Healthy Eating (CPE Letter)

Dear editor,

It is not in my habit to interfere with people beliefs and opinions , but the moment I cast a glance on the article Eat Healthily, I felt an inescapable urge to share my story since my experimenting with dieting a resulted in condition far from desirable.

It must be said that at no point of time did I experience any acute problems either with my stomach or other organs. Nor did I suffer from being overweight. Nevertheless, being curious and inquisitive, I took to reading on the sensitive subject of health. Among others, one book had a most significant effect on me. According to it, we, human beings, pose a grave danger to our well-being by filling our stomachs with all kinds of food in an indiscriminate way while those willing to enjoy a green old age should be very fussy when it comes to food.

Then, the book gave a very thorough description of the right diet enlisting several reasons why “separate nutrition”, as this diet was called , had unusual healing properties. Feeling truly inspired, I embarked on this new way of eating which banished my most favourite dishes altogether. As if that was not enough to devoid me of the quiet of mind, I was supposed to swallow a spoonful of stench olive oil before every meal, which I obediently did. The worst, though, was the rule prescribing to abstain from grabbing a single bite of food in the late evening hours. As a result, the moment I woke up I would feel the gnawing dread of an upcoming evening.

It wasn’t long before the results of my dieting started to take effect. I lost some weight and started to look gaunt; with the break of twilight I started to experience a nagging pain somewhere in the area of pancreas; and, finally, I invariably felt listless if not depressed.

A shrewd reader may wonder at what point I gave up on the diet and returned to my former haphazard diet. Alas, I kept torturing my body by testing some other equally bizarre diets, still fruitlessly waiting for nothing short of a miracle.

Nearly a year later I ended up in hospital with an unpronounceable diagnosis and chronic fatigue. When I was finally released, I abandoned the idea of turning myself into an embodiment of health and returned to my everything-is-good-in-moderation formula. And I’ve never been better ever since.

Sincerely yours,

Mrs. Bigeater