You got lucky. You stumbled upon the correct way to eat, you've not absorted the misinformation about calories-in-caloried-out, you were born or raised or whatever with the gift of being able to break your addiction to foods that are designed to tempt you beyond your ability to resist. All this while still in high school. Let's just say, I wish I had been so fortunate. (Not that it was all luck, not at all, but you should appreciate the advantages that you had.)

I'm guessing people were you two years ago. They don't need your scorn. They need your help, those few that are ready for it. As the rest of us have learned, only a few percent will be receptive -- they're addicts, after all.

But remember through all this that while you've figured this out, there are probably a ton of things that others have figured out that are not so easy for you to negotiate, and hopefully they are not walking around scorning you because of it, although they probably are. That's another mistake they're doing that you want to avoid.

People are human, which means they do a lot of idiotic things. They also end up doing some cool things too. So lead by example, and enjoy the best parts every individual has to offer while letting the other stuff go.

Stop looking at what other people are doing and listening to what they think about you. Stop trying to rank yourself in relation to other people, and just be well. These things get easier with practice.

I'm in high school too, and while this may not be the approach that you were looking for, my solution is simple: I don't eat lunch around them. I usually eat with my sociology teacher in her classroom. I do this because I have chronic migraines which get worse in a crowded cafeteria, but unless your high school is stricter than mine, you can probably just find a place to be alone and eat there regardless of your reasons. I've been misanthropic long before I started eating healthily, and my solution is to try to avoid those who piss me off and surround myself with those who don't. If you don't enjoy being around the people whom you eat lunch with, then stop eating lunch with them if you can manage it. When the weather's nice I eat lunch on a bench outside; I get questioning looks from people walking in and out, but it's less about what I eat and more about why I'm eating alone in such a weird place - which I prefer.

At home, though, it's a completely different matter: I have a morbidly obese mother who will eat an entire box of cookies/crackers/what-have-you in a sitting, but buys fat-free half-and-half (a product that doesn't even make sense, yet somehow exists) and sugar-free, artifical syrup for her coffee. She tells me, while downing synthetic ingredients laced with hydrogenated oils, not to eat grass-fed cow organs - she doesn't even specify liver, just everything but muscle - because "that's where all the toxins are" and refuses my offer to email her some links to prove her wrong. It's extremely frustrating.

PS: Your prose is wonderful.

Live and let live. In other words, ignore it and don't give unsolicited advice.

I just have to wonder, did you go out and try to evangelize about paleo? Trying to convert folks to paleo is about as safe as converting them to a different religion or politics. Not a good idea!

My how times have changed. I was a "jock" in high school and I don't recall many of the athletes at my school -- not known for being an athletic powerhouse in our small-school leagues -- being double chinned porkers. I was also one of those girls, and none of my fellow classmates were sporting brownies and junk -- back then the standard diet lunch was a yogurt (full fat Dannon, unfortunately with sugar/fruit on the bottom to stir in - 250 cals) and maybe a salad with lemon juice (there weren't lots of low fat dressings yet available in that day).

I'm sorry you are being ridiculed for eating veggies, but your view of your classmates seems more than just a bit skewed to me. Either it's real and I'm blind when I look out at my classes of mostly freshmen this semester -- who look no fatter than pictures from my freshman year in college would demonstrate (eek, about 3 decades ago! STOP making me feel so old!!) -- or it's distorted by your own perceptions of having found "the right way" to eat.

This is not a knock on paleo, but to put it in context, I'm quite sure there are many vegetarians who look at the meat on the plates of their peers and perceive all manner of issues others have that they are saving themselves from. Ditto the sugar shunners and those who eschew wheat/grains, etc. etc.

First, I really feel for you, since I recently left high school, and though I wasn't paleo, I've always been different in many ways and have had a hard time fitting in. I think you'll have to just wait - school is a nasty environment, especially for people who are different. At school, people stare, poke and laugh; its easy to understand, since everyone has to go to school, while most college students make the conscious decision (I'm talking about emotional maturity here, not dietary habits) to go to higher education, so the level of potential abuse is lower - you simply have a wider pool of people to deal with in a school.

What you have to tell yourself is that the people who ridicule you now are of no consequence to you. It takes a long time to find good, real friends, to find company that suits you, people you would want to spend time with rather than just doing it to 'fit in'. Although this might sound cliche, you really need to ignore snide comments and remember that a lot of these people actually, deep down, envy your self-discipline.

Why do you think a lot of people take it so close to heart when you refuse cake or a similar non-food? Because deep inside, they are jealous of your ability to turn it down; you eating it would make them feel better, feel like less of a failure.

Now as far as conventional wisdom brainwashing, I agree that its infinitely annoying. I deal with pangs of misanthropy on a daily basis; it annoys me to no end when i hear people at the gym discussing 'healthy' wholemeal cookies, and it similarly drives me up the wall to see people mindlessly shoving cake in their faces and then complaining of weight gain and health issues. It also irritates me when people look me up and down if I ask for full cream in my coffee. One of the 'negatives' discovering this lifestyle has had for me is that I have noticed that I've become rather arrogant around people who allow themselves to be brainwashed, and people who have no willpower. There, I've admitted it, go ahead and hate me, but we all have negative aspects to our characters, and I'm no saint. I'm still working on the arrogance issue, because misanthropic feelings cause stress.

It really helps to focus on yourself, and those close to you. I know it sounds egoistic, but this really has more to do with self-preservation; go to great lengths to get your family to be healthy, and look after YOUR body the best you can; after all, you only have one you, and you want it to last and thrive. You can't save the world, and other people will make their own choices, and pay for them.

Hold on!

Best of luck!

Milla

Honestly, get your GED tomorrow, and apply to college, or see if you can take classes at your local community college for High School credit, you'll have a lot more fun arguing with people who have just discovered vegetarian and veganism.

I found high school in general brought on constant waves misanthropy. Sorry, I know it sucks, but it doesn't last forever. If you do decide to stick it out, hunker down, kill time with your nose in books that interest you if you are feeling incarcerated (I found that they could only discipline me so much if I was reading something "intellectually stimulating" during those senior requirement classes if I had already completed my worksheets). Self medicate with some valerian, catnip, and skullcap tea if needed, and know that freedom from being caged with idiots isn't far off.

It also helps to be "closet paleo" whether in high school or not so as not to have to engage with all that helpful advice. Most of your peers are just parrots for the CW baloney from what their parents have gleaned form Dr. Oz and the USDA anyway. Watch the movie Fat Head if you want some good one-liner retorts.

In my opinion diet like religion and politics shouldn't be the topic of polite conversation. Work on seeking out the shared humanity with those around you and anyone can be your pal. Once you become good friends with those who share different values (diet or otherwise) you can help rekindle the art of polite intellectual debate which seems to mostly lacking in modern society.

On a personal evolution front High School is a time of tribal allegiances drawn along lines of social strata and pop culture identity (and at an age of emulation, rather than cultural creation that is appropriate), but I really wish I had figured out then what finally occurred to me in my late 20's: You are not what you like, or in other words, your likes and dislikes don't actually define who you are way down deep. As people, we are more alike than we are different. I now regret having turned down a number of social opportunities back then because someone else didn't live up to my "high standards of taste" in regards to music, art, or lifestyle.

Misanthropy sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction to your surroundings. Just don't let it become permanent. Your current torment is temporary, and if it helps to think about how those cute girls with the brownies and diet soda will be desperately fighting the bulge in ten years and have no idea what brought it on....well, you do what it takes to get through the day. Someday you'll escape the twisted lab experiment known as the American high school and find that life in the real world is much more sane; and real people, though they may be annoying at times, are mostly okay to deal with. It gets better, really.

Here's a quote from an article that every high school kid smart enough to use a Latin pseudonym should read in full:

"Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

"What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits." -- Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

High school sucks. You're in a social crucible; everyone's trying on new things, new personalities, new foods. Everyone's a dick to at least one other person, even if it's unintentional, even if they're the nicest person in the world. The quickest way to wear yourself out is to try and effect immediate (relatively speaking), permanent change in ANY habits of your fellow inmates, let alone the ones that are reinforced differently (a million and a half different ways, even) the second you stop speaking.

Relax a bit. Their health is not the sole responsibility of you and you alone.

Look at the research methods that brought you to paleo. Look at the reasoning skills that brought you to your conclusions about food. Are they being taught to your cohort? If not- question your teachers. I believe I read above that you're in a private school; if you apply your research skills to other topics you may well have some traction with the teachers, and be able to suggest "golly gosh gee, I see my classmates making terrible choices" (feel free to leave the subject of their choices unspecified, the teachers will fill in whatever blanks they feel necessary), "what can be done in the classroom to help them? I see that we have a [project/assignment/whatever] coming up- maybe you, in all your teacherly glory, can maybe hit the 'this is how you research, not just regurgitate advertisements' topic kinda hard this time?"

If your classmates actually do well with research, consider that they may have different priorities at this time. Paying attention to food is kind of like long-term financial planning: not many people your age pay much attention to it; there's a shit-ton of terrible and conflicting advice out there if and when you do; and if/when you do, it's likely because of a "wake-up call" of some sort.

If you're worried about your classmates' health, help ensure they have good research skills. If you're worried about some dumbasses calling you names in the cafeteria, remember these phrases/actions: "meh, it's all going to kill us anyway," "tastes better than the shit you're eating," "meh, fuck you too. how about that research project My Pet Teacher has us working on? can you believe it? there goes six months of my fucking life, i'll be living in the library. JSTOR will be my best friend, closer to me than my own right hand."

It sounds horrible! I'm sorry to hear that you're going through this. If I were you, I'd avoid debating these people, instead asking them to "live and let live" because such altruism is likely wasted. One day they'll see that you were right all along :-)

As my dear dad once told me: "It's no good knocking when there's nobody in".

There's a nice range of responses here - in the end, it's down to you to be sensitive to whether someone is receptive or not. Otherwise, don't waste your time - you will only provoke defensiveness (cognitive dissonance). Be patient with those who display curiosity and ask intelligent questions. Do your homework, so that you can provide factual evidence for your lifestyle.

Recommended reading: "Mistakes were made, but not by ME!"

.... and concluding with a quote:

'The mind is like a parachute, it works best when it is open' (attributed variously to the Dalai Lama, Frank Zappa, inter al.)

Direct a little more anger at the zoo-keepers rather than the poor pudgy zoo animals. School is prison, and prisoners tend to reach for whatever simple pleasures they can to assuage the pain of imprisonment. If they were free, they might sort of meander toward the right sort of behavior. One cannot underestimate the human capacity for stupidity, but we tend to learn from our mistakes, assuming we are free to do so.

It's been a while for me, but I don't recall the kids at my high school being like that. Maybe because it was a private school? I don't know. They had other obnoxious issues of couse. But it strikes me that you need to learn to chill out a bit more. The thing I always remembered is that the kids would do whatever got a rise out of you, then beat you to death with it. Laugh it off, make non-personal jokes out of it and it tended to go away. Freak out about the evils of not eating paleo, how they're all gonna die eating pizza, etc. and you will never hear the end of it. No one likes prosleytizers, and kids are more likely to be vocal about it than adults.

Don't worry about it, most of those kids will wind up either in adult diapers, wheelchairs, or dead of diabetes, cancer, or heart disease when they're old. You probably will die a quick death at the ripe age of 103, after many years of dragging your Jeep with a rope, wrestling bears with one hand tied behind your back, and winning, and generally being a badass.

School is usually full of wise-ass conformists who think they know better. I'd say don't bother explaining, but then again the 1 or 2 kids that might actually be convinced would be better off if you do, so if they appear to be genuinely interested, and aren't just out to make fun, share the knowledge.

High school politics are pretty insane, but once you're out, you don't have to worry about it anymore. College will be a place where magically, all those same self styled scientists tend to grow up and be more reasonable.

If you're worried about the image of the bunch of veggies, by all means, devour a whole rack of ribs in front of them, or a pile of bacon, or whatever, but you know what, why prove anything to closed minded dorks? Let them wallow in their self-chosen misery.

In the real world, you have a bunch of rich, mostly white, mostly men, who win popularity contests and take money from lobbyists to write down whatever stuff that paid them to write into laws, and the rest of us are supposed to follow whatever they wrote down. Sadly, unlike high school, you can't graduate to escape their corrupt stupidity, but that's another issue for another time.

Oh god. How many years do you have left? It gets better once you're out, believe me. But I hope you're eating more than just bowls of veggies! And I'm not big on poems but this one has always given me the strength to press on when my surroundings are less than ideal:

"When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king, what he knows throws the blows when he goes to fight. and he'll win the whole thing 'fore he enters the ring, there's no body to batter when your mind is your might. When you go solo you hold your own hand, and remember that depth is the greatest of heights. and if you know where you stand, than you know where to land and if you fall it won't matter cuz you'll know that you're right."

Go with yourself!

The road you seek begins when you cease to place yourself at the effect of other people's words and actions. For me the model is Nelson Mandela. In all the years of prison, he was never not a free man. Never was heard, a discouraging word, and his focal point, go figure, was neither bacon nor coconut oil.

Having had similar experiences in high school (see my comment above), I can only offer two things in addition to what has already been said.

First, find an outlet. For me, it was theatre. The people weren't always who I wanted to surround myself with, but it did offer me a place where my quirks and choices were tolerated, and my explorations of how I wanted to live my life were done in part through the roles I took on in shows.

Second, read. For me, stuggling with my own misanthropy in high school and college, some of the best cures were the reading of certain books. Of note for me at different points in the process were:

• Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
• As A Man Thinketh, James Allien
• Anthem, Ayn Rand
• Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't know if reading such things is something that interests you, but it worked for me. The first three are short and available online.

Hope this helps, and good luck.

If you fret about how fat or dumb the people around you are you will never reach your own full potential. Go find the people who don't care what you eat and learn something about them. The "it gets better" advice is only applicable if you change yourself or your surroundings. I know lot's of people who's lives didn't get any better after high school because they still cared about those things.

Make the most of high school. It can be a blast or not, it's up to you!

If you judge, you'll be judged. I went through a militant vegetarian/vegan phase, and believe me, there's nothing worse than being the mightier-than-thou person turning their nose up at their peers in disdain. People can feel it when you are judging them, and it makes them uncomfortable and defensive. You need to relax! You can't fix everything overnight, you can't save all the souls from the low-fat god and bring them to the bright side. It took just chilling the eff out for all the heat to be taken off my plate- as soon as I stopped talking about what I was eating and acting like I was the superior in a room of the inferior, guess what, people stopped noticing what I ate and couldn't care less what was on my plate.

It's not just high school, this situation will not change if your view of it doesn't. It's my grandma's 80th birthday next week and in the midst of organizing a surprise party with all of her friends, the gossip hasn't changed since they were in dorms together. University isn't a magic pill that somehow fixes everyone around you and opens up everyone else's minds- this is about you and your perception. I say own it, that way you can turn it into what you want to be-just lunch time, not a war zone.

Read up on the history of agriculture (or just go for Against the Grain by Richard Manning), your misanthropy will come into full bloom! ;)

I just read that the obesity rate is seventy percent. You shouldn't have to wait very long, perhaps ten years, and that rate will be eighty percent. You will be one of the skinny, maybe then you will get the respect.