Summer is over and now we face the holidays when a lot of people generally pig out and promise to go on a diet after the holidays are over. After New Years the dieting begins. Since 95 percent of all diets fail—resulting in rebound weight gain, most dieters end up on several diets before summer.
You have a choice now, to do that again or to try another method. First let’s look at one major reason people who eat factory food are so fat. And many people are fat on normal amounts of food.
A major contributing factor is the chronic exposure to xenoestrogens, substances that have been found to mimic the actions of the hormone estrogen. Xenoestrogens are endocrine disruptors.
Female hormones, estrogens, are present in both sexes, but in larger amounts for women. Estrogens influence puberty, menstruation and pregnancy in women, and regulate the growth of bones, skin, and vital organs and tissues in both men and women.
Xenoestrogens are generated from a number of sources, including heating food in plastic, consuming fruits and vegetables grown with pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers, and consuming meat and dairy products from cows that were fed feed that contains pesticide, herbicide, and chemical fertilizer residues. Chlorine and hormone residues in meats and dairy products can also have estrogenic effects. Factory dairy cows are fed soybeans, which are high in phytoestrogens, which are also estrogen mimickers. The estrogen mimickers xenoestrogens, and phytoestrogens bind to estrogen receptors and have essentially the same effect as natural estrogen, setting up the potential to wreck havoc on reproductive anatomy and physiology, disrupting of endocrine function.
Your endocrine system consists of various glands that produce the hormones that regulate your body. Every metabolic function from growth and development, sexual function, reproductive processes, mood, sleep, hunger, stress, are all regulated and controlled by hormones.
Researchers think that these endocrine-disrupting chemicals referred to as “obesogens”, mimic estrogen and mis-program stem cells to become fat cells and alter the function of genes.
Xenoestrogen obesogens are thought to inappropriately alter lipid (fat) homeostasis (all the metabolic processes that depend on fats and strive for equanimity in the body). Obesogens increase fat storage, change metabolic set points, disrupt energy balance or modify the regulation of appetite and satiety to promote fat accumulation and obesity. The pesticides, chemicals, rBGH dairy, soy, and other toxins in factory food can deliver the estrogen mimickers xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens—obesogens—into your system and keep you fat.
Eating a balanced diet of real, whole, living food is the long term solution to achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight. Even if you’ve been eating factory food your entire life, your body desires to be well. So your choice is to pig out over the holidays, and then diet, diet, diet, and fail before next summer. Or you can stop eating all factory produced food and eat food that you could (in theory) pick, gather, milk, hunt, or fish, and shrink down to your optimal body weight by next summer when the time comes to shop for your next swim suit.
Om Shanti,
Your girlfriend in health,
My blog is dedicated to my Life Mission: Living a happy and fulfilled life, caring about body, mind, and spirit. I hope you come back and read how you can define, explore, and live your Life Mission.
REAL LIFE AS A MOVIE
I could go on about statistics on cancer and other horrible diseases, but we’re all numb, so I won’t.
Even though there’s rampant obesity and disease because of our unnatural diet, we’ve become habituated to the evidence. But if you were to stand back and really look at our state of affairs you’d have to admit that there is something radically wrong with this picture.
Imagine a movie treatment: It’s the dawn of the twenty-first century. The American population is obese and sick, kids are batty, old people are kept alive way past quality of life with cocktails of drugs, crime is rampant, hospitals and prisons are maxed out, the environment is disintegrating, and animal husbandry is regressed to barbarism. These ills are caused by government-supported “evil” CEOs (depicted in lavish digs gorging on gourmet real food, laughing at how stupid their customers are). These CEOs control the food supply with factories that churn out bizarrely chemicalized substances. Ubiquitous seductive mind controlling propaganda keeps the public in line. A handful of rebels unite to fight the CEOs, but the public rebuffs their efforts and chooses to remain fat and complacent, joking and laughing about their science fiction diet.
(People do think their factory food diets are funny.)
The movie is real life. And in real life the food industry uses the media effectively with ploys that make us feel all cuddly about industrialized food. For example, you know who I think is really cute? The Pillsbury Doughboy. I think his little giggle is adorable. I’m sure that you all have your favs too.
Then there is science. This is a huge factor in getting us to eat the chemicalized substances. Scientific truth is so distorted in TV ads that many people actually believe that, for example Chocolate Cheerios are healthy. People still think that margarine and aspartame are healthy. Maybe if they played “Please allow me to introduce myself ” on TV commercials? No, probably not. People would just think it was cool.
What if factory food packaging featured skulls and crossbones and devils with pitchforks, or scenes from Hieronymus Bosch paintings with freaks being tortured by demons? Hmmm, probably not either, because now disgusting is really in and that cereal would probably be the most popular.
What about our Surgeon General? Well, the truth is that she’s overweight. If you log onto her page, she has a video talking about shifting the focus from “weight” to being healthy and fit. I’m confused, because I thought being healthy and fit included having an ideal body composition. I guess we’re lowering the bar again.
In a truthful world, the Surgeon General’s warning on factory foods would read: “This product is highly addicting and contains substances that are carcinogenic, neurologically damaging and toxic, which increase your risk for endocrine and neurological problems, allergies, asthma, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, cancer and violent death.”
But it’s not a truthful world, so you’re not likely to see any labels like that.
We also have celebrity doctors and gurus telling us what to eat and what not to eat. The fact is a good writer can make any doctor into a diet guru, a “leading authority” or “cutting edge expert.” Writers, media trainers and publicists analyze what the spokesperson has to offer, then spin and finesse that message, eventually handing the spokesperson a gripping platform, a passion, a crusade. The team boils down the newly hatched propaganda into sound bites that are cleverly designed to stick in your head as gems of truth. Makeup artists, hair and wardrobe stylists, expert lighting and cinematography can turn an unattractive nobody into a gorgeous hunk. All of this management results in the outward trappings of a guru who you can trust—and the title of M.D. or Ph.D. will give him or her the necessary credibility.
In addition to celebrity doctors, your basic garden-variety celebrities also contribute to our bad health by posing as authorities on various aspects of our health.
Come to think of it, the situation is really much more dire than the movie treatment above. The truth about food, diets, and drugs is stranger than fiction. You can’t make this stuff up.
Getting healthy requires getting educated about food, diets, drugs. I hope you’ll get educated, because getting healthy is such a fun ride. I know you’re going to love it.
Om Shanti,