The Daily Olympics of Life
May 3rd, 2010 // 10:00 pm @ admin
Article from The Special Food Groups — MagEzine
I am a husband still deeply in love with my wife, Treena, after fifty-four years of marriage. During this time she has endured 10 major operations, coronary heart disease, a triple heart bypass delayed for 19 years, Type 2 Diabetes (26 years non-insulin dependent) and hypertension. She also suffered a stroke in 1987. Treena is now 12 years older than her oldest parent’s age at
death. She is active with a 6.1 Alc (a drop from 11.8) with good vital signs at almost 76 years of age.
I’ve cooked for her and been her coach and encourager over all these years. I cooked 24,000 meals that were “over-the-top” gourmet and 18,000 became “remedial.” In other words, in those 24,000 “over the top” meals I played to her senses as I did to mine as the “Galloping Gourmet” on my TV series in early 1970’s. Then, for the “remedial” meals focused upon maximizing
flavors and minimizing risks for both our family and hopefully now, for you! It is with that same understanding and indeed passion that I write today.
All of what I say is meant for individual consumers. I’m really never over-impressed by an “average” person. In fact I doubt that I’ve ever met one. Average is a statistic not a person. Obviously I don’t know all of your unique needs and preferences, but what I can do as a direct result from my life experience with food of all kinds over the past 60 years, is pass along some of that experience. If it seems to fit, could you wind up searching for your very own unique solution?
I’ve used the title “Daily Olympics of Life” because I’m convinced that living a full, healthy “abundant” life takes the daily discipline of a world class athlete simply to avoid the toxic consequences of being alive in our “opportunistic” culture. If Olympics sounds too vigorous, please relax. I’m only proposing the Olympic discipline as an attitude, not as a physical challenge! Well, perhaps, just a little, but certainly not world class!
Connecting the dots
Let’s review how we’ve become a sickened people, increasingly prone to chronic disease that lowers the quality of our lives. I have seven points to make. If you think any one of them may apply to you or your loved ones, please decide to seek out creative alternatives. It’s never too late to start!
Portion Sizes: Over the past 15-18 years portions have grown to the extent that buying/ordering simple day to day goods like cookies, cola’s, doughnuts, burgers, fries, etc., etc. as single servings now total 900-1,200 calories more than they did in the 1980/1990’s. We must find ways to choose smaller portions.
One Solution? Treena and I now order the same single dish and split it. We ask about portion size first and offer to pay for additional vegetables.
Plant Foods: Only 26% of us even try to get 5 fruits and vegetable servings a day. Recent trails from Omni Heart suggest that 11 servings may be optimal for overall health.
One Solution? Keep a record in your diary of your consumption and think up ways to include fruit and vegetables in every meal of the day, including snacks.
Planning Ahead: According to the Food Manufacturing Institutes (FMI) 74% of us, at 4:00 pm in the afternoon have no idea what we will be eating for dinner that night. Knowing this, it is obvious that Home Meal Replacement (HMR) foods target this lack of advanced planning with a massive variety of convenience foods that may be poorly constructed from a nutritional point of
view.
One Solution? Again, use our daily diary and write in a week ahead, at least three meals you intend to cook from scratch over the next seven days.
Peace at the Table: We have turned our mealtimes in to media times. We sit down to eat and watch TV, listen to radio, surf the web, read a book or Kindle! We’ve turned the table into a trampoline, bouncing off it to do something more important than eating and relating.
One Solution? Go back to the meal “hour” and do your utmost to engage in a positive non-business conversation with other people. Take the time to digest the food and enjoy the company. Then what you eat becomes much more important than a NASCAR refueling pit stop!
Physical Stamina: If an advertisement doesn’t claim to save you money or time, it’s going to trumpet the fact that it is “labor-saving”! We’ve had so much labor saved that we’ve lost our stamina. We can start a task with some enthusiasm but we tend to tire easily and wind up exhausted by the effort and sometimes dissatisfied by the result.
One Solution? Find some useful work where we need to labor. Grow an edible garden, or help others with theirs. Offer your services to a local organic farmer and barter your hours for their produce. Why pay to exercise when you can get a really good return for your time and effort?
Pharmaceuticals vs. Choices: We are living longer. That much is true. What is helping us to do so are medical interventions that always include medications sometimes to be taken for the duration of our lives. Wonderful and we should be grateful. However, we must be careful not to turn our lives over to medications and their inevitable side effects for many people.
One Solution? Find out exactly what the medication is designed to do and ask if there is anything you can do to even slightly reduce the dose and its side effects. We should not use medications to permit unwise habits to continue to do harm in less obvious ways.
People In Need: Over the years we have seen an increasing number of well-meaning charities using some rather obvious marketing techniques to generate cash flow for their work. Unfortunately the more “professional” the plea, the more resistant we become to the simple message. “Please help us to help them.” So much so that many of us are inclined to shut ourselves off from our neighbors-in-need. Indifference to those left out in the normal distribution of foods and services is very short sighted behavior that almost always breeds a fear of an uncertain future in our apparently unresponsive communities.
One Solution? Get to know your immediate neighbors. Offer to help if you see a need. Also find an international cause; focus on one small element and then keep on giving until that single work has been well done. “Do a small thing and do it well until it’s done.”
I’ve given seven solutions for seven needs. Just imagine what could happen if you were to share your individual solutions with just one neighbor, or with your local neighbors on the Web? Before long we could all benefit and our world become a much better place.
*photo by Tambako
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