An Awakening: Food as Fuel.....The Beginning

It started simple enough: get rid of cable.  The reasons were sound: We didn’t frequently watch television; it was more often background noise than intentional entertainment, it costs way too much for the quality of programming, and it costs too much for a single mom raising four boys.  So I called the cable company and had them remove cable from my cable/phone/internet bundle.  Saved myself $65.00 per month.  Fast forward past the anger I felt at having spent an extra $65.00 per month on crappy cable.  I’m mostly over that now and just thankful that I get to keep that extra money in my pocket next month.

Then a funny thing happened.  I wanted to watch TV.  I just wanted to chill out on the couch while the boys were gone and just watch some TV.  No cable.  Hmmmmm. 

No worries.  Netflix to the rescue.   I loaded up Netflix and watched a documentary called “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”.  That is when things started happening in my brain.  Things I was not expecting.  See, I have been dipping my toes in the healthier lifestyle waters for several months now.  I got started using Young Living essential oils.  I am systematically replacing all of the toxic cleaners, soaps, toothpaste, face creams, shampoo, etc. in our home with non-toxic solutions.  I feel pretty darn good and the sick day that my oldest son had in early February – before I started using essential oils – was the final sick day of the school year.  None of my four boys missed school due to illness for the remainder of February, or all of March, April or May.  We do not take prescription or over-the-counter medications anymore.  Ever.   We are building a healthier lifestyle one small change at a time.

BUT, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that while all that was happening we were still eating mostly the same way we had been: microwaveable crap, put it in a bowl and pour some milk over it crap, shockingly orange cheese mix in a box of noodles crap.  You get the idea.  I will even admit to eating cheese flavored crackers straight out of the box for dinner on more than one occasion.

So, small changes were happening.  And they were all important.  Toxins in the form of chemical cleaners for our home and body were being phased out and toxins in the form of medications were gone.  But as I Netflixed that day, I realized that there is so much more toxicity in our lives that I had failed to consciously recognize; I was awakened to what I already knew to be true but had been hiding from myself.  Processed and convenient food are turning us into addicts (sugar), increasing our risks for every single disease known to man (especially the ones I call man-made diseases; you know, those conditions that didn’t even exist in our parents’ generation), influencing our behavior choices on a regular basis, and making us overall feel just good enough to make it grudgingly through each day.  Small changes were helping, definitely; but I wasn’t addressing our entire lifestyle, just the parts that were convenient.

I don’t want that.  I don’t want it for myself and I certainly don’t want it for my children.  And I don’t want it for you either.  So over the next several days I continued to watch various documentaries with the consistent theme being food, the food industry, and what is happening in our cultures to food and what food once meant to people.  I armed myself with knowledge.  I got online and did some research.  If you have ever researched anything online you know that there are multiple views on every facet of every subject and it can be difficult to find truth in much of what is published.  So I used my own intellect, my own experiences, and my own gut feelings as a compass while sorting through all of this contradictory information. 

What I came up with in the end is this:  I am the mother of four children.  I want to see them graduate college, get married, have babies, be successful in life.  I want to be there to help them put the pieces back together when it all falls apart.  Because it will - It does for everyone.  I want to live and be all of the things that I should be as their mom.  And at this moment, their health is almost entirely dependent on me.  If I buy the donuts at the grocery store, they will eat them.  If I buy apples and carrots at the grocery store, they will eat those.  I am the adult.  I am responsible.  And it is about time I started taking the responsibility seriously.  I can’t look myself in the mirror and rationalize cereal for dinner because I felt tired that day anymore.  I can’t use the balm of a busy day to make me feel better about “cooking” dinner for my family by boiling some noodles and dropping death-by-chemical-orange cheese on them and serving it up hot.  I just can’t.

So it is time to be intentional about food.  It is time to respect it for what it is: necessary fuel to keep our bodies running optimally.  It is time to quit pretending it is some sort of emotional salve for the busy days, the sad times, the laziness, and the empty feelings that we all have some days.  It is time to be real and to put real food in this house for my real family.

So, things are changing.  I am taking information I have learned from multiple sources, including my own common sense and experiences with what works, and shifting the food paradigm around here.  This program I’m piecing together doesn’t yet have a name.  But it does have a purpose: clean out our systems, our pantry, our refrigerator, and most importantly our thinking; and replace it all with knowledge, positive changes in behavior, and good, real fuel. 

This is not a box set that someone created in a lab, put in a pretty box and sold to me to “change my life for only $5 a day!”  No, this is me and my family using what God gave us to live the way God intended: healthy and abundant.  Our bodies are an intelligent, self-healing design and only our own personal choices can cause their breakdown. 

I will be recording the process in two places: here on my blog and in a Facebook group, which can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/655371001286024/

Or you can search An Awakening: Food as Fuel on Facebook and join the group to see all the posts, trials, errors, and progress of this journey.  Perhaps we can even start a dialogue there and trade ideas and stories. 

Care to go on a journey with the boys and me and see what we can accomplish? 

This will be fun!