What To Do About Unhealthy People Around You

It’s common for a person who’s just started eating healthy to try to make their kids or spouses eat healthy, too. This is a profoundly bad idea. Doomed to failure.

It’s a little like with the airplane masks on an airplane. The instructions are: Secure your own mask before helping your kids on with their’s (you won’t help them very effectively if you’re unconscious). Same with healthy eating. First get yourself firmly, rock-solidly grounded in rejuvenative eating. Live it, for real. Get to the point where you’re shining with vibrant energy and glowing with deep cellular vitality. They’ll see your radiant eyes and skin, they’ll notice your increased energy, your clear mind. You’ll even smell better! Even little kids (actually, especially little kids) will pick it up energetically.

And when do you finally begin preaching, “educating,” and reforming your housemates? Well never, actually. You’ll only help them discover the power of regenerative eating by attraction and example. That’s it.

I know it takes preternaturally healthy boundaries to do this (for more on this, check out al-anon literature and meetings!), but ATTRACTION really is the only thing that works. If it’s in their “karma” or “destiny” or whatever, they’ll be drawn. But the more you seem self-righteous or judgemental or ANYTHING weird or unhappy or complicated about their eating, the more you create a power struggle—polarized resistance, defiance and so on. In other words, eat and let eat.

(Of course, if your child is young enough that it works to just tell them what to eat, and your spouse agrees with you, and you’re good at making healthy stuff yummy to a child’s palate, then there’s no issue there.)