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Diet – Fat or fiction?
April 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment
You may have seen Disney’s Oscar Nominated feature about a small cleaner robot called Wall-E. It starts in a bleak and silent looking future of rubbish and early 20th century musical nostalgia, and swiftly moves onto a mobile yet bed ridden society taking their sustenance in liquidised form. I didn’t find it very cheery, and I’ve no doubt the kids didn’t either. Come on Disney, what happened to Bambi and Snow White? Has everyone lost hope?
We are, as a society, bombarded with pictures of fat people, told that obesity is going to accelerate and become a worldwide health disaster. Children are now becoming obese too, as news of poor food choices filters down into their world, and affects their thinking. So governments and health organisations lash out at junk food and refined sugar products, blaming them for the problem. The warnings increase and the situation gets worse and worse.
Most people have got things the wrong way round. They see the world around them, they see their bodies, they read the newspapers, they listen to other peoples stories, and from these influences they form their beliefs about what makes things happen. A belief is just a thought that you think long enough that it becomes a dominant thought that is readily accessed, and which the world in turn responds to.
If as a youngster, you grew up with parents who had a good attitude to money, you will have unconsciously taken these beliefs on board, and you will probably find that money is not an issue in your life.
There may have been other subjects in your home which did not serve you as well. Your parents may have had attitudes to food rather like Jamie Oliver; Don’t eat this it will make you fat. Don’t eat that its got too much salt. Don’t eat chips, they’re bad for you (how can anything that tastes that good be bad?). You want to stay slim and beautiful now don’t you? These beliefs are not helpful, because you needn’t have held them in the first place.
We are all products of our environments. The people we live with, their beliefs, our peer groups, religious and societal leanings, all contribute to our belief structures. Each of us in individual in that regard, no two of us having lived the same experience.
As we enter the 21st century, and the current of life accelerates, things are happening faster and in more extreme fashion. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer, the slim are slimmer the fat are fatter. Whatever you give your attention to will get bigger. It starts when you’re young and grows from there.
There will never be a single set of dos and don’ts to serve all, as every individual holds different beliefs on these subjects, and therefore they affect them all in different ways. Diet, exercise, vitamins, treatments of all kinds, will have different effects on the people they are given to. There are as many ways to achieve a goal as there are people on the planet, because each person holds different beliefs.
What is certain is that if you believe that something is not good for you, and you still participate, then that activity and the belief behind will ensure that it is will not be good for you. For example, if you have bought into the belief that eating junk food makes you fat, then it surely will, because you always get what you expect in life. Yet as you look around you, you see many people who not only eat junk food, but also thrive at the same time. How can this be? It seems they do not hold similar beliefs to you on the subject of diet.
I would never say that eating a chocolate bar is better for you than say, an apple, but when society gives a dog a bad name, it serves no-one, especially when the food is something that people will want to eat, and most of the ‘bad’ foods fall into that category. You body will deal with anything you give it, unless your belief contravenes, in which case it will not process the food effectively.
Our health conscious times, and the many well meaning health practitioners out there have left us with is a long list of things that we shouldn’t eat for one reason of another. This thing has too much salt, that has too much saturated fat, or too much of the wrong type of fat. That food has too many carbohydrates, or too much protein, or too many preservatives. The list goes on and on. Our good food choices are reduced to a handful of things that don’t really appeal to anyone. What invariably happens is that people go ahead and eat those things anyway, and suffer as a result.
People get fat because they eating the types of food that they believe will make them fat. They look at their bodies and feel bad, and feel fat, and the situation gets worse. Also, in feeling bad about eating these foods, they are attracted to more of the comfort foods which they know are bad for them, which just exacerbates the situation.
We are told that disease is caused by lack of exercise, smoking, bad diet, and excessive drinking, all considered bad lifestyle choices. In fact these are indicators of a bigger issue which lies, ruminating, beneath the surface; namely how the person feels. People naturally want to feel good, have healthy good feeling, beautiful bodies, and when they don’t, they don’t feel good, and tend to gravitate towards activities such as these. The real cause is negative emotion, or dis-ease. That is what causes disease. The external factors are merely indicators.
Not one other person can tell you what is going to work for you. You alone hold the key to what you want in your life. The more you read about the evils of food and their harmful effects, the more you limit your choices. If you didn’t know this stuff, you would have been better off. As you find activities, foods and thoughts about your body which feel better and practice them instead, you are on the right track. Your emotions are very finely tuned guidance that will take you in the right direction, and if you contemplate doing something that goes against your beliefs, then you will feel it is your gut. What you eat is far less important that what you think, and therefore how you feel about it. Get happy and make your choices from there.
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