Food Slippery Slope

For those of us aiming to live healthfully, we face a formidable challenge daily. Yet this health hazard comes from something we must have and can’t avoid: food! For foods have transformed from nutritious, natural products to ones acknowledged by health experts as ongoing public health risks. The availability of food tilts heavily towards unhealthy processed products, containing food additives, salts, sugars and fats. As an example, yogurt started out as a health food, simply prepared through fermentation. Now, it has transformed into something in a tube, full of sugar and additives. This preponderance of unhealthful food in our society poses a problem for people wanting to eat well, as eating healthy can at times seem radical and anti-social. When I travel through mainstream grocery stores and fast food restaurants, I feel like a stranger in a strange land! If I haven’t prepared myself properly for travel, finding healthy food is akin to finding water in a desert: either you bring it with you or you may find yourself very thirsty or drinking from questionable water holes.

Especially when the effects of a poor diet may not make themselves felt for decades, it might be hard to see why it’s such a big deal to eat certain types of food offered to us. It becomes all too easy to rationalize just a ‘little bit of this’ and a ‘little bit of that’ when we’re presented with some unhealthier fare. We don’t want to appear difficult, rejecting others’ food they have often spent time preparing, or needing to look elsewhere for a meal. Additionally, it can be tiring to focus all the time on eating good food, as we don’t want to make this the be all and end all of our lives. So eating cake at the office party, or a little candy bar or soda in the afternoon becomes justified, and this may be OK if done sparingly. However, this can start us on a slippery slope, as we may find ourselves eating nothing but questionable foods without too much trouble! This issue becomes larger as we look at the number of times we find ourselves eating foods we know we shouldn’t. Our society as a whole has a terrible diet, so these foods present themselves everywhere, at all times. It becomes all too easy to eat what we see in front of us every day, ending up with a diet we know isn’t good for us.

So when do we start refusing/creating alternatives to these poor options? It takes time and energy to eat well, to eat natural foods low in fat, sugars and salts, so we must make a conscious choice to move in a new direction. We need to be aware of our routines, our old associations with foods, our old desires, to challenge these and start creating new, healthier patterns of eating. Through awareness, we can see many of our ingrained responses to particular foods (must dessert follow every dinner?) and then decide to choose differently. Equally as important, as we move towards a healthier lifestyle, we can notice our body respond to certain foods in various ways: some foods will make us feel light and energetic, while other foods (even if we like how they taste) will cause us to fall into a stupor for several hours! We always face this slippery slope towards a poor diet, but with awareness we can more easily see (and literally feel) the effects of both healthy and unhealthy foods. This certainly makes the choice of eating well much easier.