You Are What You Eat

Right now, I am watching a show called Taboo on the National Geographic Channel. This particular episode is about obesity, and it is profiling a man who weighs over 600 lbs. He blames his obesity on the eating habits instilled in him by his grandparents when he was a child. This makes me think; how much can we blame the habits learned as children versus our own willpower? When I was a kid, I remember being told I couldn't leave the table until I ate everything on my plate. As I got older, I remember feeling guilty if I ever left food on my plate. Although, I have learned to not feel guilty because you need to stop eating when you are full, not when all of the food is gone, I think that idea lead me to overeating at times. But I can't blame my parents because now that I am an adult I am aware that it is unnecessary to eat all of the food in front of me if I am full. So why is it that some people haven't been able to control themselves so easily? Leading them to obesity and weighing hundreds of pounds before they realize they have a problem.
Obesity has become a very serious issue in our society, with greasy fast food so readily available, people just aren't eating healthy food. My book, The Inside Tract, talks about how we need to get back to eating a whole food diet. This diet isn't a diet in the terms of cutting back food to lose weight, rather, it is simply just eating vegetables, fruits and whole grains and avoiding processed foods. This whole food diet is what our ancestors survived on. Think about the colonists and the kinds of food they had available to them. Everything they ate was either grown right in their backyard or they hunted it. They didn't have a McDonald's down the road to run to if they didn't feel like cooking one night. Even without the medical knowledge and vaccines that we have today, they were generally healthier people than we are now.
All of this comes back to the fact that the foods we eat have a large impact on our health. If you eat fast food and junk food all day then not only will you gain weight, but I can almost guarantee that a bevy of other health problems will come a long with it. And on the other hand, some, but not all, health issues can actually be helped by eating a healthier diet.
The whole food diet consists of the foods that our bodies were meant to ingest. Our bodies want and need nutrients from vegetables and sugars from fruits. Currently, I am in the process of switching over to a whole food diet. Obviously, this isn't something that can easily be done overnight. I'm sure if you had the will power and ability, you could cut out all junk in a day, but I will admit, I'm not that strong. I like junk food and some nights it is a lot easier for me to get fast food for dinner. I am also going about this realistically, because even though I want a majority of my diet to contain whole foods, I know that I can't completely cut out all of the junk. I am a strong believer that anything in moderation is just fine. I'm hoping that by changing how I eat, I will have less side effects that come with not having a gallbladder. Also, hopefully, I will put less stress on my liver and spleen, which are now stuck with the job of making up for the work that my gallbladder used to do.