I’m so mad at the people who make and sell our food

I work with many clients regarding many different things. Primarily, I work with individuals recovering from eating disorders and with individuals working to clear chronic acne. But I also have clients who have other health concerns, such as being overweight, or trying to resolve asthma.

Food can be either medicine or poison

Every single one of these disorders is triggered by food.

I’m mad because as I work with my clients (and also myself) to make sure the diet is clean and healthy and medicinal for their constitution, it seems like so much work, and so much food to cut out or stop eating. It feels like so much restriction and care has to be taken, at the grocery, at restaurants, at parties. Like so many ingredient labels have to be read. It feels unfair and sad.

But seriously, I just got mad one day, because it SHOULDN’T feel hard or restrictive. You know the reason it does?

Because 99% of the food we are exposed to, asked to buy, forced to eat, is crap.

That’s not OUR fault – that’s on the people who make and sell our food .

it’s really hard to buy/get good food

Eating a healthy diet wouldn’t feel nearly so hard if going to the grocery, the BULK of the food you saw had 5 ingredients or less, the BULK of the food you saw was OK for you to eat, and the majority of the dishes listed on restaurant menus were made from foods you know are healing for you.

Eating healthy wouldn’t be so hard if you HAD to eat what was in season, if you HAD to eat what was on the table in front of you, and the amount of food that tantalized your eyes and imagination shrunk from a huge Costco warehouse or a downtown district with over 100 restaurants to a backyard garden or a general store with a humble grocery section.

Do you realize that we have over 1,000 times the food diversity to choose from that our parents did? Our food norms now seems totally spoiled and completely out bounds compared to how humbly people used to eat.

Does any of this sound like you:

• Don’t like leftovers.
• Don’t like having the same meal 2 days in a row.
• Don’t like cooking.
• Have to eat out at LEAST once a week.
• Have to have meat at every meal.
• Have to have dessert with every meal.
• Just soup or salad for a meal does not do it for me.
• I only like burgers from {restaurant name}.
• I don’t eat any veggies except for {insert food name}.
• I could never dream of having a 1 ingredient meal (ie, just rice).
• I would die without my {exotic superfood name}.

eating like a king – not necessarily good

The food landscape we live in so luscious, it’s almost too good to be true. In fact, it is. It creates an unrealistic expectation of what we should be eating. It blurs the line between food and drug. Basically, we all eat like kings. We eat like we are on vacation ALL THE TIME. The food landscape full of rich, pre-prepared goodies destroys our relationship with food, so we no longer put in the rather ample time and effort to find and cook meals the same way our ancestors did. (Do you think you would be eating so lavishly or unhealthily if you had to prep every single meal – from SCRATCH? Kraft mac and cheese won’t save you here…)

In order to sustain our unhealthy appetites for all of this delicious and exotic food, measures must be taken. As much as food diversity and access has increased, SO HAVE preservatives, growth hormones, antibiotics, genetically modified strains, heat and chemical treatments, and other processes and additives that are incredibly harmful to both our food and our bodies. In addition, so has the amount of people putting energy into our food. Imagine who picks your goji berries – are they happy? Are they paid a fair wage? If not, then maybe they touch your berries with distress.

you are what you eat ate

I recently heard a saying I love. It goes: It’s not, “you are what you eat.” It’s actually, “you are what you eat ATE.” So when we eat meat, we’re actually eating hormones, antibiotics and GMO grain. When we eat veggies, we’re actually eating inorganic fertilizers and pesticides. This is serious, guys, and this is why I’m so pissed.

Because, for as much food as is out there, only the teeniest, tiniest percentage is food that is completely untouched by modern tampering and chemically bullshit. I just read another tidbit of info that illustrated just how in the dark we are and what a scary struggle this is.

It turns out that raw almonds are NEVER actually raw, except if you get them at a farmer’s market and get the farmer to look you in the eye and promise they are raw. ALL other almonds, even if they say they are raw, have been flash treated with either steam or a carcinogenic gas called PPO (polypropelene oxide, I believe, but don’t quote me). And guess what? YOU’LL NEVER KNOW, because that info is not shared on the label. (Just FYI, the good news is, if the almonds are organic, the method is guaranteed to be steam.) But, how many other foods out there are getting processed with chemicals or heat, without us knowing? What else goes into processing?

organic veggies are processed…what?!

And just to be clear, when I say processing, this applies to EVERY SINGLE THING we eat. It has ALL been processed. Even organic veggies. How are organic veggies processed? They are picked. They are packed. They are transported. Just a little scenario for you: Imagine your organic lettuce being picked. But it’s picked by a worker wearing gloves. The gloves have ALSO been used to pick NON-ORGANIC food. It gets sent to a facility to be washed. However, that facility ALSO washes non-organic produce. And what else does that facility do? Who knows? Not you. The packing facility shrink wraps your organic veggies using plastic and heat.

To be fair, this is a little drastic (is it, though?), but I just want to illustrate that we have LOST most of our power and knowledge around food. We basically have to TRUST giant corporations to tell us the truth.

slow food is good food

There was a movement a while back started by Alice Waters, a famous Bay Area chef, called Slow Food. It gained a lot of popularity, but I no longer hear the words Slow Food as often as I did when the movement was really building momentum. It combined several beautiful factors that helped to shrink the sphere of food available to you in a really healthy, logical way. Eating slow meant eating local – only food that was farmed or grown within a certain radius of your home. Eating slow meant eating only what was in season, so your diet naturally changed as the seasons did. Eating slow meant eating in love, companionship and mindfulness.

So when I work with my clients and we create diets that seem humble and small and unsatisfying, I really encourage them to see the larger picture, to get perspective. Because it is not THEIR diets that are screwy, it is the diet of the modern world. THEY are the normal ones.

small + simple is normal

OF COURSE it’s hard to lose weight when there are more frozen pizza options in the grocery than types of vegetables. OF COURSE it’s hard to avoid xenoestrogens when practically all the meat we eat has been fed growth hormones and antibiotics. OF COURSE asthma is inflamed when we HAVE to eat inflammatory foods because that is the only food we have access to. So, dammit, I’m pissed. The world is making my life and my clients lives HARD. Finding food is like finding a needle in a haystack…a haystack made of NEEDLES that is! Do you see the predicament now? So much food, yet so little of it should actually be consumed!

We, as humans, very logically, are meant to eat a small subset of basic foods consistently. And you will see that truth reflected as you look at ANY ethnic cusine. We are meant to vary what and how we eat with the seasons. We are meant to prepare our own meals, yet eat with loved ones. Seems obvious right?

sorry. life sucks sometimes.

So though simple and small may seem restrictive, it isn’t. It is brave. It is real. It is understanding and yielding to a better, more realistic way with food. It is seeing modern food as the scary three-ring circus that it has become. It is taking your power back.

I guess what I want to say with all this is that IT IS NOT YOU. IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. It is AMOST impossible these days! But take heart, do your best, and hopefully this article wasn’t a total downer for you. 🙂 I just really felt like I needed to say it.

In beauty and bliss!

xx

Celestyna