If I winged a nutrition sermon at a church in TN
(I began writing this last week.)
I froze my ass off last night on a farm in Tennessee. It was $10 to camp!
The night dropped to the low 20s (Fahrenheit) and I tell ya I did a much better job swaddling Maggie in blankets than I did myself. A short time before dawn, I decided to turn it in and pack up, deciding to dry the frosty moisture off the tent in some parking lot down the road.
The benefit to this, however, was the glorious sights of Tennessee farmland amid the pink light of the just-rising sun.
I’m writing this on the app and don’t see that I can put photos on.
Down that dusty pink road, I saw two signs in quick succession:
One, in someone’s yard, advertised:
“Grass-Fed Beef!
1 lb - 1000 lbs!”
And just a few yards later, a church sign advertised:
“What Foods to Eat!”
Evidently some nutritional sermon or offering they were offering the community and congregation.
As I enjoy making up spontaneous speeches on everything, I thought quickly that were I a speaker at the nutrition event, being brought in my limo obviously, and saw the beef sign down the road, I would use that as my spark to begin riffing.
I’d say,
“You know, a few doors down from here I passed a sign in someone’s yard...
That said they have grass-fed beef for sale. You can buy a pound or you can buy a whole damn cow. And maybe share with your neighbors.
And I thought, what else do you need to know about nutrition than where to get it locally, full of nature’s gifts?
Now I’m not gonna sit here and tell you what to eat too much. I know, I’m sorry if that’s what you came here for.
I want to tell you a few stories instead.
The first is about the Aborigines. The indigenous people of Australia. Lived there forever.
When colonists and explorers from other lands came to Australia for the first time with all of their ideas about telling you and me and the native Aborigines how to live better they made notes about how poor the people were, because they ate bugs.
Haha - I know. To our palates that does sound like they might be pretty poor.
But if you ever look up photos of the indigenous Aborigines back in the early 1900s so before modernization took hold too much, you will find photos from a guy named Weston A. Price, a dentist who went around the world recording native diets and health markers.
These photos are stunning. Like I said, you can look it up - “Weston Price aborigines” and you’ll find them. They show these men standing there with incredible posture just beefed out to hell, but not in that fake steroid way but in usable muscle - these guys were still hunting most of their food you see.
And the people coming in decided they were poor because they ate what made sense and was local to them, and also because they didn’t hoard and didn’t keep a lot of stuff around because when you’re moving after food sources from God’s green earth it’s best to pack light and share with one another.
You’ve probably been fed some ideas that what man has created in a factory is better food for you than what your ancestors grew up eating.
Maybe you’ve heard that butter and beef are bad for you, but you might not know about all the lobbying money that went behind that, especially from the sugar industry that wanted to blame something else for rising obesity in the US and had(has) deep pockets.
Maybe you’ve even heard that you need to eat more vegetables, and that veggies are the healthiest things on earth. And maybe they are. But how often do you crave veggies?
This may be controversial but there’s a lot of vegans that eat meat when they’re drunk and not a lot of people on a carnivore diet that go running to the produce section when they are.
Maybe you do need vegetables.
I’m here to point out a few reasons why you might not even be sure of what’s good for you any more.
I’m sorry - mom and dad - (and I would look churlishly to the sky as I said that) but you kind of messed up my ability to tell what’s good for me.
How many of you had to sit at the table until you finished your spinach? (Points for show of hands) or maybe it wasn’t spinach but something else. My dad was forced to finish a T-bone steak on Sundays that he hated and still wonders why they didn’t just save the money and give him hamburger instead.
You were taught to ignore what it felt like to be done eating in your own body. The term for that is satiety - indicating satisfaction and fullness. Higher fat foods that aren’t processed tend to give this feeling more. Meaning you actually get full off of steak without overeating but not off fatty French fries.
Probably this divorcing from your senses also happened with hunger, too. You had to sit down and eat with the family whether you wanted food or not. Are there benefits to that? Sure. Is it impossible to parent perfectly? Yes. So I’m sorry. But making someone eat when they’re not hungry or to wait to eat when they are can divorce from a sense of internal knowing. So can diapers. But that’s another story.
I’ll tell you that I know I don’t always eat when I’m hungry. I eat when I’m sad or when I’m stressed or when I’m bored. And that’s ok. I’m not bad for doing that.
But it helps to know why I’m doing it.
When I have really good company around I barely notice I have a smart phone with all the little bells and apps vying for my attention.
But that same phone can suck me in forever if I let it other times. Why?
I started to figure it out by writing down in my notes app every time I reached for Instagram without thinking about it. I wrote what I was thinking or feeling at the time. And this is still the best way to gain self awareness around unsavory habits of all types. What’s the trigger? Oh, I’m lonely. Oh, I’m this. I’m that. Ok. Do I still want to eat that potato chip bag, order takeout, or scroll instagram until I forget reality? Fine. But at least I’m being honest with myself. And maybe later I will start to find some better solutions to the actual problem. Because addiction never quite solves the problem or you wouldn’t need it any more.
There’s something else working against you here and that’s the trillions of dollars of research into making unnaturally highly palatable foods in the food industry. They have tests on tests showing exactly the right amount of crunch and flavoring a Dorito needs to have to light up the pleasure centers in enough brains - I kid you not about this. They know us. It makes sense to want to never stop. Frank enfoods are DELICIOUS. Enjoy them if you want.
But if you want to start figuring out what the right foods are for you and your family, start trying things like butter and meat and things that make you salivate without going through ten steps to make it. Try out animal fats in your cooking like lard or beef tallow. Basically take your grandmas cookbook or your great grandmas and go through it for a month and skip any weird jello recipes. Notice how you feel after a month. Notice how your skin reacts.
For one month of your life try to live by eating less processed foods. There’s a whole group around this called Whole 30 that has maps and support and all sorts of things you can look it up.
After a month you’ll be a little more yourself. Your tastebuds will become more sensitive again. Things will literally taste better. You’ll probably start having some more natural food cravings and food will be your medicine again.
Then, you’ll know what that’s like. And nobody can ever take that away from you. It will be stored in your body’s knowing what it’s like to eat unprocessed things that no one spent millions to convince you to eat.
I actually think it can be good to eat junk sometimes. It’s easy to get weird about Doritos and get afraid everything is gonna kill you and I think that’s worse than just eating it. But if you don’t really want it any more - that’d be neat.
So try short term experiments. Maybe you can’t imagine a month so you try a week somewhere. Try eating only meat. Try eating only veggies. Experiment. Go nuts. You’re here on planet earth to learn about yourself because you forgot hahaha.
I’ll leave you with one simple experiment I’ve done that helped me.
I never make myself wrong for wanting things. If I want it or I have a craving, I just pause and ask myself if I really want it or not. It’s totally ok if I do. If I say yes, I eat it and if I say no I try to give myself whatever it is I really wanted at that time. But at least I paused first to check in with myself because I care about me. Maybe my body knows something I don’t and I need what’s in that chocolate cake 😉. But also seriously maybe.
You do know what’s good for you. Away from the marketing and what your wonderful, well-intentioned parents tell you, you actually do know. It just takes taking the time to slow down, resensitize yourself to what it feels and tastes like to want food, and experiment a little to figure out your own best way to choose.
“Thanks for having me everybody!” (Waves, walks off stage to raucous applause and autograph signing and groupies for autonomous speeches)
By the way all online courses are still 50% off so if you want to buy me some gas check them out here: https://samantha.kartra.com/page/newsale