It is so hard to stay healthy in America. The system is unintentionally designed to keep us fat. Many factors contribute to this.
The first problem is that health is not easy. Small neighborhood markets no longer exist. You have to push your way through a giant store to get to produce that will go bad in three days. If you just buy frozen food instead, you won't have to repeat the nightmare again for another month.
Another issue is price. My healthy side says to get a salad when I'm out. My good shopper side says that if I use the dollar menu, I can get a bag of burgers for cheaper.
The final issue is obviously the deliciousness of fatty foods. I can't help it. A bucket of grease on a wad of meat is the best thing in the world.
I don't even want to get into working out. Talk about a hassle.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Calorie Crazy
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2 comments:
Hi NTG. It's a subject I am so passionate about. Since I switched to a primarily vegetarian diet years ago, I find that more each year, fatty and ultra sugary, salty or starchy foods really do not taste so good, and if I deviate from my diet, I can feel my body groan under the burden of digesting toxic foods now that my system is more or less clean. (Truthfully, I have been reversing several aspects of the aging process for over five years now, simply through educated food choices.)
When we are saturated with unhealthy foods, it can cloud our thinking, and our intellectual abilities, and energy levels and many aspects of our consciousness. This was once common sense.
I think of women brazenly eating pesticide-laden produce, and then giving birth to sick or compromised children, and I am struck with such a sense of helplessness and frustration. My own 9 y/o son cannot eat anything but organic fruit, because he gets respiratory symptoms such as wheezing and sniffles the moment he bites into anything with chemical residue on it. But of course, this just makes us the "freak family" because it is not fashionable to draw conclusions based on solid experience-based consistently recurring evidence to the contrary. (I am crazy until a corporate-sponsored doctor agrees with me).
That women who unwittingly poison their unborn infants while supporting all the sick things that lead to these unhealthy lifestyle issues, could deny the possibility that a birth defect may have been preventable if there was more awareness and understanding of health-- this infuriates me. How is this negligence any less tragic than an abortion, to ignorantly proceed with scientifically detrimental nutritional behaviors? To unwittingly create people who are disadvantaged from birth because we are too precious to step out of our comfort zone while we are pregnant?
I lay down yesterday afternoon for a rest, an I as I munched on my organic carrot, was contemplating just how delicious raw vegetables and beans actually taste now that I am able to discern the sugars in them from not constantly having my senses accosted by all that extra sugar and sodium. (That carrot was sweeter than any carrot cake I remember ever eating.) And still I had to worry about runoff from neighboring farms who use less responsible methods of cultivation. To me, that's like second-hand smoke times 100. I can walk out of a room full of smokers. There is no way I can get all that *hit out of my bloodstream if I want to eat like everybody else.
I think a lot of us choose unhealthy foods when we need comfort- i.e., sex, companionship, mental stimulation, rest, exercise. It's all about conditioning and misdirected instincts. It takes years to undo really entrenched conditioning, and a ton of self-discipline.
And you know what? It's IGNORANT not to do _everything_ in our power to ensure that our babies and children have _every_ possible chance to be healthy. It has to be THE priority. Everything else should pivot on this. It's not extreme-- it's inconvenient for many-- but it is only logical, and logical makes careful eating reasonable, normal, and sensible behavior.
Oops! Sorry it was so long! :)
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