Look around – take a walk – go shopping – to the theatre – symphony – sports event and you will see many, many overweight people.
How on earth did this happen! My mother’s generation didn’t share this overweightness. Many in my generation have gaining weight and battling that weight gain as a constant. In my children’s generation they are taller and heavier except those who border on bulimia or some other eating disorder. What has happened to all of us? Something radical on this earth and in our environment has changed.
Have you noticed that diet food – diet drinks – exercise and body control programs – an entire industry has grown up and is thriving on your willingness to work hard and sweat even harder while that industry earns substantial amounts of money for either the foods they want to sell you to control your weight or their weight control ideas or body manipulations to feed your dream of looking as though you are 15 years old again!
It is all a smoke screen! A way to keep you from realizing the pit you have fallen into and can’t get out. The truth that you need to set you free is obscured and in your very distant past generations, mostly obscured from you by the need to maintain and increase the profit of this new “Health and Fitness Industry”. That may be what it is called by many, but its goals are anything but.
Most of what you need is not in that Health and Fitness Industry, but in the secrets your past generations took to the grave. The marketing, with which you were raised, blinded you so thoroughly you didn’t want to hear what your ancestors had to say nor did you want to carry forward their lifestyles. You particularly looked down on the knowledge and experience they gained from their lifestyles because you found more relevant the marketing and advertising dreamed up by those probably even younger than you are who were/are busy pumping out pipe dreams to maintain their jobs.
They were trained by experts at creating a new culture and a new lifestyle based on your giving them your money and potential possessions and they giving you the way to a miserable life – whether it be long or short – but profitable to their companies. Is this what you bought and live by today?
Now, however, everyone around you seems to be calling you back to this glorious past where you will find redemption, salvation, a better life than we have today and at the same time those same people, industries and their marketing/advertising is creating a trap for you so you don’t even know what past you are being called to learn from and buy into. A mythical, glorious past which actually never existed except in the movies and a scattering of novels. What used to be sold on the ‘silver screen’ is now being sold as a distorted, pumped up on drugs, reality show which you are being told was the great, glorious past to reach back to, recreate and nirvana will arrive.
They hold out the promise of satisfaction, satiety, for this something inside that is roiling your gut and telling you something is off and very damaged. They hold out what looks like the cure to this wrong road you’ve taken. Their message is full of pretty pictures or accompanying videos so words alone no longer satisfy and those pretty pictures are characterized as the road to Oz. But the curtain is seldom let down so you can’t see the wizard behind the screen doing all of this manipulating.
Let me lift the curtain for you – just a little. To strip the curtain away entirely is something you are going to have to do for yourselves. Unfortunately, it has been turned into a lifelong search and you are very devoid of the mentors who could shorten the search and reward your efforts when you hit a success spot.
Over the past couple generations we have put in place a modern lifestyle which started with our need to work constantly to be able to afford more, even though we were using so many new inventions that cut our work load in half. We haven’t been able to get off that rodent’s wheel long enough to see if it really was generating the ‘more/better’ it promised. Most of us are afraid to stop because the bleak future pictured by doing that is something we can’t stand to allow ourselves to imagine.
So let’s take this one thing at a time:
starting with – Our food supply and food habits. That alone has taken books, videos and endless self-help sessions to describe and to either mislead us or to help us understand what is and what has happened. The story that starts with once upon a time ends with corporate farms using chemicals and other substances which destroy our bodies a tiny little bit at a time so we can’t identify or point to that as one of the reasons for our current dilemma. The marketing and advertising has us in a constant ongoing argument with each other which both sides lose, because in this great information sharing age, the crucial information is kept locked up and very seldom shared.
Just a couple for instances:
Flour – that which was the staff of life for our forbears and was in many breads and other dishes is something we are warned against today and which has developed around it and trying to take its place – a new industry – gluten free – because so many are now allergic to what sustained life in their past generations. And gluten-free is a much more lucrative end result of processing than is flour, which is now depicted as the enemy of health in so many characterizations and advertisements. One little dirty secret = it is substantially more profitable.
How could that be? Who did this thing? The one substance which you could practically live off of alone is now claimed as our bodies enemy. If you are not allergic to it, then certainly you know it makes you fat!
Flour as a profit center is what happened and the machinery went into high gear to figure out how to make ever more money giving even less to the general populations: Farmers were encouraged to put all kind of chemicals on their wheat and to experiment with new kinds of wheat developed because, thereby, much more could be grown on a small plot of land and even beyond that – large corporate farms popped up, quietly destroying the farmer. The substantially increased profit to be made on land growing this ever new kind of wheat was too much for some to pass over and certainly was not to be shared with the non-corporate types. And so ‘crush them’ was the mantra of the day and it was successful.
Greed called those susceptible, into the flour business, to press as much money out of it as possible giving to the populace whatever smokescreen and story board was necessary to hide the real reasons for that substantial profit increase from something as basic as wheat. And along came the hiding and holding back and creating myths for the populace (us). The wizard was very busy with all of this going on behind the screen.
The best place to start to tell this part of the story is at the end of the processing line – the point at which flour has been robbed of everything that gave us life and all of that replaced with that which takes life and good health away from us. The large silos in which the “finished” flour was put to be held until it could be packaged harbor many ugly secrets. Predictably, those silos were infested with bugs and our new kind of logic said bugs needed to be killed with pesticides and that happened. None of the silos escaped.
There was no way to get the dead bugs out of the silos so let the flour stay until the bugs deteriorated. No one would ever ask what those black specks were in the bags of flour, if the bags and the marketing were such as to make the flour more convenient to buy and prettier to look at with the mythical story about how much ‘cheaper’ it was. And the bonus – something light brown or a dark ivory was made very white! The background color of this ‘revolution’.
There was no way to get the pesticides out of the flour because it just became one with the ground grain. So the department, in the United States, which kept the public’s food supply safe just issued a proclamation which said there was not enough pesticide in the flour so it wasn’t worth demanding that the pesticides be removed – that would be too costly – nor was there enough to warrant a note on the packaged flour letting the consumer know the product they were buying was tainted.
And so, the flour moved off the shelves into our homes where it wrecked havoc with our health without most of us knowing why we were developing these low levels of something that made us feel not quite up to par; some of us becoming quite ill with allergies; some of us succumbing to viruses and various bacteria much easier and more frequently than in the past.
….And so another industry sprung up to address that and to take us further down the rabbit hole and those addressing that issue further up the profit margin generator.
Milk – Another one of those ‘basic for life’ foods that we all eat or drink that has added to this horrendous lifestyle we are living. We have become so accustomed to the problems with milk and other foods, we have simply adjusted and move on. It is becoming unpatriotic to question.
Many of us are horrified if we have to drink “Whole Milk” – as though this would poison our system. We have come to believe most assuredly that would put more weight on us and probably fool with our fat/cholesterol count and from that would come hardening of the arteries or high blood pressure or something equally awful. Some science I remember from a small child doesn’t exist in the public mind anymore – “drink your milk, you need milk fat and milk protein in your system at the same time. ” And that is Whole Milk. The other kinds of milk simply lowers your health and increases the corporate profit.
But, what if ‘whole’ milk was not the culprit, but the growth hormones fed to the cows producing the milk was at fault. The growth hormones which apparently move from cow to human and cause our bodies to react by being tricked into believing the one ounce of food we just ate was really four ounces so where we want our cows to become fatter on less so our profits would be more, what really doesn’t matter to those so trapped in that profit center is the fact that they are passing that little tricked-out and chemicalized out food to the rest of us as we get just as fat as the cows and for the same reason. Doesn’t matter if it is ‘whole’ milk or the other kind with the fat taken out.
What if problems occur because, while the cow needs to be heavier with more pounds per cow on less food per cow to increase profits, humans need to be lighter with fewer pounds per human to be healthier. So – what to do —
Develop, to address this problem – a very large health industry to compensate for the health and wellness problems caused humans by this and other such food developments. And so it should be and so it is.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
You should get the message by now so do your research and you will be appalled at what you find. Some have already discovered much of this and adjusted their lifestyle and diets accordingly, but not even close to a majority of us.
Food has been turned into a political topic to maintain its outlandish growth into the nether regions, those where you can legitimately ask if this is really food when it is mostly chemicals and instead of working together for the health of all we are arguing pro and con totally ignoring reality and facts in our arguments – especially the most popular ones. Listening to the arguments one would think some of us are not human, but our bodies have some other kind of existence.
The real culprit comes into play in our everyday lives and how we have incorporated meals into this growingly outlandish lifestyle. Out of the food industry has come the processed food industry and the fast food industry – all detrimental to our health.
Once upon a time, meals were a family community event. Well, that’s gone by the board. Meals are now a catch when you can thing and mostly made up of the fast foods and/or the processed foods found everywhere.
And in-between those very unsatisfying fast food meals are the fast food and sugar or salt loaded snacks. Today, however, it is increasingly salt and sugar in the same food product because it was recently found that combining the two makes for a quicker and more substantial addiction. Hungry between meals? There are thousands of snacks you can pick up to get from one “meal” to the next – competing for the title of “I can damage this body quicker than you can”.
I could go into other food groups in addition to milk and flour, but you have to do something! So I will leave that to those interested.
Alternatives? What did our ancestors do!
Soup: Was a ‘go to’ dish. Not the soup one makes with individual ingredients like pumpkin soup or butternut squash soup or, etc. But the soup, kept on the back of the stove, constantly hot so if anyone was hungry between meals you went for a bowl of soup. You simply found a soup bowl, ladled out as much as you felt you wanted to eat and enjoyed a very filling, satisfying and nutrient rich ‘snack’ that kept you satiated between meals and did not add extra pounds or lower your immune system making you susceptible to whatever came along. A side benefit from this ‘family soup pot’ was the fact that if company dropped by unexpectedly you had something very lovely and elegant to serve them and in an instant. Set the table, ladle out the soup and enjoy your visitors.
Everything was put into that soup. Vegetables left over – instead of letting them spoil they were cut up and put into the soup. Meat-turkey-chicken-venison, whatever, left over from some dish or other or was not being used as quickly in another dish as expected because time to use it had run out – that was added to the soup. It was constantly adjusted with different spices to make it something really special, very filling and incredibly nutritious to keep you in good health.
Custards and puddings were constantly being made. Left over rice went to make rice pudding as did bread that was beginning to go stale. As was ——etc.
Breads were used even when stale. All one had to do was to pass the bread under the faucet to wet it a bit and then put it in the oven to heat. The result was bread that tasted as though it was freshly baked and just out of the oven. Today, we throw away stale bread and rice and other grains instead of reusing them and keeping them in the refrigerator for their next use – that is, those of us who still eat such things. Or we keep them in the refrigerator, expecting to use them, but once we finally remember them when going through the refrigerator, we find them full of mold.
Cakes were baked from scratch. They can be baked today and just as quickly as those from the box – tasting far better and with more nutrition. The boxed cakes give you nothing. The freshly baked cakes are a dream. For a recipe – try the 1-2-3-4 cake. Easy recipe to remember. With a mixer it takes less than 15 minutes to put together ready for baking. Make enough for more than one cake – use the stale left overs to make custards more interesting.
So many recipes are available for quick and nutritious foods – made from scratch. But even our cookbooks have been compromised. When I see one which says take a can of…… out it goes in the trash.
Looking for the old cookbooks is difficult because they have been so cast aside. I find mostly the file boxes in which someone has filed recipes they had from grandparents, aunts, uncles, old friends who brought food stuff for the sick and shut in, including the recipe they used to create the dish they brought. That doesn’t happen so much anymore – can’t when you’ve stopped at a quick food store to pick up something on the fly.
We could go into the cosmetics industry, the environment, and more – but the clouds start to form and those with vested interests become interested in us and we like to travel under the radar.
Life can be really simple because that even goes to how you clean your house and the substances you use with which you clean. Our mantra is simple – don’t use anything to clean with that you would not eat. Well, not as a snack, but you get the message. And don’t put anything on your skin you would not put in your stomach. It winds up in your bloodstream in seconds.
All of that marketing and advertising on which we have been raised is hard to undo and get out of our minds. We have given top priority and attention to what which is put out for the purposes of selling a product – the mythical world – rather than anything factual about that product. And far too often, that which our family and older friends have tried to teach us gets thrown out with the dirty wash water.
Our conditioning is almost complete – except for the cracks in the wall that a few have been trying to widen to let back in the flood of information that has to be kept out if our current – modern – lifestyle is to be kept and built upon. That lifestyle is a building built on sand. What you need for yourselves and your family is a building with a strong foundation. The story of the three pigs comes to mind. Each built a house on something different and the storms came or was it the fox who huffed and puffed and blew all of the pigs houses down except the one who built on that solid foundation.
The same goes for all of us as we build our lives and try to pass along the lessons we’ve learned to our children. Hopefully, something happens which gets them to listen. I’ve given up on that and have written many notes for them to read after I die. That isn’t a sure thing either – because most of your belongings are given away or thrown away after death so some other way has to be found. Libraries were one way, but the internet has sounded their death knell – so the search goes on.
In the meantime, I realize this topic needs a book not an article so let me stop here and leave the rest of this up to you. Hopefully, you will walk the path that puts you in good health and those around you in a wonderfully supportive environment.
The one great discovery I’ve had is that walking that path gets rid of simple things like a cold. We haven’t had colds in over five years. They are not normal, as we have come to accept, but an indication that something in your life and in the lives of your family members who come down with colds and other such temporary illnesses has a cause that can be eradicated if you change your lifestyle.
All of these such illnesses were unheard of two generations ago. The movement to build a huge and lucrative health industry, which depends upon regular outbreaks of bad health, has grown very quickly. Such outbreaks are necessary for that industry to grow, expand, and constantly see increased profits. New viruses and other infectious agents have to multiply and get stronger for the health industry to continue on its upward path and we have not disappointed.
It is not an industry that is working to put itself out of business by helping the populace in its move towards better health. When we notice that hospitals have become profit centers with stock holders and all the other trappings which require regular profits and substantial increases in profit each quarter and year over year, we realize our health is being preyed on directly as is our food supply indirectly.
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