"You're kind of an...extreme personality, aren't you?" my wife said to me one morning as I was frying up a skillet full of bacon and eggs. It was day two of my trial run on a modified "carnivore diet" which I had adopted to try to lose a few pounds and damp down some inflammation. The science seemed to make sense (from the limited amount I had read)--you starve your body of carbohydrates and enter into the Nirvana of ketosis by eating like a savage caveman coming home from the bar and you magically burn fat stores like a Pakistani incinerator. Bacon, eggs, steak, sardines--everything is free game as long as it's (primarily) meat and has zero carbs.
"You're not wrong," I replied. "And I'm willing to try anything once."
Two days in, though, and I'm already not feeling super hot. It seems like the curse of "too much of a good thing," and my biggest lingering fear is that meat (which I love) will become something I have trouble looking at if this goes on for more than a few weeks. It could have been a case of keto-flu, but something about this particular diet touted by the likes of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson seems, I don't know...unbalanced. Extreme, if you will. Plus, truth be told--it's kind of boring!
The problem came in when I went out to eat with a priest friend and had some pita bread with my gyro and four french-fries; that handful of carbs jacked my stomach up something fierce. A diet like carnivore/paleo/caveman necessitates rigid discipline, and rigid discipline is not my forte.
I know it was short lived, but I think it was better to come to the realization earlier than later before I stock my chest freezer with a butchered half-cow from Lancaster county. Wouldn't a more sensible approach, perhaps, be to, say, simply cut out pasta/rice/potatoes/bread and refined sugars instead of just eating nothing but three pounds of meat a day? Or going back to intermittent fasting? My body my choice.
Why must we always be driven to these polarized extremes--not just in diets but in politics, in policy, in ideology, in rhetoric and communications? I used to think bi-partisan political moderates were a good thing, but the DT era changed all that. They became the Rev 3:16 candidates--lukewarm, salt without saltiness, good for nothing but the dung pile.
You see it too in this big push for all-electric cars. The gas-electric hybrid--which always seemed to make the most sense to me from a pragmatic standpoint and which industry leaders like Toyota had by now perfected and have stood the test of time--became a kind of feeble leper overshadowed by the Telsa revolution. But no--we need to outlaw all ICE vehicles by 2025 or whatever California is doing. Never mind our dilapidated and already-strained U.S. electrical grid which struggles to keep up with people running their AC in the summer. Forward march!
And sad to say, the liturgical equivalent is there too. While St. John Cantius in Chicago appeared on many people's radar during the COVID era--the reverent Novus Ordo done ad orientum in Latin with chant--this is still, from a liturgical purist point of view, an inferior hybrid; ie, lipstick on a pig.
But where does virtue lie? According to Aristotle--who of course influenced the likes of Augustine and Aquinas--virtue is a mean between two extremes; the midpoint between an excess and a deficit. By way of example, a deficient of courage might be cowardliness and an excess is foolhardiness. Neither is desirable, but the middle is where the magic (and wisdom) is.
I'll grant that I probably didn't give enough time for this particular diet to get broken in, so any benefits from it that may have come after a month or so may not have been realized. But our diets--like our politics, our liturgical preferences, the cars we drive, etc--often depend upon our personalities. Even though like my wife noticed, I may have "extreme" tendencies, I do realize for myself that that is not where virtue finds a home. It may make for likable posts or click-baity articles, and may even feed into a subconscious desire to be unique or special. At the end of the day, for me, balance always seems a less sexy but more reasonable (not to mention sustainable) way forward.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some prunes to eat.
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