Challenge Your Beliefs
I subscribe to Mark Manson’s weekly email,, “Your Next Breakthrough (five minutes each week that might change your life.”) This week’s thought was: Nobody is wrong 100% of the time. Always look for the nugget of truth in those you disagree with. Nobody is right 100% of the time. Always look for the faults and mistakes in those you agree with. Followed by these questions: How can you challenge your own ideas and assumptions regularly? How can you seek out and find viewpoints you disagree with, and then challenge yourself to find wisdom and truth in them? Why aren’t you doing this more often? Every once in a while I have to re-examine my eating habits. Now, for any vegans reading this, DON’T WORRY. You will never, ever read here that I’ve decided to stop being vegan. I’ve been vegan for over thirty years, and that’s not going to change. But lately I’ve been letting a lot of processed foods creep into my diet, and I had to re-examine my beliefs about what a healthy vegan diet looks like. A podcast I’ve been listening to lately is Human Performance Outliers, hosted by ultra runner Zach Bitter. In this episode he interviewed Brad Kearns, who I have a love/hate relationship with. Brad has his own podcast, “B.Rad” and he’s pretty entertaining. He has a lot of interesting ideas about health and exercise, and I like what he has to say… EXCEPT WHEN HE TALKS ABOUT EATING. He does keto- fine!- but for some reason is passionately anti-vegan. It got so annoying that I stopped listening to him, but decided to give him another try as a guest on Zach’s podcast. He’s still anti-vegan! But his main rant on this episode was against “seed oils,” a term people use to refer to most vegetable oils, including soybean, sunflower, safflower, and canola. Brad said (and I looked it up, he’s right!) those oils are particularly harmful because they cause a lot of inflammation in the body, and that they’re in practically all processed foods. He said, if you want to improve your diet, first get rid of the seed oils, then come back and we’ll argue about keto vs. vegan. Hmmm! I came home and looked in my fridge. Earth balance has vegetable oils, and so does the Miyoko’s cheese I’ve been slathering on everything. The pantry was equally disastrous- all the chips, pretzels and crackers have seed oils. In fact, it really is in most processed foods and I never thought twice about it. I’m not going to make myself crazy over it, but I’m going to seriously reduce the processed foods in my diet. Tonight for dinner I made this recipe for “Ultimate Vegan Chili.” and instead of opening a bag of chips, I made some chips out of corn tortillas! I brushed them with olive oil (olive oil is apparently one of the good ones,) sprinkled on some salt, and baked them. They tasted about as good as they look, which means they pretty much sucked. But I’ll keep trying! I have to get back to having things like chips every once in a while as a treat, rather than whenever I feel like it. So, thanks Brad! We’ll never agree on vegan vs. keto, but we do have some common ground after all. Do you have any beliefs that you’ve challenged lately? When was the last time you changed your mind about something big? –I do have a big one, in case anyone missed this post, Story of an Anti-Vaxxer