There are a lot of questions going around us about how to best care for our bodies and our planet. Americans are getting severely obese and suffering from diabetes and heart failure because of it, but no one knows the best way to handle that. Tons of ads come on TV for diet programs and exercise videos, kids networks like Nickelodeon are emphasizing playing outside. Still obesity is an issue. A person in my family a few nights ago received his first order of Nutrasystem. In this program people can pretty much go online to pick the meals they want for the week and they come shipped in one serving packages from wherever they come from. I took a quick gander inside this guys order. I saw about 10 bags of cheese curls and 10 individually wrapped fudge brownie bars. What kind of junk is inside this food that makes you lose weight even though you are eating complete crap? It really makes me wonder. There seems to be this two lane highway with no diversions when it comes to eating right and losing weight. If you're eating right you're supposed to be losing weight, so if you're losing weight you must be eating right, right? Complete crap. I have such little respect for people who are so narrow minded. There is no way that preservative filled, irradiated, genetically altered food (if you can call cheese curls and brownies food) is healthy, and I'm sorry to bust any "miracle diet" bubbles here. I know losing weight is difficult, if not from my own experiences at least from the experiences of people who are close to me. I know when it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit with 80% humidity you don't want to go outside and do any exercise because it's so freaking uncomfortable, and I know it's a pain to cook in those temperatures so we're all tempted to eat out, but none of us have the money because of the economy so we're all flooding McDonald's for their dollar menu. If we're not flooding McDonald's we're cooking lean cuisines in our microwaves thinking that somehow this company has packaged all the nutrients of fresh ingredients into a little frozen meal with only 300 calories. Unfortunately I don't believe it works that way. We all look at labels and compare calories (a unit of energy that doesn't mean much if you're eating non-nutritional things aka "empty calories", and sugars and fat. We think that a diet soda is better for us than a regular because it has 0 calories, even though it's packed with artificial sugars. Craziness. I remember my household also trying the Atkins diet. It worked for them, for a while, but then a member of my family also had a heart attack. Could that be related to eating an over abundance of meat and cutting out carbohydrates? Vegetarians call the Atkins diet the "Make yourself sick diet" because they say it supposedly sends your body into a state of ketosis, something that is much like the state it goes into when you are sick. Pretty much these diets make your body focus on storing glucose and burning ketones, resulting in immediate and unsafe weight loss. The bottom line is, there are a lot of things that appear healthy that really aren't. I think the best way to lose weight is to eat a more regulated portion size, less meat, and more raw fruits and vegetables, and then if you're really serious, to cleanse your body of toxins (lots of ways, if you're interested let me know.)
My favorite little psuedo-healthy products are the ones that say "Natural" on the packaging. For some reason uneducated health nuts and dieters alike go to these like they're a miracle. Really, a food company can slap a "All Natural" sticker on anything, and that's not an exaggeration. "All Natural" has no legal definition and can therefore be placed on any product without ramifications (except maybe losing a little sleep at night for being bad, bad people). I'm an organic nut, though. When Wal-mart started carrying my favorite brand of cereal in an organic version my eyes lit up brighter than our LED-lit Christmas tree (I know, shame on my parents for shopping at Wal-mart and shame on me for letting them do so!) Anyway, I talk to a lot of people about organic foods and cosmetics and such, and they usually don't get it. The fact that people have no clue what organic means saddens me, so I'd like to put it out there. Organic is a legal term, and farms strive for this title to A) help the environment and B) meet the demands of consumers. One of the members or a team of members from the scrawny team of less than 15 employees at the National Organic Program (U.S.) comes to inspect your farm and give you the certification. Each farm must meet strict guidelines. Organic produce, for example, is grown without pesticides, is not genetically modified and the fertilizer used must come from animals who have not been fed hormones or antibiotics. Organic meat must come from animals who have not been fed hormones or antibiotics, who have lived outside (as opposed to inside where they have no space to move around) and who eat their natural diet (cows:grass; chickens:corn). I never even realized it before the whole "grass-fed beef" revolution, but they actually feed cows corn these days. What the heck man! Cows don't eat corn. I actually live in an area surrounded by corn fields, and NONE of this corn is used for human consumption. Most of the food grown in the U.S. is for animal feed, and many people suggest limiting the amount of meat you eat could help feed more people in the world. Anyway, as for processed foods, the term organic gets a little trickier with a certain percentage of their ingredients having to be certified organic. The point is that when you buy a food that says organic, it means something. It means that someone, somewhere cares about the environment and what it's consumers are putting in their bodies.
There's also another movement that is happening pretty quickly lately, and that's the movement towards making clothes out of organic cotton (or sometimes hemp and bamboo). It warmed my heart to go to Wal-mart the other day and see affordable organic cotton shirts from No Boundaries and Danskin. It used to be that organic clothes came in two colors, tan and brown and they were inevitably unattractive, expensive and sometimes a little itchy. Man has organic textiles come a long way!
Another issue that's really controversial is whether it's safe to put things on your skin that you wouldn't necessarily eat. For instance, I wouldn't too much like to down that bottle of perfume (come on, Earl Grey tea is bad enough!) A lot of the more extreme health and environmental nuts (and I kind of include myself in this as I am moving in that direction, slowly but surely... just know it's a term of endearment ) have been saying no to makeup, hairsprays, deodorants and soaps (heard of the no poo movement?) for years. It doesn't have to be that extreme though with the lines of organic makeups, suds free soaps, aluminum-free deodorants/antiperspirants and CFC free hairsprays that are offered these days.
So I know I have only touched a small tip of the "eating healthy, saving the planet from the ultimate warm up" iceberg, but I hope someone reads this and learns something they didn't know before. The bottom line is that I love nature, and I wrote a journal about it, and for everyone that's looking at all these words and feeling like they really don't feel like reading, here's some features




Sorry I have such a poetry and photography obsession!