Why Did I Stop Following the Macrobiotic Diet?

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It is a time for rice planting in Japan, and you see farmers planting rice everywhere. Nonetheless, this is a scenery common in the countryside and you don’t see it at all if you are traveling in Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto.

It is a pity if these 3 cities are the only places you are visiting because you are missing one of the most typical aspects of Japanese culture: Rice is our soul food and staple food, and Taue, rice planting is the biggest event in Spring here.

Why Should Foreign Tourists Visit Shiga Instead of Visiting Tokyo or Kyoto?

Last week, I said that I had once been macrobiotic but stopped following this diet.

Why was it?

I did enjoy the macrobiotic diet and there wasn’t anything wrong with it as far as I was concerned. However, it did limit your social life a little and it made so much easier for me to interact with others if I opened up the capacity of my diet. Social life was very important for me and I prioritize it over my diet.

It happened to me when I was in Findhorn, actually. I stayed at the Findhorn community in Scotland in 1986, and was exposed to a wide variety of aesthetically pleasing and mouth-watering organic dishes, many of which I hadn’t been able to eat if I had strictly followed the macrobiotic diet.

They were all vegetarian and organic, and therefore they were natural enough according to the standard of our regular food culture.  I didn’t need to interact with people from all walks of life, but if I expanded my diet to this level at least, it would add a lot more new aspects into my life, I thought.

The same thing happened when I came back to Japan. I expanded my diet in order to socialize with the regular Japanese people(there were almost no alternative Japanese people back then) and it meant even the regular European natural food diet was too limited to enjoy the life in Japan.

Yes, prioritizing my social life over diet was the reason why I began eating all kinds of food.

Having said that, that wasn’t the only reason. There was something else, which contributed to my spiritual growth, writing and creation of Zen and a Way of Sustainable Prosperity, that made me start walking on a different path.