Friday, November 6, 2009

grumbly in my tumbly




eating grains and sugar makes me hungry.

i can't ever get enough.  and within an hour or so, i'm hungry again.  grains and sugar really send my body on a horrible cyclical path.

i get puffy, have all sorts of digestive distress, aching joints, my moods spike up into near mania only to crash down into a nearly comatose state, and just lifting the next brownie to my mouth seems like lifting a boulder with a toothpick, sugar is so draining.

so why do i keep eating them?

oh tribe!  i am one of those people who knows everything but learns nothing.

once something is incorporated into one's life with consistence is when i consider it to have been learned.

i have been involved with so many aspects of "alternative"* health for the past 11 years.  the facts, studies, herbs, foods, philosophies, and personal fiddling could easily fill a book.  (hmmm....)  however, i'm not the healthiest person that i know.

why?

oh there are very many long-winded answers that could fill that blank, but what it really and truly comes down to is that i'm a perfectionist.

if something can't be done perfectly, it's not worth doing at all.  so i give up.  this perfectionism is lovingly nurtured by horrible life experiences, a culture that hates women, sunday school, and dieting since the age of 11.

what a conundrum.  i love life.  really, i do.  i want to touch everything, smell everything, see everything.  i want to kiss life right on the mouth.  here's the kicker:  life is not perfect.

life is messy.  life is wild.  life is unpredictable.  life is tragic.  life is exultant.  life is bigger than the rules of one little woman trying to control it.

my focus shifted off the great when i started trying to walk the path of perfection.  food stopped being something to explore.  it became bound up in rules: portion size, time of day, mode of preparation, etc.

food's greatest purpose is nourishment.  i love that word.

NOURISHMENT

and grains and sugar simply don't nourish me.  they break me down.

it's time to eat for nourishment.  eat to feel wonderful.  eat to thrive.  because you never know what life is going to throw your way next and it's good (not perfect) to be ready.

*i have no idea when health practices that have been proven themselves effective for thousands of years became the "alternative" to allopathic experiments that began only a few hundred years ago.

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