You Are What You Eat
T-POST® #105
Sold out!
I consider myself a pretty healthy guy, and I thought I was eating well my whole life, but according to studies of today, I wasn’t. I was fed by my loving parents, and cleaning my plate each night was an easy task. But now that I have my own kids I have to feed, I’m being told that a lot of the food I grew up on was terrible. I guess it’s a mystery how I’m still alive…
We live in a day and age where the phrase, “You are what you eat” is really at the forefront, and if you don’t eat right, you’re a dirtbag. If you have kids and your kids don’t eat right, you’re a dirtbag and a fucken criminal. What does eating right really entail?
No trans fats. No hydrogenated oils. No GMO’s. No high fructose corn syrup. No Olestra. Everything needs to be gluten-free... I have no idea what any of these things are, but I do know that if any of this shit is in anything you are eating, your supposedly hurting your body.
Even though food has changed since the caveman days, our bodies really haven’t. But along came agriculture and then the industrial revolution, and with it, man-made chemicals made their way into our kitchens. It’s easy to understand that any ingredients that are man-made, like MSG or BHT or food dyes, are not great. It seems pretty logical. And with more investigation, we’re finding out that many foods considered healthy and
...if you don’t eat right, you’re a dirtbag. If you have kids and your kids don’t eat right, you’re a dirtbag and a fucken criminal.
labeled as natural contain many harmful chemicals used as food preservatives and flavor enhancers, which are often disguised under unrecognizable names.
So basically, you can’t just go to the local supermarket anymore and buy packaged shit. Unless your in a low-income neighborhood, these places don’t really even exist. We now have green/farmer’s markets on weekends where local farmers bring there goods to us for sale on the city streets, or
specialty/gourmet supermarkets that sell organic only. And eating organic goes without saying. If anyone is caught eating anything not raised in this manner, whether it’s a fruit, vegetable, of something from an animal that wasn’t raised eating organic, you seem unintelligent.
What sucks is that organic stuff costs twice the amount of money and is usually half the size. It’s expensive being healthy... The reason obesity is more of an issue with the less fortunate.
Atkins diet. Dukan diet. South Beach diet. Going vegan, or raw, or paleo... These are all ways of feeding yourself which require omitting even more things out of your diet not listed above. With all the choices we have now, I think in general, people are trying to simplify there eating habits altogether. Some eat no meat. Some eat only meat. And some just want to bring it back to how people ate when humans first existed.
For me, at my age, no one is really going to tell me something I don’t know about my body. No matter what the studies say, I know that certain foods don’t agree with me as much as others and cause things to happen in my body that I don’t dig, so I stay away from them. If you tell me some rash I just got for the first time came from eating pizza with gluten in it, I’m probably not going to stop eating pizza or anything with gluten in it. Because I know that after all these years, gluten is not my problem, or else I would have had a rash my whole life, right? All these things that people now say are bad about our foods are probably true, since we have science to prove most of it, but eliminating a lot of it may not be the end all answer to some of the issues we may be having, and having to cut out foods you loved since you where born, or even worse, a whole food group, seems a little drastic to me.
And it’s not like your eating rat poison or something if you decide to enjoy a bowl of Fruit Loops, but the feeling I get when I have to purchase a box of colorful cereal and bring it up to the counter to pay, is the same feeling I had as a teenager buying condoms... It’s embarrassing. Do you know how many times when I’m preparing my kids a school lunch of prosciutto with fresh mozzarella, an organic plum, and a granola bar, that I want to throw in an Oreo cookie or a few chips, but can’t, because I’m afraid a teacher or parent will start to badmouth my wife and I, or give us dirty looks when we pick up our kids? Long gone are the days of any good snacks in your school lunch unless mommy hand baked that shit with organic flour, almond milk, and cage free eggs.
It’s work eating right in the new millennium. Cavemen had to fight and struggle to find enough food to live. And we have to fight and struggle to not eat everything in our paths each day... Go figure.
Words: Tony Arcabascio
Design: Peter Lundgren
Model: Maria Olofsson
[1,62 cm tall, wearing mens S]
