By Jeneea Jervay-Bush
…continued from last week
Nutrition services also tend to be temporary. An exception would be if there’s an ongoing chronic condition that requires a registered dietician as part of the person’s medical team because of its direct correlation to managing that condition. Nutrition, even more than fitness, is an area where people tend to believe that they are experts and don’t need any input. I was in the “I know what to do, I’m just not doing it” group or the “I already know what healthy eating is” group or the “this time, this diet will work” group prior to my career change to fitness/recreation.
My old self had good intentions and believed to her core that she was right and had a firm grasp on nutritional knowledge. Now, on the other side of a masters, certifications, consuming more research articles than I can count, and conversations with nutrition experts, my question for my old self is “based on what?” Where does this nutrition knowledge come from that fortifies the opinion that no input is needed on the nutrition journey? The answer is my old self had zero basis for her confidence in her nutritional knowledge. By the way, the results/failures over a 25-year period clearly show that confidence to be misplaced.
Challenge what you think you know my friends. Ask yourself the question I should have been asking myself in my 20s and 30s. Are my beliefs based on professional input, peer-reviewed research, or my own opinion? Prove what you know to yourself by producing the source. Name the registered dietician that supplied you with the knowledge or the peer-reviewed research from a reputable source (e.g., Mayo Clinic). If you are unable to produce the source, are you operating from knowledge or a misinformed opinion? Explore where your opinion comes from and interrogate how you formed it. The input from the Internet or TV commercials selling you fitness equipment or lose weight quick nutrition products could be larger contributing agents than you realized to your opinions. But the only way to figure that out is to spend some time with those questions.
… continued next week.