Something to think about if you are serious about healthy living.

But, especially if you are navigating raw food and plant-based eating for life.

Many years ago, when I was in changing the way I ate, I came across a line in my notes that was so profound at the time, I all but tattooed it on the back of my hands so I could see it whenever I switched diet approaches or thought about food.

Something that explained a lot of poor decisions I made with healthy eating.

But also explained a lot of brilliant decisions, too.

And, overall, made me a much better raw food advocate, a more discerning person as far as what I allowed in my body, and a much more patient person when it came to dealing with all the noise around nutrition altogether.

Anyway, here is what I noted down:

(paraphrased - but this was the essence of it)

“I can deal with someone being arrogant. I can deal with someone being ignorant. What I can’t deal with is someone being both at the same time.”

What does this mean?

It means ignorant healthy eating, when someone doesn’t know much, and knows they don’t know much, and simply stays in their lane, can still work out fine.

Arrogant healthy eating, on the other hand, is also fine.

You may not “like” it, but it can teach you a lot.

In fact, very few of the arrogant approaches were appealing. But what was valuable were the results that came after stepping back, quieting the noise, and simply following through. They were arrogant because they worked, not the other way around.

These two kinds of approaches above are rare and valuable.

If someone follows them, they are fortunate indeed.

But then… there are the approaches that are both ignorant and arrogant. They come from diet fads, unproven theories, and the kind of claims that sound convincing on the surface but have no grounding in reality. They look shiny, but in reality they don’t offer anything.

Have no depth at all.

Just parrot what someone else said, did, or thought.

It’s like being told in your first week of raw food:

“You may have read the top 2% of books on nutrition,… but out here you have exactly zero hours of lived experience applying it to the way you eat. You know nothing, in fact, less than nothing. If you knew you knew nothing, that would be something, but you don’t.”

That, in my experience, was what happened when my eating was both ignorant and arrogant.

Anyway, here’s why I bring it up:

I didn’t learn a single thing from those times. Nor, probably, do I learn much from ignorance alone (that’s why I study and test). But the arrogant moments? The ones where I absolutely knew what I was doing, had the track record to prove it, and wasn’t going to let anyone or anything pull me back into old habits?

Gold.

Again, I may or may not “like” those arrogant moments.

I had some hard struggles with myself over a couple of them.

But ultimately they made me much better.

And for that, I am grateful, even if I thought they were unforgiving choices at the time.

But I also had some arrogant moments that I did appreciate. And in one of those cases, my raw meals became significantly better, and I still apply what I learned and figured out to this day in the way I eat.

Enter the next stage of my journey.

I bring forward some insights from those moments that truly supported me.

I had to take my own simplicity and AMPLIFY it.

Usually the world tells you to tone things down, if anything. And maybe you should. Just depends on the situation, your health, your body (are you ignorant or arrogant?), and a whole range of other factors.

But in this case, turning it up made my raw food way better.

And I can look back at my healthy eating and see exactly what made it work in that period of my life.

Irina Valeva

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