It’s day 21 of the 30-day pledge I made to myself to remove several items from my diet: caffeine, added sugar, artificial sweeteners, refined grains, processed meat, red meat, and dairy.
This may seem restrictive, but I thought of a way to compensate for that. At the end of 30 days I will choose one thing to add back or one thing to take away. Whatever I decide will be a conscious decision. There is a way off this path, but the plan is that my choices will be deliberate. If I wanted to add all those things back into my diet, it would take seven months.
Part of my goal in this challenge is to be healthier, another part is to gain as much mental clarity as possible by removing the hold, mostly sugar and caffeine, had on me. If you’ve seen my posts on social media and smartphones, you may have begun to realize that minimalism is a huge value of mine. It comes down to having control over what I can, without trying to control what I can’t. For the most part, I can control the stuff that surrounds me and what I feed my mind and body. To me, it is good to practice control of things that are so important.
Minimalism gets a bad rap. It’s not so much about having less as it is about maximizing what’s important. It also looks different for everyone, with varying levels of intensity. Some may want to minimize digital clutter, but they’ll have a massive CD and DVD collection. Others may go the opposite route, ending up with a huge hard drive filled with media. Both are minimizing what doesn’t serve them to maximize what does serve them.
I won’t label myself a minimalist because I find that most people expect you to be radical and keep minimizing until you have nothing, but it has been part of my values for a long time, and it’s not going anywhere.