For some, eating is a passive action. For many Americans, eating involves the fastest and cheapest way to get the stomach grumbles to stop and to keep the action of their life going. I was once just like this, like the majority of Americans. I ate Taco Bell several times a week, and I got Steak N' Shake milkshakes every night of the Summer. I put rooster sauce sriracha on everything, and I found chips and salsa to be a perfectly acceptable meal three times a day.
Then, I got sick. By sick, I mean chronically sick, and no one knew the answer to my problems. Finally, I decided to take it upon myself to end my daily sufferings.
It started with soda. At one time I was drinking around 3 cans of coke a day. I quit everything that wasn't water. That was the easiest part for me. The harder part was quitting spicy food. I loved taco bell, chips and salsa, Sriracha, and basically any food that was red or orange. I enjoyed having the identity of being someone who could eat foods so spicy other people would cry. I felt like I was losing a part of myself when I gave up being the woman in my group of friends who could eat the spiciest foods.
It was time for me to find a new food identity. I used social media and blogs to assist me in my transition. What started as me giving up a few unhealthy eating habits turned into me becoming health crazed. There is no one in my life who is health crazy, and almost everyone I surround myself had similar dietary habits. It was the people of the internet that I found I could turn to in my time of transitioning. I started reading blogs and research articles, I made lists and started sharing with my friends about the things I had learned. The biggest thing that I learned was that the media and food brands had been hiding from me that everything I was putting into my body was toxic, and everything I was eating because I thought it was healthy for me was in actuality quite the opposite.
For instance, vegetable oil sounds healthy right? It has the word vegetable in it! Vegetable oil is in a LOT of processed food and it is very bad for you. Butter sounds unhealthy, right? Actually, butter is good for you in small amounts, it is margarine and vegetable oil spread which are actually bad for you. When I found out butter was better for you than margarine, I went to buy butter and even some of the brands that said "Organic butter" on the front DID NOT HAVE BUTTER IN THEM. Food brands can be incredibly misleading. I have a 3 page extensive list of all of the things I have now read the research on and had to change about the way I eat.
Since I have changed I have lost 15 pounds. I have stopped having incredible pain. I started to gain control of my life again. I do not know if it was my diet that made me sick, but I do know that adjusting my diet made me feel a lot better. I feel like a healthier person overall now that I have a healthier food identity, and I am a lot more likely to be interested in other healthy activities than I used to be.
The information is out there, but when your main influences are commercials and your friends (and your friends are exposed to the same media as you), it is really hard to get out of the cycle and out of the negative influence. We live in a fast food, tv-dinner time society, but I hope that we as a society can get back to cooked family dinners like I used to have before I was 8 years old. While I believe that a lot of the influence about our food comes from the media, I really think that with the internet and social media we as individuals have the power to overcome that influence. All you have to do is ask yourself, what are the ingredients in what I am eating? If the answer is "I don't know" you should probably not be eating it. If the answer is there research it, the internet has plenty of dietitians and doctors who will tell you whether or not it is something you should be ingesting, and how often you should be ingesting it.
The media can have a strong negative influence on us, but we can also use it as a powerful tool for positive change, all it takes is a little bit of effort. If you read this know that you can contact me and I will more than be willing to support you in your venture to become a healthy eater, and also know that there are a lot of other bloggers and health officials on the internet who would do the same.
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