Why being yourself is good for you

Working in the city you see a whole array of fashions - sharp suited corporate financiers, hot to trot secretaries, kagoolled tourists and retro shoreditch types. This afternoon I spotted a shoreditch styled girl wearing a waistcoat that was quite frankly beyond description - I just wish I'd had a decent camera phone to share it with you!

Besides admiring this girls confidence to wear such an item (it had three dimensional crown shaped shoulder pads - see what I mean about hard to describe) it got me thinking about individuality.

Alot of us spend our youth trying to copy other people - dress, act and look like people we think are cooler or in some way better than us. Then somehow with age we realise how futile and silly this and start expressing our true individuality in how we dress, act and spend our time and money.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes I'd realised the futility of trying to be cool much earlier! However it's a shame that not everyone extends the same attitude to their health - middle aged women trying the latest ludicrous diet being followed by some twenty something starlet, overworked stressed out city workers following intensive triathlon training schedules, busy mums trying to stick to Madonnas macrobiotic regime and even food stalkers (copying what your super skinny friend/colleague eats in the hope you'll end up the same size).

You see just in the same way that I have a totally different dress sense to the girl I saw today I am also likely to have a very different biological make-up. This is why if we ate the exact same food one of us might feel great and the other one might feel rubbish. This is part of the art of nutritional therapy - working out an individual programme that is best for your client rather than telling everyone to eat the same food.

On the plus side you don't necessarily need a nutritional therapist to help you work this out - a bit of experimentation and trial and error can be very illuminating. Try cutting out/cutting down the usual suspects one at a time (dairy, wheat, gluten, caffeine, alcohol. sugar) and see how you feel, try varying when you eat and whether you have fewer bigger meals or more frequent smaller meals.

You can do the same with your exercise regime - do you feel better working out in the morning or evening, are you exhausted the next day after a long session but full of beans if you make it shorter? You might be surprised at what works for you and save yourself alot of disappointment when you have to give up the latest fad diet or exercise regime because you feel totally awful on it!
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