The Plight of the Dieter
It would appear that nutrition is one of the most difficult aspects of healthy living. Even if one has made the decision to follow a healthy diet he or she is then faced with trying to determine what exactly is a healthy diet. We are now bombarded from all sides by various individuals and organizations offering the latest method to loose fat. We now have the Atkins Diet, the Zone Diet, Abs Diet, Grapefruit Diet, Jenny Craig, and more. Every organization claims to have great success with their followers, and in fact, most of them do. The problem is that the list of people that do not achieve success on their respective diets is far greater than the list of those that do. That is why many people are bouncing from one diet to another for their whole life, gaining and loosing weight in a yo-yo effect. In fact, that is where the term "yo-yo dieter" stems from.
The problem with all of these diet protocols is that they only work for a small percentage of the population. If you got lucky and stumbled upon a diet that works for your body, then you will do well on it and possibly achieve your goals. This is not the case for most people, however, so they keep yo-yoing.
The people who advocate these diets, however, do not pay attention to the people for whom they did not work. They keep advertising them as a solution to everybody's nutritional woes. They are taking the allopathic approach -- the same solution to similar symptoms without taking a look at the underlying cause of the problem. The reason this does not work is that every single person has biochemical individuality, meaning that all of us are different in what sort of food we need and how we use the food we get. Namely, we all have a different metabolism.
To compound matters, most people do not eat according to their ancestral development. Human DNA takes tens of thousands of years to change even a minute fraction of one percent, yet our diets have changed significantly in the past several hundred years and even more so in the past several decades. Our bodies did not have sufficient time to adapt to our ever changing and fast deteriorating diets. Frankly, our bodies should not have to adapt, either, but that is beside the point. Many of us are now suffering the consequences of following a diet that is wrong for us. Most of us need to go back to a diet that more closely resembles what our ancestors might have eaten. You will learn how this can be achieved in the next section.
The only way for a person to eat properly is to follow a diet designed specifically for that person, taking into account the particular nutritional needs of that person. The one technology currently available to us that does this is called Metabolic Typing.