Nutrition Rant

This is entirely prejudicial.  And also, satirical.  Apparently you can get away with saying anything if you preface it with “This is satire.”

Losing weight is hard.

Eating to be healthy is hard.

It just goes against everything we as animals crave.

It is unnatural.

I’ve been working since May to cut weight.  That’s what we used to call it when I was on the wrestling team in High School; “Cut weight” or “Make Weight”.  That’s has more sense of control than ‘lose weight’.  It has a sense of the effort and action required.

I’m finally starting to make some progress but it’s still hard.

To put in context of how hard consider this.  I workout every day.  Every day.  I run more miles than 99.99% of the people on this planet.

I never liked sweets.  I don’t eat cake or cookies or tarts.  Never have.

But I still need to focus and scrape and suffer to lose weight.

Why is it so hard?

There are forces of evil aligned against me!

I mean we live in a land of abundance where pizza and beer are only a short reach away waiting for the weak moment.

And that’s the first lie.

That it doesn’t require self-control or self-sacrifice.  That there is some magic combination of macronutrients and habits that just makes the belly roll melt away.

I call Bullshit!

It takes incredible self-control to reach past the stuff you want.  It’s hard.  It’s sacrifice.  It does get easier with practice.  But it’s never easy.  And it’s always an ache in your heart.

A hunger.

But it’s not all about self-control.

The world of nutrition is filled with lies.

There is a $1.5 Trillion food industry working against you.  And their goal is to sell you processed food.

Why do they want to do that?

Anyone who has tomatoes in their garden right now knows that they are anything but standardized.  They come in all different shapes and sizes and colors and flavors and levels of quality.  If you can manage to keep the animals away long enough you can pick them and you get about a week before they start to decompose and your kitchen is filled with fruit flies.

But. Consider this; if you deliver them in a can as tomato paste all of that variety goes away.  They are easy to transport and are shelf stable.  Hell, I bet you have cans of tomato paste right now in your pantry that are over 3 years old and still good.

Industrial production makes money at scale and needs standardization.  It’s the industrial revolution, the Henry Ford production line efficiency.  The equivalent of that in food.

By standardizing and automating and processing and packaging the cost is driven out of the food supply chain.

That’s a good thing right?  Well, yeah, but at some point it also drives all the healthiness out of the food as well and actually drives in the unhealthy aspects of packaged food.

Bottom line.  A bottle of whiskey is worth more and easier to transport than three bags of grain.  Any time the raw material can be transformed, productized, into a package it is more profitable.

The last 100 years have been a constant march towards making cheaper calories, with small consideration to the impact that has on us as humans.  As animals.  As residents in our own world garden.

The constant pressure to make food cheaper drives changes in the ingredients.  Less expensive ingredients that can be mass produced an on industrial scale – like corn sugar.  Standardization of ingredients.  Preservatives as ingredients.

And as a nice added benefit, these are ingredients designed to make us crave that food, like sugar and fats.

We are being farmed.

What is processed food?  Isn’t all food processed?

Basically, anything in a bag or a box or a can in your local market is processed.  Even fresh fruit and vegetables have been industrially bred to produce standardization and profitable attributes.  Those incredibly large a sweet apple varieties and oranges the size of your head have been bred to be that way.

They are pushing your buttons by pushing more of the things you crave into every package.  Sugars and Fats and salt, and then injecting it with preservatives to keep it fresh.

We are programmed to crave more.

We are acclimated so that we don’t even notice that we’re being farmed.

But, that’s ok because they can make even more money selling you health supplements, weight loss gimmicks and insurance sponsored pharmaceuticals.

But, you’re not stupid.

You try to do the right thing.

You read the labels and look for the healthy stuff, right?

Well, unfortunately the food industry is actively marketing to confuse and take advantage of you there too.

You walk down the aisle, concerned about the jiggle in your midsection and think “Here’s a label that says ‘Fresh’” – That’s got to be good right?

What exactly does that mean?  Is there some sort of regulation or definition of “Fresh” – nope.

Means nothing.

That can of tomato paste from 2017 in the back of your pantry is just as ‘fresh’.

How about “Natural” or “All Natural” – Yeah, sorry, means nothing.  You could label napalm ‘all natural’.

How about “Farm Raised” or “Farm Grown”?  Ditto.

There was a lawsuit recently on that one.  Someone went after a factory farm for labeling their eggs “Farm Raised” – and they lost.  Because there is no, zero, nada, zilch regulation around these phrases.

The only one that means anything is ‘Organic’.  That is regulated and means you shouldn’t get pesticides and chemicals.  Depending on how well it’ enforced.

‘Free Range’ – Has a defined regulation as well.  But it is laughably loosely defined.

And, really all these crazy macronutrient labels like “More Protein” or “Essential Vitamins” or “Proven Energy”, or ‘balanced’ or ‘healthy’ or ‘nature’ are throw away marketing terms, just window dressing to take advantage of some perceived trend.

They will continue to label and package to meet whatever it is you think you want to buy.

Don’t get me started on Biotics. Most of those mean nothing as well.  Come on people.

And supplements.  What about supplements?  What about all those low-testosterone ads?  What about those energy boosters?  Those metabolism boosters?  Those weight loss aids?

Unfortunately there are no chemical shortcuts to health.

There is Zero regulation in the supplement industry.  As long as they aren’t actively poisoning people, and that is questionable as well, they can say and package any kind of supplement they want.  It is a $100 billion business.

They are farming your fears.

They are farming your health.

They lean on a bunch of other weaselly phrases and words to ease your doubts.  How about “Clinically tested”.  Shit, I can call my bathroom a clinic and do my ‘verified studies’ in there while I’m at it..  “Proven results” – uh huh…That result could be raging diarrhea, but yeah, we proved it.

Guess what?  There is no silver bullet.

You and I are going to die.  The only proven path to health is exercise and diet.  You can throw in aa dose of decent sleep for fine tuning.  And you can’t smoke, drink or any of those other things that are bad for you.

Losing weight is hard.  Eating healthy is hard.

I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to take back our free will from the packaged food industry.

But I try.

I eat as little packaged food as possible.

I read labels.

A quick thought experiment.

Let me ask you a question.  What should the ingredients of peanut butter be?  If you are in the peanut butter display in your local market and reading labels what should you be looking for?

Peanuts.  That’s it.  If the label says ‘Peanuts’ and nothing else you’ve got a chance.

And sometimes after reading all the labels on the shelf, you have to walk away disappointed.  Because there is no choice.

What should the ingredients in beans be?  Beans.  That’s it.  Beans.

It’s hard.  It costs more.  And most of the time it kinda sucks, but at the end of the day you are in charge of what you buy and what you put in your mouth.

It takes more time.  But maybe there is freedom in that time applied to making and cooking and understanding how the food ‘becomes’?

Maybe you can learn to do that?  To make nutrition part of your mental health as well?

There are people out there who can help you, who know the truth.

You can find them if you look.

You can weed through all the disinformation and find your way back to health.

I know you can.

Because you can do hard things.

Other people won’t.

You can.

Hard things are where the good stuff is.