It occurred to me that lots of people don’t know very well how to choose food, not acknowledging that even though all of us don’t necessarily get fat off such food, what’s certain is that all of us will build a pretty unhealthy stash of LDL and other wrong things by the time we hit 50. Perhaps it’s simply out of ignorance of what’s good and what’s not; most often though, I suspect it’s just due to habits and/or education.
I’ll stand first on the line of bad eaters, and I’m willing to admit it. Goodness, I so know them, these overly-processed, full-of-added-sugar foods that our poor organism aren’t exactly cut to use correctly. I actually like them. I actually like having meals at McDonald’s, these golden potatoes in their little red boxes, the fried chicken and the Big Macs. I actually like having pizza for lunch and pancakes or waffles for dinner. It is easy. It is comforting. It is sweet and it is something I like. Yet, I know it’s good neither for my health nor for my weight.
When I was younger, we never had lots of vegetables at home, but there were always cheap sodas and packs of cookies for when we would get hungry between meals. Come to think of it, these pangs of hunger, probably we wouldn’t have felt them, had we eaten in a healthier way; these days, I can live off a big mixed salad for the next four hours without even considering a snack, and it doesn’t give me much of a caloric intake in itself. For us, this was pretty much the serpent biting its own tail; in some ways, hadn’t it been for the sodas, cookies and other snacks, perhaps we could have afforded, if only at times, the vegetables and meat that our meals were so poor in. It’s a choice, yes. It can be a tough choice, renouncing to foods we like, even though they’re unhealthy. I however wish that we had made this choice at the time.
Let’s think about it for a moment. Are various sodas so essential to our lives, not from time to time only, but weekly, daily, even several times a day? Can’t we snack on a kiwi or two rather than on a half-pack of cookies? It’s a bit of a vicious circle situation, really; you get used to these foods because they’re convenient, and then you get to like them too, because you eat them so often. My only opportunities at a more appropriate kind of meals - at school, where I was staying for lunch and where we actually had school dieteticians compose our meals - were often blown up by no other than myself, who “didn’t like veggies”. It’s stupid. It’s childish. What’s worse is that it doesn’t necessarily wear off with age.
I believe in personal tastes and personal choices, and I also believe in learning how to eat, because at times, we can be just terribly obtuses about these things. Everyone has surely noticed how many little children say that they don’t like a certain food without even having tasted it; well, I’ve been a little child for very long, and it was high time that I gave a try at making things change. I probably won’t stop liking pizzas and waffles, sure, but I can learn to like more of the healthier foods. I don’t want to remain a child, afraid of tasting unknown foods and desperately clutching what I know only in fear of change.
I can still remember something my mother said, not so long ago. She always used to like black coffee, just like my father, just like myself. Nowadays, though, she keeps on enhancing it with sugar or aspartame, saying that the taste just “isn’t the same anymore” without it. I agree that some coffees really aren’t tasty at all, but if one’s taste can change so drastically in one direction, why would it seem so impossible that it could also be reversed, changed in another direction? I used to dislike skim milk, as I’ve been drinking half-skim since my childhood; I however tried to have more of it, in the past weeks, and now it doesn’t seem so horrible anymore. In fact, it’s quite tasty, and now I slowly start to feel like half-skim is a bit “too much” for me.
Habits and behavior patterns are hard to break, though. We’re used to our processed, junk foods, to our McDonald’s, to the tacos, pretzels and whatever else with stuff our bodies with. We however need to understand that it’s not about forcing ourselves to always eat foods that we deeply dislike; this would be unbearable, and we would throw the towel more or less quickly anyway. Simply, our bodies can be highly adaptable, especially to what’s they’re actually meant to eat, and among the wide variety of vegetables, fruits, meat, fish and grains, it seems impossible that there aren’t at least a few of them that a person could like. And then, in the end, we one day realize that after one or two days without junk foods, we already feel better.
That’s what I’ve learnt, and am now trying to apply to my everyday life. That’s what we should all remember: that we’re biologically meant to eat normal foods - not junk foods.
- Kery
