If you are like me, changing your diet away from the typical Western Diet that is high in carbohydrates, artificial ingredients, and sugar and low in fat and natural nutrients you are looking for signs that you are on the right track. How can everyone else be so wrong? Signs of progress come in two varieties.

First are the personal signs. When you are eating like everyone else in your neighborhood you are going to have symptoms of trouble. After eating you will feel bloating, you may suffer burping and even in extreme cases, acid reflux. After you eat you will be drowsy as your body deals with the tsunami of carbohydrate, dispatching a flood of insulin to put all of that free energy into fat deposits in strategic places all over you. If you are not on a diet and currently starving yourself then you will be slowly gaining weight. If you are currently overweight, like two out of three of your neighbors, you are suffering the trials and tribulations of that. You are craving carbs and sugars soon after you eat some. You might have mysterious food allergies, you might have anxiety or unexplained depression. You want to change but you know that dieting only works while you are dieting.

When you stop eating carbs you lose each and every one of those things I describe above. You will be very gradually losing weight. You won’t be hungry immediately after a meal, you won’t be tempted by sweets at the office break table. You won’t think about food much at all between meals. Your mood will be sweet and you won’t have fits of emotion after the slight stimulations that may trigger you now. You will only break wind on the rarest of occasions, you won’t burp after meals, you won’t get indigestion. These are the immediate personal signs that you are on the right track.

On the broader front, you can be sure that you and all of the people who have stepped away from the carbohydrate diet are working together to change the world when you read news like this:

America’s Obsession With Healthy Food Is Driving Campbell’s Away From the Soup Business

Campbell’s Soup is going to deemphasize soup. They have bought a business selling fresh vegetables and juices and a company that sells organic baby foods. Campbell’s sees the writing on the wall. People are not buying as much boxed, bagged, bottled or, yes, canned foods. They want to blame declining sales on something? Perhaps they should examine the hidden sugars and carbohydrates in their foods. I personally eat fresh soups because soup stock is so easy to make and I have never eaten anything like it out of a can, and that includes canned soup stock.

This is Campbell’s idea of where the market is headed. Lots of health claims on the label. Too bad it’s made with artificial ingredients and comes in a bag. Too bad it is a soup that I will make a big batch for myself and keep leftovers in mason jars in my fridge. Home canned soups are just as convenient as factory canned (or bagged) soups, and have an advantage of no artificial flavors or ingredients, and has all of nature’s bounty naturally, not added back it.

I feel sorry for Campbell’s and their employees that are suffering some temporary discomfort as they figure out their new places in a world where more and more people eat less and less junk. When we have finished remaking the Western Diet into something that sustains life there will be plenty of work to do for all of them. It just won’t be the business of creating meals laden with the slow poison of carbohydrate and sugar. It won’t be the business of making something that must be freighted and trucked half way around the planet to get to my and your plates.