I woke up this morning to this, shared with my by my rational, very balanced husband.

I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.

Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.

After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

Those crackers – gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!

The broccoli, though..that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless….oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.

And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.

I hate myself.

We laughed about it because, let’s face it, we’ve played around with more than one of those concepts. To be fair, he’s much more conservative with his internet reads and what he takes to heart. For a very long time, though, I was caught up in anything and everything food and nutrition. And I’m a proponent of knowledge; after all, nutrition is what I hope to study. But I’ve come to find that discretion is just as much a requirement in this area of healthy living as it is anywhere else. Maybe even more so.

Eating healthy won’t kill you. But obsessing over every angle of it will kill your joy, and that’s just as tragic. Life is about balance. So simple in concept, but it can be much more challenging in practice. Don’t believe everything you read, and remind yourself that not everything applies to you and your life. Examine the facts – after determining that they are, actually, facts. And then decide if it’s something that will bring a positive change to your life. If it doesn’t fit right now, that’s fine too. Decide and move on.

We shouldn’t be scared of foods. We should be excited about foods that will help us thrive. Less time worrying about what foods are trying to kill us, and moe time nourishing ourselves so that we can go out and live. Less time on the internet and more time with our lives already in progress.