Ahhhh Halloween. I suppose I could just say Snickers, Reese's Pieces, Butterfinger, Hershey's, Kit Kat, or Twix to convey the same meaning. It's all the same poor quality, trans-fat laden crap bursting with refined sugar and negative nutritional value. Did that stop me from eating my way through far more than my fair share? Noooooo. But as I gobbled up all this chocolate I started feeling really bad. It's been a while since I had more than a few squares of not-very-sweet dark chocolate at a time. In fact, since I started juicing a few months back, my diet has improved exponentially. I don't think I realized it until I sat feeling like a sausage about to burst from its casing as I continued to shove chocolate down my throat. I mean I couldn't stop. It was pathetic, the more I ate the more I wanted and the worse I felt, so the more I wanted so the more I ate!
As intense food cravings consumed me I realized something else was going on here. Something that explained the horrible relationship I've had with food for most of my life. It would be remiss to not state that I am currently a health conspiracy theorist through and through. I blame the modern American lifestyle for a significant amount of the health problems plaguing our society. Nobody cooks their own food anymore. Who on earth has the time? Its all microwaved from a frozen box and full of genetically modified fake chemicals. Once I stripped all that crap away from my diet my health improved a lot. No, it didn't cure Fibromyalgia, but along with a gazillion other lifestyle improvements, helped lessen the symptoms to enough of a degree that I kept at it. Sitting in my post-Halloween chocolate coma made me realize what a endless trap the American supermarket truly is.
See eating all those refined carbs and fake sugars may feel like food on the tongue, but the body has no idea what to do with these foreign substances. They aren't natural, and haven't been around long enough for the human body to adapt to them. So what happens when I eat a Snickers bar or three? Well I've certainly consumed enough fat and calories to satiate a gorilla, but my body doesn't register as having eaten anything, because it doesn't recognize what I just ate as food. My stomach does the best it can to digest the toxic dumb I just swallowed, but it doesn't send a message to my brain that I have received either nutrition or satiation. No, all it does is tell my brain it needs food! So I eat more chocolate, but my stomach never tells my brain to stop wanting more because my stomach doesn't believe I have given it what it needs. And I haven't. What a trap! Last night I realized my only way out of this ridiculous spiral was to discipline myself against those chocolate longings and eat something real. And amazingly enough, after a dinner consisting of lentils and quinoa, my stomach finally told my brain to stop insisting I am hungry and I threw out the rest of the Halloween candy. Ahhh, blessed gift of nutritional satiation.
Thanks for joining,
Leah
