I’m natural from the ankle down.
Ignore the massive black rose flower tatt making my foot look like it’s ready for the chop.

How many times today have you seen your favourite influencer, celebrity, or former reality TV desperado — rammed to the gills with Botox, hauling around plastic milk jugs, and rocking the death-by-a-thousand bee-stung lip look — trying to peddle you some soap or meal replacement shake as they drone on about the benefits of “going all natural.”

Desperate for a few quid and to keep one lip in the limelight, heavily marketing to and taking advantage of people — plenty of them kids, desperate to lose weight and improve their relationship with food and bodies.

Killer Flubber

The nation’s favourite bouncing-around-your-living-room-like-fucking-flubber fitness instructor did a recent publicity stunt on protein bars, branding his creation “the most dangerous health bar in Britain”. Rammed full of unnatural chemicals and ultra-processed nasties. “The killer bar”

Slap “unnatural” and “dangerous” on the label and a reliable, albeit mostly bang-average, yet still perfectly serviceable, shelf-stable source of protein suddenly feels like it’s coming for your organs.

Demonising a protein bar to this degree presents a different level of grimness and danger.

Closer to home, I’ve had to endure similar drivel from a yoga instructor who was a lot chunkier back in her gloryhole days. But since going all natural and building her routine around kale, farts, and sun salutations, she’s finally managed to shift some timber later in life.

The awful, boring, and largely useless-for-many, yet naturally true, “move more, eat less” notion apparently doesn’t apply here.

Humans are wired to sort everything into good or bad, because for most of our history that was your best chance of avoiding death.

Advertisers know this better than anyone. Calling something “natural” bypasses the thinking part of your brain entirely, and it works even better when there’s a villain to go with it—some semi-fictional monster made of chemical additives and processed ingredients—so you’ve got someone to blame and something to avoid.

I can’t stick to any diet for longer than 10 minutes, but when I try again, I’m not eating any of that artificial junk.

Most of us know by now that food companies, much like social media, want us to consume more and more and keep us there. In food’s case, that means providing exactly the right amount of salt, fat, carbs, and sugar to make the stuffing-of-cheeks unrelenting and inevitable.

What “natural” actually means

Saying something is “natural” sounds gentle, wholesome, clean, uncorrupted. We automatically associate it with “better for us.”

But natural is an ambiguous word.
It doesn’t guarantee safety or effectiveness.

Cyanide is natural too. Arsenic occurs naturally in rice. And botulinum toxin — one of the most lethal substances known to man — is what most of this email’s opening desperados are injecting into their faces.

The dose makes the poison.

Most people’s eating habits today aren’t down to failing to pick good over bad. It’s because most of us use our environment as an excuse to keep making bad decisions.

You didn’t cave because of some sinister chemical seduction working against your free will.

You caved because you grazed all day, skipped the “unnatural” protein bar languishing in your bag out of principle (scaremongering), and by six o’clock were hungry enough to eat the bag itself.

So you grabbed a Big Mac on the way home after another bad day at the office instead.

There’s nothing wrong with the unnatural Big Mac.

But there’s a difference between choosing one because you want it, and reaching for one because it’s the only thing left once you’ve said no to everything else all day.

Do that enough times, and the burger isn’t doing the damage; the pattern is.

Deny, deny, deny, then cave. That’s what actually wrecks your relationship with food.

The battle between good and bad, clean and dirty. Processed vs unprocessed. Natural vs unnatural.

The world today is unrelenting in making us worry about the wrong things.

Optimising for weight loss and exercise without actively doing either.

One more Infinity Stone to pop into my exercise-and-diet-inspired Thanos glove, and I’ll be ready to tackle my weight and lack-of-movement dilemma.

The natural way.

P.S. I haven’t got a fucking clue about Thanos’s driving glove or Steve Rogers. I’m more of an Adam West Batman and a Cesar Romero painted-over-moustache guy.

P.P.S. “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!”