Why Can't I Eat What I Want?
My husband is always saying, "Why can't I eat what I want?"
In a few weeks, I am taking a trip to Ontario to go to my father-in-law's 90th birthday celebration. My mother-in-law is 88. They are in their own home, drive, travel and play card games with their many friends. Whenever I nag my husband about how he's eating, he says, "I eat the way my parents ate and look how healthy they are? Why can't I eat what want?"
And my answer is always the same - "Eating the same types of food as when you grew up doesn't mean you're actually eating the same food as when you grew up because the food isn't the same anymore." And it certainly isn't the same as the food his parents ate - or any of our parents either.
|
If you grew up eating the same way I did, it was pretty much like this: Breakfast - cereal, milk & sugar, toast, butter & maybe jam, glass of milk or orange juice We didn't usually have a snack before bed, but I know some families where all the kids had a bowl of cereal every night before bed. |
 |
My bread was white, my veggies were canned, on weekends we might have had hot dogs and potato chips, and the only cheeses I had ever had were Cheez Whiz and processed cheese slices. Sometimes we had chocolate milk made with Nestle Quik and "strawberry milk" with Nestle Strawberry Quik, and I used to love that cinnamon sugar mix you could buy in the store to add to your buttered toast.
What Was Your Diet Like?
|
When I was older and my kids were young, it was much the same, except we had real cheddar cheese, (though I still liked my grilled cheese with cheese slices and then topped with strawberry jam - wow, I haven't had that for a long time!) I had also switched to frozen vegetables and I added in foods such as lasagne and pizza. Friday nights would often be "family night", we'd order in pizza and have Coke and orange pop while we watched a rented movie on our rented video cassette player (anyone remember those days?). We'd have ice cream for dessert; one time we had some blue ice cream. I don't remember what the flavour was called but bright blue food just doesn't look natural. The kids didn't even like it. |
 |
The next morning I found a bowl of the blue ice cream that had been left in the living overnight. The weird thing was that it didn't even melt! Not that it was frozen, it was room temperature, but it was still in the same shape in the bowl as it was when it came out of the carton! Wonder how many weird chemicals that ice cream had! We never bought it again.
My husband still likes that kind of diet (minus the blue ice cream). (Yes, he's a "little" heavier than he should be :) He doesn't seem to mind. So what's the problem?
The "Same Food" Just
Isn't "the Same" Anymore
"Why can't I eat what I want?" Because many of our foods are technology-driven manufactured food products that have very little of the original nourishment, but instead contain chemicals and modified ingredients. Do you know that no one has ever eaten the way we're eating these days? There were never any GMO (Genetically Modified) foods before. There were never before so many artificial colours and flavours, there were never all the chemical preservatives that make sure that the food has a long shelf life.
For example:
Bread - Today's bread is mostly from GMO wheat. It never goes moldy - that's not normal. They've added extra gluten which our bodies don't handle well, fructose-glucose contributes to belly fat and of course much bread now has GMO soybean oil in it.
Hotdogs - Let's just say it's not the meat it used to be!
Ketchup - I used to occasionally buy bargain brands but always went back to Heinz because it was the best tasting. But now the ketchup has changed - different colour, texture, flavour. It tastes like you're putting a teaspoon of sugar on your hamburger. The second and third ingredients are both GMO corn syrup products. This is sneaky marketing, there is really more sugar than tomatoes in ketchup.
On the plus side, I find their organic ketchup tastes more like the old ketchup.
Kraft Cheese slices - we saw on Facebook where someone tried to melt a slice of cheese over a flame and it wouldn't burn or melt. Of course I had to try it for myself when my son's family was over for hamburgers. My son insists on having cheese slices, so we got one out and tried to melt it. All that happened was that its shape warped a bit and it turned black and hard. Apparently these cheese slices are one molecule away from plastic. And we're eating this?
Potatoes - I live in P.E.I. which is almost one big potato farm. One potato farmer I know loves the Monsanto products. He buys the GMO potatoes, and says, "This is great! If an insect takes a bite of the potato, it dies! I don't have to spray as much now." The pesticide is GMO'd right into the potato. And I'm thinking, "And we're eating this? Why is this OK again?"
If my family and were eating exactly like we were kids, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Maybe there wouldn't be such a need for change.
But the food isn't the same. It's been artificially changed through technology. No generation has ever eaten like we're eating now. We've never had so many non-food ingredients in our food before.
Some nutritional experts are even saying that the parents of kids growing up now are going to be called "The Lonely Generation" because their kids are going to die before the parents - because of the food. We should be angry. We should be outraged. The food companies have made it very difficult to get the nourishment we need, and to have food without toxins.
So I Tell My Husband, "Sorry, Dear,
It's Just Not The Same As
The Food Your Parents Ate"
I think these factors are some of the causes of today's weight epidemic, the diabetes epidemic and the increase in heart disease. Certainly our bodies can't cope with increase in the increased amount of gluten in the bread, resulting in the gluten sensitivity and the celiac you see around you. It's not so bad to have bread (if you're not sensitive) if you're having home-made bread with organic, non GMO sprouted flour. But these days, if you are eating commercial bread products and desserts, it's pretty hard to lose weight, and it's pretty hard to keep your blood sugar levels level.
The Good News Is:
You'll Feel Better and Lose Weight
When You Eat The Way
Your Grandparents Did!
Think about it -
Your grandparents' food was 100% organic. There were no pesticides or herbicides in their food.
Your grandparents' food was relatively unprocessed. The wheat was milled, the pork may have been salted, but preserving food meant doing your own canning, fermenting foods, and using salt and sugar as preservatives. Even the sugar was better quality back then.
Your grandparents' food didn't have any artificial colours, nor artificial flavours. It was not filled with preservatives. It's hard to get any baked goods go stale or moldy these days; besides the preservatives, there isn't enough nourishment in them for mold to grow, so there definitely isn't enough nourishment in them for you to live on.
Body shapes have changed. When I was in high school, although one or another person may have been a bit "fatter" than another, they were still a normal shape with curves in the right places. These days, not to be unkind, but it is common for a person to have rolls of fat around the waist, even though the rest of their body isn't fat. Or they may be fat all over, but still excessive rolls around the waist.
There is good news and bad news about this. First the bad news - it is impossible to "diet" away those rolls, even if you went on a starvation diet. The rolls will still be there. You also cannot ever exercise away these rolls. You will have good muscle tone under the fat, but you'll still have the fat.
But there is good news. When you understand why the fat is there, you can take effective action to get rid of the rolls of fat.
The problem is that we have too many toxins in our bodies and the one single largest source of toxins these days is our food supply. Your liver works very hard to rid your body of toxins but it can only do so much. When you are constantly taking in more toxins than the liver can handle, then the liver moves it out and stores them in fat cells - you guessed it! around your waist.
So you can't "diet" them away, and you can't "exercise" them away, but you can "clean-eat" them away! When you stop eating the chemicals and GMO foods and replace them with more natural, preferably organic, and unprocessed as possible foods, your liver can start to catch up. It takes a little bit of time though, it could take as much as four or five months of clean eating before you start to notice a difference.
There are a lot of diseases linked to the current "S.A.D." diet - the Standard American Diet. An increase of heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer and diabetes are just a few that are continuing to increase - much because of our diets. When processed foods were starting to be introduced, my mother bought them for our family. I don't think it occurred to her that the food might not be as healthy; remember, this was still before herbicides, pesticides and GMO.
We have trusted that the food companies have our well-being in mind; yes, we know they have to make money, and that's OK, but we didn't expect them to actually sabotage our health in the process. There is an incredible amount of research that goes into today's food products. For instance, there is a ratio they follow when deciding how much sugar, salt and fat goes into a food. This ratio of sugar, salt and fat increases the dopamine levels in the brain and create an addiction - yes, we really do get addicted to certain foods, and those foods aren't doing us any good at all!
So - "Why can't I eat what I want?" Because we all have been manipulated by the food companies, and the food is making us sick. It really is kind of annoying because we don't want to have to spend time learning about food and about what's good and what isn't. But if you don't inform yourself and make the changes that will help you stay better - not sick - you won't have quite as great a life as you could have had.
Read more about what to eat so you stay well, have energy, lose weight and love your life!
 |
Teresa has left the city life and lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada with her husband |
|
Return to Top of Page |
New! Comments
Have your say about what you just read! Leave me a comment in the box below.