One Path, Many Truths (The Diet, Day 30)

You know the Buddhist saying “One truth, many paths”? A friend once told me that was the wrong way to think of it. Thousands of years of Buddhists have it wrong. It’s “One path, many truths.” I’ll leave you to decide the spiritual wisdom of this for yourself. I just want to take this opportunity to co-opt the saying for the purposes of talking about dieting. What else?

I’ve read a number of diet books recently. Some say low carb is the answer. Some are equally fervent about low fat. These things cycle. I’ve seen quite a few diet crazes since I drank my first Tab in my Aunt Carol’s kitchen and pinched my first inch in front of a bowl of Special K.

There was the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the eat nothing after five diet, and the rotation diet. Remember the rotation diet? You were supposed to rotate 600 calorie days, 800 calorie days, and 1200 calorie days to trick your metabolism so that it wouldn’t come to a complete standstill over an excessively restrictive diet.

If there is a indeed a fat gene, my family has a good strong strain of it. Nary a diet has been invented that hasn’t made its way through our ranks. And every diet has its own rhyme and reason. And every diet kinda has a point.

One thing I’ve particularly noticed lately, though, is that they all keep converging in the middle. The low fat diets tell you to eat only a moderate amount of complex carbohydrates. The low carbohydrate diets tell you to be careful not to overdo the fat. They both claim the other doesn’t work while they do, yet they’re both kinda saying the same thing. One path, many truths.

Eat less and exercise more if you want to lose weight. Burn more calories than you consume.

That’s really the only true path, but there are many possible true ways to walk it.

Probably there’s a metaphor in there somewhere for spiritual enlightenment as well, but I’ll leave you to figure that part out for yourself.