Over the past few years I’ve made a lot of dramatic changes in the way I eat. I nixed corn syrup, then wheat, then sugar, then meat, then dairy. I eat almost none of that now, with very few (and very particular) exceptions. At first, as you might imagine, it put a cramp on my social life because eating out was no longer my default activity. Not only did restaurants not serve the kind of fresh raw and vegan food I wanted, they had all these items added to almost everything on their menu—even when it wasn’t actually necessary. (If you ever give up wheat, you will be shocked at how often it’s added to everything under the sun—same with sugar, same with dairy! Don’t even get me started on corn syrup.)

Because of my sudden seeming restriction in food choices, I started to realize other things about typical restaurants and the food service industry in general—mainly that meals out are almost always ridiculously overpriced for the startlingly low quality of food. I can eat fresh produce for a fraction of what I’d pay at a restaurant. Why eat out at all?

I’m sure there are exceptions—Casa de Luz notable among them—but I haven’t found many.

If you’re a meganpreneur (or indeed, any flavor of businessperson) you’ll have noticed another wrinkle: Business meetings. I was suddenly aware that having meetings for business was going to get a lot more complicated, because I simply wasn’t interested in eating out (or even having coffee) and that had been my primary method for making new project connections. Everybody eats. Everybody drinks coffee (or some other Starbucks fare). I no longer had any desire to meet new contacts at the local coffee shop, because there simply wasn’t anything I was willing to ingest there.

In fact, it was a happy coincidence that I changed the way I accept new projects—otherwise I’d be in a quandary!

This all happened fairly recently, but I think I’ve reached a nice lull; I almost never go out to eat and I like it that way. I’m hoping to even further decrease my likelihood of doing so, because it just doesn’t feel right to me for the most part. I do the things that feel good—Casa de Luz is one of them!—and try NOT to do the things that don’t.

So it was a nifty discovery this morning when I caught up on Steve Pavlina’s blog and found that as part of his juice feasting experiment he’d written about this exact issue—meeting and connecting with other people without needing it to be about food. I loved hearing his insights—and if you’re interested, they’re worth a read.

I was very lucky that my current business partners were willing to work around my sudden wont to decline Chuy’s meeting invitations, and that some of them are as interested in natural health cuisine as I am. I am very lucky that I have a good space for business meetings in my living room, and that I almost always have business meetings with people I know well and am comfortable inviting over. (Someday I will need to confront my hermitude and invite people I don’t know yet, but that will happen in good time.)

Food for thought—ha! ;}