Everything in moderation?

Moderation

Did your mum used to say to you to “do everything in moderation”? What does that mean? Should we only love our family in moderation? Should we eat a moderate amount of known carcinogens? Should everyone smoke a moderate amount?

Of course not. This saying probably goes back many generations to when there weren’t so many unhealthy options. If all you had available to eat was fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds and good quality meats, then eating a moderate amount of all of them made sense. But the world has changed.

There are now many things in your environment, in your cupboards, in your grocery store, in the air and even in your minds that your body doesn’t want in any amounts, and by suggesting you do, you are only fooling yourself. Most of the time “everything in moderation” is really only used as a convenient excuse to not change a habit that you know you should change.

One of the biggest problems we face is that our bodies are just so darned good at adapting. So many of these small stressors that we take “in moderation” don’t cause immediate effects. In fact we might not notice any symptoms at all for years or even decades. But eventually these things add up and the cumulative effect of these stressors means that your body is simply not functioning as well as it should be. What makes this even more of a problem is that it happens so gradually, in fact often so slowly that we don’t even realise it has happened. Or even worse, we just assume it is “normal”. For many people this means that they are functioning quite poorly and they don’t even know it. Or perhaps they do have symptoms but they just assume that happens to everyone or that it is just bad luck.

So forget about doing things “in moderation”; give your body as near as possible exactly what it needs, and as near as possible none of what it doesn’t, and you will find a new, better level of “normal”.

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Everything in moderation?