Thursday, September 15, 2011

Food For Thought

I suppose it started several years ago, but since I've had Frazier to be responsible for it's escalated. The food question...what to eat? Once I started, it snowballed...and it's ever-evolving. I've blogged about it before, but it's something I get questions about often so I'm broaching the subject again.

"It" is even hard to explain. I read plenty about how to feed yourself while incubating a new human and then moved on to reading about what to feed growing humans, and finally what to feed fully grown humans...like me. I've read a lot of books. Perhaps a ridiculous number so I won't tell you how many, and that's just the non-internet portion of my studies. Unfortunately, I still find myself vastly under-educated on the subject...like I said, I'm still working on it, but I have devised some basic rules for eating (and feeding the small growing human in my home) based on my research that I think serve us well. I can't possibly tell you what they are, because they are many and complicated and they probably should be different for individual people and families, but here are a few things I will say (and no, I'm not talking to EVERYBODY-I know there are exceptions):

You probably do have the time. To do research, to shop, to prepare food. Take the time you spent preparing, purchasing and eating food today. Now add to it the time you spent watching TV, surfing the internet, blogging, hitting the snooze button, painting your nails. You're going to eat anyway, and it's going to take some time to acquire, prepare and eat that food so that time is a given...are there one or two other things you could give up for health's sake? Could you make an extra 30 minutes a day (ten minutes per meal, maybe?) Because that's probably all you'd need.

You probably do have the money. Americans spend less on food and more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. Coincidence? I think not. Consider how much you spent on what your kid wore today...and yesterday. Is what you put on your kid more important than what you put inside them? Or how much was the monogrammed lunchbox you packed your kid's lunch in? Sometimes I think we've been conditioned to make food the smallest portion of our budget so we can easily rationalize splurging on the container, but never the food itself.
Consider this: the cheese I buy costs $4.45 for an 8 oz block. Sound outrageous? But that's the same price as one tall Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks. The average American family spends roughly 10% of it's budget on food. That means we're spending 90% of our budgets on housing, transportation and...everything else. What's the everything else you're spending your money on?

If your pediatrician told you that your kid would die unless you found two hours a week and $50 extra a month to spend on them, could you manage that? No-brainer, right? It's easy to feed them cheap processed foods and waste a couple hours a week on facebook that could be better spent researching or cooking when it isn't a matter of immediate life or death.

You wouldn't take your kids to a building and drop them off just because there was a sign on the front of it that said, "Best Elementary Education In Town" and because it was conveniently located near your home and cost very little. No, you'd probably research it. You'd probably ask other parents about it; you'd want to go inside it and look around. You might even look up ratings and statistics. And only then, when you'd ascertained that their claim was, indeed, valid, you'd take your child there. If you researched it and found it was lacking in educational merit, or wasn't even a real school at all- would you drive across town and pay more for one that was? If that wasn't an option would you teach them yourself before you'd take them to aforementioned, self-proclaimed "Best Elementary School in Town"?

Yet, we feed our children foods just because they are in boxes emblazoned with unsubstantiated health claims, or because they are cheap, or because they are easy to make or available at a conveniently located store all the time. Even when finding an alternative or making it yourself are options.

I won't tell you I don't ever waste money or time or that lifestyle changes are easy or that diet is all that's important...and certainly not that it's most important (IT ISN'T) and I certainly can't say the way I do things is how everyone should or can. But what I am saying is that those things above are things I think about regularly and it's why and how I feed our bodies the way I do. It seems in Christian circles we talk freely about being good stewards of our time and our money, but we forget that God made us stewards of our bodies, too. I think we owe it to Him to upkeep the vehicle he gave us for our soul. We're little use to Him on earth without it. Moreover, some of us have been entrusted with little extra bodies to upkeep for awhile and to condition for future use. Isn't that a responsibility worth taking seriously? Worth a little of our time...and our treasure?

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