We can’t turn left or right in the world without being reminded that our bodies are, well, not “fitting in” with societal expectations. Mainly, that is because what is sold to us, drilled into us, and relentlessly shown to us is not actually real. Not to say there aren’t beautiful bodies that ARE real, and certainly not to say that some of us don’t have them. But speaking for myself, and I think a lot of people, we just can’t rise up to the photo shopped, air brushed images that permeate our culture.

I don’t know what the diet industry is worth these days, I imagine in the hundreds of billions. Since dieting results are rarely sustains, the market more or less has an annuity on our spend. (Broadly speaking) those of us who try diets will eventually re-gain the weight we lost, or lose the muscle we gained, and we will be back for more solutions when that time inevitably comes.

The exception? Change our lifestyles. Yes this is the really Big with a capital “B” answer, and this is the healthiest and ideal route to pursue, if we wish to change our bodies.

But there are so many magic pills out there to try instead. This one makes us metabolize faster. That one “curbs” our appetites (as if appetite had anything to do with chronic over eating.) Another will provide our nutritional needs so we don’t even need to eat. Say what?

I had a revolutionary thought the other day. I say revolutionary because in 51 years I’ve tried a lotta diets and even a Dexatrim or two (remember those?!) and I still find weight management to require a lot of time and energy. I haven’t found any magic pills to “solve” this “problem” although I even once (shamefully) fell for an on-line scam that took $200 of my hard earned money before I knew what hit me. #human.

My thought is this: Instead of finding a “magic pill” to cure our weight loss woes, what if we could take a pill that just wiped our internal database of BS regarding food, weight, fat, thin, times of day to eat, number of calories, number of carbs, cleanses and all the rhetoric, research and quackery we have retained since day one of realizing it was critical to our social survival to be thin?

What if, we woke up one day and just had a complete ignorance on the information experts we have become, and knew nothing about low fat, low carb, high fiber, intermittent fasting and the energy balance theory? What if we hit “control-alt-delete” and returned our brains to factory settings. We could literally eat real food, when our bodies were hungry (and not when our bodies were bored, lonely, scared, tired and worst of all: feeling too big!) and probably do more for our health than if we applied all we’d learned until now.

So far, it is just an idea. But not a bad one to ponder. I have heard the recommendation (Optimize.me and other sources) to eat like our favorite philosopher. IE If Socrates or Marcus Aurelius couldn’t eat what we are about to (like a Number #5 Big Mac Meal) we shouldn’t eat it at all. We should only eat what they would have had access to. IE NO PROCESSED FOODS!

Another way to say it, eat only what your Grandparents had access to. Science says eating this way would significantly impact the obesity crisis and health care cost epidemic that is crushing our economy and monopolizing our mental energy. I say, it’s an easy pill to swallow, if it’s true.