Kale seems to be today’s poster child for the wellness movement, which I suppose is fine as far as it goes. But I gotta level with you: I hate kale.

Like, hate hate it.

I can tolerate it in soup, if it’s cooked down enough and I’m in the mood to be polite. That’s it. I would not like it in a house, or with a mouse; I wouldn’t like it in a box, or with a fox. I hate it in smoothies. Don’t even think about putting it in my salad or I’m gonna throw hands.

For clarity, I’m talking about regular, basic kale. Baby kale and dinosaur kale are a whole different experience. It’s a texture thing for me, and in my opinion, texture is the most overlooked component of making better eating choices. Texture nearly always has an emotionally charged element behind it worth digging into. That’s one of the things I do with my clients.

The first I ever encountered kale was when I was a 19-year-old waitress at a Frisch’s Big Boy in Indianapolis. It was on the salad bar, not as a feature but as ground cover. We used hearty kale leaves to cover the ice around the buckets of toppings. We wiped the spilled dressings off of it every night and reused it as many days in a row as we could.

Surprisingly, this is not where my emotional charge around kale comes from. And if you want to know my term of endearment for kale, you can book a 1:1 meeting with me because I’m not supposed to just bandy that about in polite company.

So why am I going off on kale today?

Because its popularity is a great illustration of how societal beliefs about what and how we should be eating may not be true for us individually, and are worth breaking down to see if they are true for us.

Regular kale is so damn popular I didn’t even know there were other variations of it until a few years ago. I kept eating it because everyone said it was so great for you, kept hating the texture, and kept hating what it did to my stomach.

Look, you’re not a sheep. You don’t have to follow what everyone else is doing.

And straight up, the food industry is not our friend. The government does not have our back with their nutritional recommendations. In fact, both of these entities have done a lot of harm to the population over decades. But I’m not trying to rally up support for a conspiracy theory.

I’m suggesting—nah, imploring—that it’s imperative that we be our own health advocates.

And yeah, that kinda means starting over with what you’re putting into your body.

Make changes a bit at a time that stick and stack so it’s not overwhelming. Add in good things before you ever take a break from something less supportive. Get tools to navigate labels and handle the emotional stuff that comes up, because where food is concerned, it will. It’s almost never just about the food.

If that seems daunting to you, I encourage you to reach out via email or even set a meeting. You don’t have to eat kale to make healthy lifestyle changes.