The Set Up–
As the title of this post articulates, I ate something so delicious and so vile that one would think I spent all of last night drinking until I collapsed pitifully next to my toilet bowl.
Considering that I haven’t been compelled to sip a dang on thing since the better part of last year, this drunken, sick feeling that plagues me is not and should not be a normal reaction to food. I mean… nope. It shouldn’t.
Admittedly, I’ve been on a mission to find understanding about why food is such a literal plague in modern society, and in my family specifically. My beloved daughter has these unexplained ghost-like allergies that cause her so much mucus she has to have breathing treatments from time to time just so she can catch her breath. She’s NOT asthmatic. She’s fine when she’s with me. But at times when she stays with my parents or her father, it all gets very weird. She’s been to the doctor numerous times and even to the emergency room. They all just keep prescribing her more allergy medication and say to keep giving her the breathing treatments when she needs them. Pffff.
My father is diabetic and over the last 3 years has had a few stroke scares. Both of my father’s parents died of cancer when I was very young. My mother’s father died of cancer 10+ years ago. My perfectly spry maternal grandmother died from congestive heart failure last May. My mother has compelling bouts with cold like symptoms throughout the year. My sister has a supposed inherited condition called “ulcerative colitis” that is Mediterranean in ancestry and is only found in folks who are of Jewish or Mediterranean descent(which we are). That said, with the exception of my brother and me, everybody in my immediate family has got something. I haven’t even begun to list the stuff going on with my aunts and uncles on both sides of my extended fam.
At first perusal, it would seem that my family isn’t much different than the lot of our families or our general communities as a whole. Heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes plagues Black and Hispanic communities disproportionately. There is a plethora of information regarding how to quell this and so many medications on the market that it’s almost a candy store. And yet, despite folk maybe changing their diet (or not), taking their meds (or not), and even reducing their stress levels through exercise (or not) the problem persists. It persists disproportionately in “colored” folk, but it’s just as rampant in “pink” folk as well. It’s seriously a problem that gives me pause.
For a long time, I was a vegetarian. I ate no meat at all for roughly 15 years. When I got pregnant with Aubrei, about 6 months in, I craved a steak. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I craved nothing. I didn’t eat junk. I didn’t force feed myself crap just because I was pregnant and had an excuse. I ate fairly well the whole time. I’ve always been pretty in tuned to my body’s needs and so I asked my doctor if it would be okay to have a steak. Knowing my 15 year history, he said sure. I didn’t go crazy, I simply added red meat to my diet, I assumed I needed the iron or something. I don’t believe in coincidence. You’re talking to someone who has NEVER had issues with high blood pressure. A month later, I was admitted to the hospital with severe toxemia, Aubrei was born early and the rest is history.
I didn’t put 2 and 2 together at the time. I thought that it was just Aubrei’s time to come and so she did. I believe part of that is true. We all knowingly or unknowingly set causes in motion for our greatest good. And yet, there has always been something lingering in my spirit about those turns of events that I’ve never been able to put my finger on.
I can also say that I’ve long been a proponent for Yoga. I used to tell people that Yoga cures everything. No matter what they came up with was their issue. “Have you tried Yoga?”, I would say without blinking. Colored folk would necessarily look at me like I had just given birth to a monkey in front of them. But no matter. I do it. I look fabulous, and what? I knew instinctively that the key to great health and an ageless body was movement and removing toxins. Yoga is great for removing toxins from tissue and organs by manipulating the entire body system. It also calms the mind and our thoughts which is also a source of toxins. By default, I made Yoga the key to everything, but I was missing a bigger picture, that I’m learning now.
The Reality–
Earlier this week, I started reading a book by Alejandro Junger called simply Clean. Many times throughout the course of my life I’ve felt *ugh* and wanted to detox or refresh or something. I would look for a “green juice” or a “detox in box” at my local “all natural” store and maybe buy something to help me clean up whatever was making me feel so *ugh*, but for the most part, that stuff never worked or I just didn’t do it right. The “green juice” tended to make me feel better for a time and so I tend to keep a bottle or three in my fridge to drink daily. But as supposedly healthy as I look, having to literally fight with my mentals on a daily basis to FEEL awesome and healthy on a daily basis is draining, quite frankly. I’m great at resetting my mind and force my body to follow, but who wants to do that every single day? I would much rather actually really feel awesome. And so I went searching for another *ugh* detox program.
It turns out, I didn’t have far to look. The book was being advertised on the right hand side of my computer screen whilest I was facebooking last week. I did my due diligence and sampled the book and went to the website : http://www.cleanprogram.com/. I looked at the video about toxicity and how the toxins in our food literally create the environment of illness that we all have come to see as common place in our culture and with the coming of age. Considering that I have never once bought into the concept of looking my age, I bought the book and it’s philosophy hook, line and sinker.
Most of us understand that the preservatives in our food is not normal, naturally occurring or healthy for us right? The diseases that run rampant in our culture, particularly the mental issue that has made its way to the mainstream doesn’t seem normal does it? And yet, it’s becoming common place. Could it be that the food we eat: the fast food restaurants on every corner, shit, some of the restaurants we frequent; the cheap liquor; the chips, cookies and crap and stuff that we buy pre-packaged at the store; all the wheat, eggs, and milk products we consume every single day with hormones and high fructose corn syrup and names not a one of us but the scientist who invented it can pronounce–could it be that the food we eat is not only killing us by way of toxicity, but also making us nuts in the process?! Not to mention all the medicine we have to take just to live somewhat (and temporarily) symptom free???
Sidebar: We, my people, keep Pharma in business simply by eating.
The Experiment–
I decided to do a bit of a social experiment, with myself as the guinea pig. I was feeling a bit dry and parched (dehydrated is more like it). I wasn’t drinking enough water and I was drinking way too much coffee, which I never drink, just to stay up nights doing the million plus things that I do. My skin was looking wretched. Plus, I wasn’t eating all that much, but whatever. As I began reading Dr. Junger’s book, I made sure that I consumed mostly filtered water. I made sure I drank at least 3 of my Bobble Bottle’s worth–which came to be between 9-12 8oz glasses per day.
Mind you, I wasn’t really thinking. Being so dehydrated had made me a bit foggy and consequently, my was blood pressure was a smidge low and so I was experiencing spells of light headedness and I was just plain old tired. I thought it was my simply doing too much, but it turns out, it was something else.
So for no less than 4 days, I drank only water. No tea. No coffee. No green juice. Just water. Kindof like a fast, but different. Whenever I was hungry, I drank more water. Of course, when I got to the point where my stomach wanted to eat itself, I ate something small and not really considered healthy–french fries or crackers and maybe soup. Sometimes I ate just Greek yogurt. It was really and literally whatever was handy. Twizzlers and chips came up from time to time. I was being consciously lazy. Like we all can be with our eating habits. I refused to go to the supermarket. If it was around, I ate it. *ugh*
Surprisingly, THE NEXT DAY, my skin started to take on its natural glow from being re-hydrated. My brain was still a little foggy and my mood was a little hard to manage, but I endured. I also slept for more than 12 hours on two concurrent days. It was weird. On the one hand, my body was getting what it needed–water and lots of it. And so it reacted by making me look glowy and healthy. On the other, my body was getting just about NO nutrients and so my brain was clouded and my mood was erratic. Hmmmm. Interesting.
So then came the coup de gras. I had basically starved myself with crap for 4 days and I was hungry enough to eat a horse. And so I did. Allegedly. I high tailed it to Sonic and ordered their Southwestern Cheeseburger with a side of fries and a Strawberry limeade. It was awesome. I ate the whole thing and most of the fries. I skipped the strawberry limeade bc for whatever reason, the water was what I craved and it was a blissful drive home.
The End Result–
No sooner than I hit my front door, it began. This icky sick feeling. I’ll spare you the sordid details that happened between bathroom walls, just know that it wasn’t pretty AND it wasn’t loose. *ugh* It felt exactly like I drank too much and wanted to throw up but I couldn’t. So it came out the other end, but it didn’t want to. It was literally like my body was fighting itself. The smart part of my existence wanted that shit out immediately, but the part that just wanted food of any source, wanted it to stay. Needless to say, I think “smarty pants” won.
Even more interesting, even after my toilet “seizure” was over, I didn’t feel better at all. I didn’t feel sick per say, just cloudier than usual. Glazed over. My mood was just plain wrong. My temper was short and all I wanted to do was sleep. When I dropped Aubrei at my parent’s house last night, my dad made soup and I ate some. All I can consciously remember thinking was “there is no nutritional value in what I’m eating right now”. I felt like shit. I went to sleep earlier than usual and woke up this morning still feeling like shit. Is food–the building block of our energy and being– supposed to make us feel this way? If I were to take a gander at an answer, I would say NOPE!
So, imagine me. A generally healthy person with a generally good outlook on life and a general understanding about things in general– eating nothing but water and crap for 4 days and at the end of said 4 days feeling worse than I can remember feeling since that one time (at band camp) I got sick drunk. Imagine, if what I’ve experienced in 4 days is what folks are doing to themselves every single day of their lives. Would it be a surprise that crazy is on the rise? Would it be a surprise that folk have all kinds of auto-immune diseases? Would any of our dogging health concerns be surprising in the slightest? Would it be a surprise that folk look and feel the way they do and can’t seem to find a way around it?
Just like Nike once said about “the shoes”, it’s got to be the food. Now, let’s get a few things straight. I’m not coming at Sonic. I just picked Sonic because it was less cliche than McDonald’s. I didn’t eat a whole bunch of the same stuff because I purposely wanted to make a point about how even little bits of different stuff doesn’t sustain life. I drank water because of vanity. I dunno. This wasn’t a scientific offering. Like I said, it was just a bit of a social experiment. I must also add that all the while I was carrying out this experiment, I didn’t tell a soul I was doing it and I was reading Dr. Junger’s book on effective detox and cleaning out the toxicity that has accumulated in our bodies. So clearly, I was paving the way for my next social experiment, which is to see if Dr. Junger’s Clean is all it’s cracked up to be.
And so, I leave you with this. I ate shit and now I feel like shit to prove a point. And you’re saying now, “of course you feel like shit Envy, you ate shit for 4 days.” And isn’t that my exact point???? But even further, so much of the stuff that are everyday staples in our diets are in fact shit. Meaning, they are not meant for our bodies to consume– DAILY–which is why we all for the most part feel so aweful.
So now, I’m preparing my body over the course of the next few weeks to clean up the mess I’ve made of my body in the last few days, just so I can begin Dr. Junger’s Clean program. I’m starting my Clean journey on February 1. It’s designed to be a 3 week program and I’ll be using the book method and not the “medical” method he has available on his website. I’ll be eating only whole, organic foods, making them myself and drinking the smoothies and such, and taking the required supplements exactly as he’s got it all lain out in his book.
When I begin, I’ll post my progress semi-weekly, although, my goal is to keep a daily journal on how I feel from day to day through to the end. You can join me if you like. The best way I would suggest to start is with the book. It’s available on Kindle, Nook, and all the main book getting establishments. I read mine on Kindle for iPhone which is a free app btw. Get Clean Here! If you’d like to join me whilest I (WE) “Clean”, like my fan page and we’ll post our experiences together. You can do that HERE!
I’ve added some food for thought at the bottom of this post. Who knows, we may be on to something. Maybe changing our food and the way we eat individually will actually create a chain reaction that can change our world collectively. The moral of this story? Pfff. You know I ain’t got one. Just some food for thought. Thank you for reading this though. Peace and Abundantly “Clean” Blessings. Love, -e-
The “Stats” on Our Fat
According to expatify.com Jan 10, 2011 These are the top 3 fattest countries out of 10:
(1) American Samoa, 93.5% (of the population that is overweight)
It’s a staggering number. Many Pacific Island nations have had trouble with weight in modern times mostly because they have abandoned their traditional foods for cheap, easily attained processed foods from the West. Perhaps no other Pacific Island has had such access to these habits as American Samoa.
(2) Kiribati, 81.5%
Like American Samoa, Kiribati has been flooded with processed foods like Spam and mutton flaps (fatty sheep scraps), often sold at lower prices than native food.
(3) U.S.A., 66.7%
Well, the U.S.A. doesn’t top the list, but it’s close, and it falls behind only a small islands nation and one of its own unincorporated territories. The United States of Processed food, high fructose corn syrup and fast food has been high on this list over the last half century.”
In 2003, we were #1, according to America: The Fattest Country by Dan Rubinstein. You can read the whole article here. Yikes!
“The fattest country in the world is the United States, with 30.6% of Americans being obese. Two thirds of Americans are also considered overweight. This national crisis can even be seen in American pets, with 25% of our pooches and cats being classified as overweight. There are currently 13,000 McDonald’s Restaurants and 11,000 Burger King Restaurants. These statistics could give anyone a heart attack. Americans eat larger proportions than they are supposed to and technology has wiped physical activities off of their to-do lists.”
“The roots of this environment can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s, when people like U.S. agriculture secretary Earl Butz instigated a chain of events that would by the end of the century lead to 450-pound teenagers requiring emergency stomach-stapling gastroplasty surgery. Butz, a Richard Nixon nominee, lowered food prices for American consumers and helped American farmers lock up new markets. In order to do that, he pushed products like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and palm oil into our diets. HFCS, which improves the shelf-life of vending machine goodies and protects frozen food from freezer burn, is six times sweeter than cane sugar and can be made from U.S.-grown corn. Palm oil, imported in massive quantities from Malaysia to give American agricultural exporters a green light overseas, has been described as “more highly saturated than hog lard.” Yet they both became staples.
Butz simply wanted to solve political problems, says Greg Critser, author of Fat Land. He didn’t intend to make people fat. Neither did movie theatre magnate turned McDonald’s director David Wallerstein, who realized his businesses could make more money by selling larger portions of high mark-up items such as pop and fries. Customers don’t want to feel like gluttons and buy two small bags of fries, but one giant serving…. In his hunger for profit, Wallerstein didn’t see the bigger picture. “When you don’t want to look at something, you don’t look at it,” says Critser. “That’s not very profound. But it’s true.”
*Omg*