Why should I care, you damn hippy?

First, I'm going to be honest with you so you don't get your panties in a bunch later on: I am not a nutritional expert. I don't claim to be. Any health advice given in this blog should be taken with many grains of salt (or maybe not because you could then die of a sodium-induced heart attack.) I'm just a semi-normal Midwestern girl, circa 21 years since birth, grappling with newfound mortality and the fact that I have a body that is mine and will be until the day I die.

Like many modern Americans, I have struggled with my weight my whole life, winning and losing various battles. I spent most of my childhood overweight, feeling imprisoned in flesh. Come junior high and puberty and an apparently lightning fast metabolism, I shed weight and could suddenly eat what I wanted and stay slim. But "slim" is a word I use in retrospect-- throughout high school my mirror falsely painted me as chubby, and I mentally punished myself for those extra Cheetos.

Then I went to college, and the mirror wasn't lying anymore: the fabled Freshman Fifteen came true. That spring, my doctor informed me that I had extremely high cholesterol for my age. I mean it's not like I was going to die or anything (yet), but it was the first time I realized that I was not invincible. Just because my outside was smooth and shiny and smiley and young, didn't mean that inside there wasn't a sticky monster lurking in the depths of my arteries.

Since then, I have overhauled my lifestyle. And I've made discoveries along the way, gems that I think elude many Americans blinded by beacons of neon M's seen from the comfy seats of their sedans. But I don't blame anyone for falling into this unhealthy trap, because there's no reason or need to fight for food in our society anymore; if anything, we have too many choices. Even in our present recession, instead of people thinning out like our grandfathers in the Great Depression, we are gaining weight, courtesy of an abundance of cheap processed food products.

So to put my views in the simplest way: I try to eat real foods. Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Whole grains. Lean meat and dairy. Things that have been manipulated and morphed by humans as little as possible. But I'm no martyr; I still have pizza, ice cream, and other junk that I know is bad for me. But I don't keep them in my apartment, because I treat them like the indulgences they are.

Most of what I think about food seems like common sense to me, and it is, but it's overlooked in our society, where people define "diet" as temporary torture to lose a few pounds, instead of the way they eat everyday. "Flavor" consists of fat, salt, and sugar, instead of the myriad other spices in our cupboards. Biologically, we have not changed much in the past few thousand years. But within the past fifty, the way and the things we feed ourselves have. And so has the quality of our health.

So I'm here to tell you how I (and others) have given the ol' bod some much deserved and needed love and respect. Hopefully America will do the same before we all find our bodies giving us one last chance, with a gun to our thick, fat skulls.