The Rule that Outlived Its Purpose

For years, I've followed a woman in the nutrition space — a vegan chef who built both a career and an identity around eating with no salt, no oil, no sugar. That way of eating had helped her lose a significant amount of weight, and for a long time, it worked — she was solid, healthy, exactly the body and identity she'd built her name on. She'd also built a following around it — people who looked to her as proof that this one way was the healthy way to live.

Then came cancer, surgeries, procedures, the drugs and nausea and complications that followed. Her body started losing weight again — more than she needed to, more than she wanted to, more than her body could afford to lose while it was trying to heal. She needed reserves. Strength. Something to fight with. And instead of loosening her rules to give her body what it needed, she gripped them tighter. No salt, no oil, no sugar, no matter what her body was asking for now. She was miserable. And nothing about that rigidity was making her better. It wasn't hurting her, exactly — but it was standing directly in the way of the one thing she needed most.

Eventually, she had to let go. Not because she wanted to, but because she had no choice — she wasn't fighting to maintain weight loss anymore, she was struggling to keep any weight on at all. She let the fat back in, the salt, the natural sweeteners. It was a hard shift, and it cost her something beyond the physical: some of her followers saw it as a betrayal, as her stepping outside the identity they'd all built together. She wasn't "one of them" anymore.

I wonder now if some part of her recognized what her own certainty had cost other people too — that "this is the one healthy way to live" had never actually made room for the individual's specific body or unique circumstances.

What goes wrong is forgetting to ask whether the rule still serves its purpose — or building a purpose so narrow it never had room to answer that question honestly in the first place.

I only know her through what she shares in her newsletter — a small slice of a much bigger experience. But watching it unfold, I kept circling a question I'd never quite said out loud, one that started well before she ever loosened her grip: was she being too hard on herself, too rigid — or was I too weak, unable to fully let go of a little salt, a little sweetness, and convinced that meant I was failing at something she'd clearly mastered? I didn't have language yet for what was actually happening. I just knew I kept quietly ranking us against each other, as if only one of us could be doing it right.

I heard that same either/or, dressed in different clothes, on the radio not long after. Two people were debating whether pleasure or meaning is the truer form of happiness. Referred to as hedonic and eudaimonic behaviors, both sides came to the conversation steeped in solid research, theory, and rhetoric. As I listened, I kept thinking: why does either of these philosophies have to be right? Why can't both? It was the same either/or I'd been weighing in my own judgments — of her, and of myself — as if one of us had to be right, when really we were both just human, holding ourselves to something we'd been told was true, whether or not it actually was.

This isn't really a story about discipline, or about diet, or even about her. It's a story about what happens any time a rule outlives the reason we built it — which happens more often, and more quietly, than we tend to notice. We tend to frame this as a discipline problem: too rigid, or not rigid enough, as if the fix is finding the right amount of control to apply. But that's not really where things go wrong. What goes wrong is forgetting to ask whether the rule still serves its purpose — or building a purpose so narrow it never had room to answer that question honestly in the first place. And sometimes the purpose was never fully ours to begin with — inherited from someone else's version of "the right way to live," never actually tested against our own body, our own life, our own truth.

So here's the question I keep landing on, the one that has nothing to do with cancer or diets or anyone but me: what's the rule I'm still following on autopilot — the one I built for a reason that may not even be true anymore? When did I last check whether it's still protecting me from something real, or just running because stopping feels riskier than continuing?

Rules are supposed to be a compass — something built to point us toward what protects us. But a compass doesn't know when the terrain has changed. Only we can check that. So consider this an invitation, not a conclusion: pick one rule you're following right now without knowing why. Not to break it. Just to ask it a question it might not have been asked in years — do you still know what you're protecting me from?

This kind of questioning works best as a habit, not a one-time pass. 

If this is the kind of thing you like sitting with, my newsletter Practically Well  goes a layer deeper — it's where I keep working through these questions in real time, and it's the best way to know what's coming next in this little corner of Bettering Nature. Consider it a standing invitation to stay in the conversation.