Living in Bliss, not what I miss

I don't eat meat very much anymore. In the last year, I've probably eaten meat only a hand full of times. Beef once, they knew the cow, organically raised, grass fed. Sushi a couple of times, and random other fish dishes through out the year. Someone warned me about what might happen, if I cut meat out of my diet. I might actually feel better, about myself, about life in general, about the world around me. You know, they were right. I cut meat, sugar, butter, all other dairy, and processed food almost a whole year ago. I think August 23, or 24th was the last time I had fast food. I came home, found a book called Healing with Whole Foods, and it changed my whole perspective about eating. From human garbage disposer. Eating almost anything, and ending a meal, only after every speck of food was eaten, to eating nothing but whole grains, and leafy green vegetables with maybe a little olive or flax seed oil. Don't you know, I haven't yearned for meat since. I grew up on an american diet. Meat, then carbs, whether white rice, or pasta, and a vegetable. Four major food groups, and maybe a discussion about a food pyramid, but only to include dessert and milk. Growing up, I drank a gallon of milk, every day and a half to two days. My parents buying four gallons of milk a week, my mom adding a bit to her tea in the morning, and my dad, if he had cereal. That left 14 cups of a cows teat for me. Invariably, and this was most of high school, I would also eat the majority of a pound of pasta for dinner. Pork chops, hamburgers, chicken (baked, fried, diced, cubed, sauteed, stir-fried, it didn't matter) were all staples in my digestive workings. Oh, and invariably, I was eating close to a pint of ice cream for dessert, every evening. Wonder what my arteries were handling, cause my belly never got any bigger. Guess it didn't need to. ;-) My parents went on weight watchers when I was 8. So everything in our house was low calorie, low fat. We always had fresh vegetables, unless my sister or I was cooking dinner, and even then, we were usually making a salad, to help sift all that meat through our intestines. But I had only flirted with being vegetarian for a week (I was 15), and that quickly became just red meat, and then fattened up to anything as our family went on a camping trip and the bar-b-q made up for lost appetites before. Well, sometimes things just work out as easily as they appear. I started reading this book, and it all made sense. The gist was, basically, if you put in the building blocks your body needs, you won't be hungry later. Standard american diet of meat potatoes and veggies was based on a study done years ago that mapped out 10 amino acids needed, oh wait, for the diet of a rat. Mama's breast milk has eight and those eight can be found in any variety of organic whole grains. So I slept on it, and pretty much the next day, went from cookies, chicken, white pasta and bread, to like I said organic whole grains, and leafy green vegetables. My goal, to keep it up for 6 months, flush my system. Remove excess mucus, which builds up in our intestines especially because of dairy and meat, and see how I feel. I went for a week, without any fat. Man, that turned into a big headache, and I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized I wasn't putting but a tablespoon worth of olive oil in my rice for dinner (organic brown rice, has an essential complex of magnesium and other nutrients necessary for calcium absorption). So, I went to my local grocer and bought a bottle of flax seed oil. It was like 15 dollars. But instead of meat, it was worth the price. I ate a cup and a half of oats every morning, with a dollop of raw honey (raw honey has enzymes and nutrients that are anti-viral, anti-biotic, full of life giving essentials that pasteurized honey lacks). For lunch, I was eating a cup or two of brown rice with steamed basil, mung bean sprouts, spinach, broccoli and baby carrots. And for dinner something very similar. Don't you know, three weeks into this, I felt better like a million bucks. I mean, better than I ever have for as long as I can remember. At the time, I was going through some really unnecessary things. My son's mom had left him with me because of a fight between the two of us. All of my friends and family were out of town on vacation, so I couldn't find anytime to work. And on top of it all, the woman I was in love with, had managed to slip in and break my heart. Man, it was scene for disaster, and I knew I was at a fork in the road. I had three things to help me get better and I had three things to make me go under. Only the path of less resistance did I make the right decision. I remember thinking, the only way for me to really get into this and do it, was to allow myself to eat anything I wanted. If I feel like eating meat, I can allow myself, if I want a cookie, I'll have a cookie. I know that what I'm reading will allow me to be able to eat exactly what my body needs, but a discipline is only accomplished with tolerance and flexibility. At least, that was my out, if I wanted it. And for 6 months straight, from the beginning of September to the end of March, I only had meat once, and that was a shrimp in an egg roll, I was not expecting to have meat in it. One tiny shrimp in 6 months was a big change from meat every night at dinner, like any good American house hold. Not having any dairy in my diet, meant I didn't have to battle any colds this past winter. Having only grains and veggies in my belly meant that my meals could be absorbed into my blood stream as soon as I ate them. Meats can take up to three days in our intestines, before the nutrients can be fully absorbed, and even then they say we have an excess of 15 pounds of undigested protein in our belly at any given time. EWWWW!!! What the fuck is the meat packing industry thinking? "That and I want it preserved so when we cut out of you, we can sell it again?" Thank you, but let's leave the feed lots alone and start raising more pastures, so our cows can walk and munch like they were made to. Basically I went from the pharmaceutical industry of food, that most of us have no idea about, to the I'm raised off of the nutrients of mother earth, who supplies my immune system with everything my body needs to be healthy, side of things. Which, ironically, is the only way we're liable to survive as a species and a planet. The food industry like all other industries is run to produce. The theory being the more product, the more money it makes. Our bodies thrive differently. The higher quality, more nutritious the food, the smaller we chew it up, the better we absorb and the more we use the food to rebuild and maintain our whole being. The meat industry has a policy of "as long as we can cram 'em in, we'll cram 'em in, till the doors don't shut" form of raising livestock, which supplements millions to pharmaceutical companies to keep down epidemics of disease and nutrition deficiency, and has been in-breeding the same genetic lines for so long that their DNA is making people's cells deficient and leaking dimensia into the populace. In olden times of living off the land, meat was a luxury. One might kill one cow for the year, smoke it, and store it for special occasions. Thank you Christmas ham. Grains supplement a majority of the protein we needed to survive and trace nutrients in the whole grains allowed our bones to stay strong and our immune system to ward off infections more readily. As the population of the country and then the world began to increase and become more condensed in cities. The ability to mass produce and then store larger quantities of food became a necessity. The advent of processing foods for storage entered the food industry and white flour and canned goods replaced the open market and farm to table way things were. Huge epidemics of nutrient strapped illness spread across the country and instead of famine because of lack of food, famine because of low quality food was introduced to the populace. Systematically, causes were singled out of individual crises, but production was always dominant over quality. Instead of making more whole wheat. We enriched white flour with niacin and iron, not realizing that even more trace nutrients, including magnesium were being removed from our diet. Instead of finding protein in gluten, our bodies were breaking the flour down into simple sugars, which would give us a boost of energy, but were stripping our bodies of nutrients we would rather utilize for absorption. Our digestive systems over the last 100 years have been over taxed and abused to such an extent that no matter how much food we eat, we can't get enough nutrients to supplement our bodies rejuvenation. We eat more calcium, maybe even more than ten times as much as people from the earth farm cultures, and have epidemic rates of osteoporosis, tooth decay, and bone loss. It's not the calcium that's the issue, it's little things like magnesium which open up the calcium ducts in our cells and bones, so that we may absorb the calcium in our bones. We have more free-floating calcium running through our bodies, but without the magnesium, the calcium is solidifying in our kidneys and gull bladders and skin, not in our bones. White sugar, having all the potassium, and other trace nutrients removed, does nothing but bond itself to our brain cells, affecting and slowing synapse firing and keeping our brains from working on a level that is necessary for healthy living. Yet, is so addictive that that rush we get is more enjoyable than keeping our train of thought, or just thinking clearly. This is why the whole food movement and organic farming, sustainable living movements are so important. It may seem to cost more at first, depending on where you get your produce. It may seem like it's not as pretty as our Genetically Modified, Sterile counter parts. But what it lacks in appearance, the more you taste organic, whole foods, the more you will begin to appreciate the taste and strength of organic living. Hope you have a great day and enjoy a fresh organic peach, their delicious this time of year. Peace.