I’ve been on a journey for the last year–a journey that I am going to continue for the upcoming year (for the confused, my year seems to begin and end with the Allied Media Conference).
A journey of health. A journey to discover health. A journey to contemplate health.
Not really sure which choice it is. I started off this past year’s journey not even really all that sure what “health” was, much less if it is or was a possible reality. The question I still have no answer to: is it possible to “heal” while your sitting in the middle of a war?
But even as I struggle, I do know several realities now.
* “health” has been defined by our society in the U.S.. But our individual selves rarely want the definition of “health” as defined by our society. But at the same time–we continually beat ourselves up with that society created definition–which prevents us from focusing on the needs we have to achieve our OWN PERSONAL definitions of ‘health.’
* The idea that there could be one “thing” that could bring “health” to our bodies is riddle throughout U.S. culture. Magic cure diets. Magic cure exercise regimes. Magic cure “holistic” “lifestyle” changes that focus on exercise and diet…If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year, I’ve needed to do *multiple* things to help relieve or end symptoms/problems.
* For example, extreme chronic achy tired brought on by depression and hypothyroidism has only improved considerably after I got on medication, began acupuncture, started daily walks, began meditation, got OFF medication, increased acupuncture, increased walking to at least an hour a day, went back ON one medication, and then finally figured out that one particular way of needling during acupuncture makes me feel like a million bucks.
* It is only after a year of doing the previous “stuff,” that I finally even have the strength to sit and read a fairly radicalized book about how food in the U.S. has been manipulated to encourage addiction.
* In other words, it took a YEAR to really get me to the point I could even think about “diet.” How many doctors tell you to go straight to the “fix your diet and you’ll feel better” route?
* The book I am reading about diet (and, btw, just because I am reading this book doesn’t mean I have *fixed* by diet, it only means that I am arming myself with as much information as I can find before I fall into the full fledged “eating healthier” regime) is “the end of overeating: taking control of the insatiable american appetite” by David Kessler. I’m on part one section 4 right now, and so far, it’s a fairly disturbing interesting read. The basic argument of the book is that food in the U.S. is made up of three basic food groups, sugar, fat, and salt–all three of which are stimulants individually–and act as “hyperstimulants” when served together. As such, those of us who have a rocky relationship with food (even slender/thin folks) are often not actually lazy or lacking self esteem or unable to say no etc etc…instead, we are addicted to the high of the stimulation that high fat/sugar/salt foods provide us.
As somebody who has diagnosed diseases that erode at a person’s energy level on a daily and hourly basis…um, can we stand up and cheer at how our lifetime eating patterns now make sense?
I’ve always had depression, but it got really horrible right after I gave birth to my first child. And guess what started at that time? Extreme cravings for pints of ice cream. Is it any wonder, given what Kessler is arguing about sugar/fat/salt, that the *time* I craved the shit out of ice cream was on those two and three in the morning baby shifts that lasted for hours at a time because both of my children had illnesses? That some times I would eat ice cream first thing in the morning?
That now that I have been on serious treatment for hypothyroidism and depression, the extreme sugar cravings have really slowed down considerably (I can’t remember the last time I ate an entire pint of ice cream at one sitting).
The good thing so far about this book is that the guy who wrote it, David Kessler, is somebody who has also struggled with weight. So, thus far, I have not really encountered any fat phobic logic (outside of the fat that the whole book is written to confront the “fat epidemic.” sigh).
In fact, he started off the book with anecdotes about several people and their relationship with food–and one of the anecdotes centers on a woman who is considered “thin.” Her obsessive thinking when it comes to food is starkly similar to the way the overweight people in the anecdotes described their obsessing.
An interesting fact that Kessler incorporated in his “ohmygawdwereallsofat!” section was that researchers noticed in the 1980′s that there was a startling increase in weight throughout the entire U.S. population. That what had remained relatively stable throughout the *centuries* suddenly went through the roof in a earth shattering way in the 1980′s. According to Kessler,
“In fewer than a dozen years, 8 percent more Americans–about 20 million people, roughly the population of New York State–had joined the ranks of the overweight.”
The thing that keeps this statistic from becoming fat panic is that (unlike pretty much every type of media that I have ever encountered) Kessler uses the *statistic* of overweight numbers AND THE DATE as a point of investigation. In other words, what was going on in the 80′s that encouraged uncontrollable food eating habits? What was going on with *food* that suddenly a static inanimate object (like M&M’s or a hamburger) suddenly had so much control over ALL of us, regardless of our weight (cuz remember, it was slender people that were obsessing over food too, they just had different outcomes to the effect the obsession had on them than others did).
It isn’t, what made U.S. citizens suddenly get so fat and lacking of self control? Rather instead, it is, what happened to food, what happened to our culture?
Which has had the effect of *immediately* releasing years of guilt and obsession from my brain. It’s NOT. MY. FAULT. that I sat and gorged on a thing of ice cream at two in the morning when my son was in hour two of screaming.
As Kessler says in his introduction: YOU ARE THE TARGET. Companies *survive* on you and I and the world eating unhealthy addictive hyperstimulating food. They target your brain, your weakness, your life.
And for me–this may not be true of others–and I don’t expect it to be and I hope that anybody reading this realizes that every person’s body is different and that this analysis should not be used to judge anybody, not even your own self–eating high fat/sugar/salt diet helped me to survive undiagnosed conditions while living in high pressure situations (like early motherhood, graduate school, etc). Without medication, and without some sort of stimulation, I doubt I would have made it through those years.
But it ALSO led to a worsening of the diseases I live with. Not necessarily because those foods “made me fat,” but rather instead because once the “high” was gone, what else was there to do but to crash, to a deeper more intensely low level than what I started off at? Anybody who has been addicted knows what i’m talking about. When you crash, the aches are worse, the sadness is worse, the fogginess is worse, it’s harder to get up and do anything at all.
Anyway. Like I said, I am not reading this information with the intention of going on crash diets or anything like that. Instead, I’m thinking deeply about how to make this information a weapon in my “health” arsenal.
How can I use it to keep me at a point where I can get out of bed every day, play with my kids, go to work on a monthly/yearly basis without feeling like I must die, AND stay alive until I’m 120 in a quality and magnificent way?
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August 9th, 2009 at 12:15 pm #
One of the things I really got out of Fast Food Nation was how around 1980, the whole game had changed. It wasn’t just extra marketing of fast food. It was the fast food industry joining hands with the Department of Agriculture to get fast/preprepared high fat/salty/sugary foods into school lunchrooms. Simultaneously, here in the rust belt, factory closings and layoffs meant the closing of grocery stores and the opening of fast food joints. Neighborhood stores are rare—it takes three times as long to drive out to the highway interchange where the grocery stores are, as opposed to doing drive-through at the fast food joint. Hell, I can walk to both McDonald’s and KFC and back home again in less than ten minutes; it takes me damn near half an hour to drive (one way!) across town to get to the healthy food!
And what kills me is….I’ve been eating “healthy” all my life. Before yuppies discovered it, I’ve been eating basically the way my ancestors have. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have some occasional french fries along the way, but….all that “healthy” eating didn’t keep me from becoming hypothyroid, nor did it keep my mother from becoming diabetic (or having cancer). I grew up on bread that came from my grandmother’s oven, not the Wonder Bakery. Still didn’t help. Tasted better, but not a panacea.
There isn’t anywhere near enough work being done on all the shit we’re ingesting via plastics and packaging. All the stuff that is leaching into our water supply and how it affects our systems. How it affects our endocrine system. What that is doing to the cancer rate, the autoimmune disorder rate, the allergy rate. How our bodies are rebelling at the cellular level, perhaps even putting on more fat as a way to absorb the poisons….
…just thinking out loud. I’m gonna have to check out Kessler’s book.
August 9th, 2009 at 12:43 pm #
I’m telling you La Lubu. I watched a PBS documentary on the water systems in the U.s. a bit ago–and it was stunning. Almost hopeless. The level of SHIT in our water–literal SHIT from factory farms. And then the medicines and hormones and plastics….I’m oddly ambivelent about Lance Armstrong right now (usually I can’t stand the dude), because he is bringing so much attention to cancer–and showing how cancer is a world wide disease that must be dealt with on a world wide scale, rather than something that you do at the doctors office after you get diagnosed. I mean, he’s 501c3/foundation/mainstream as the next group–but the fact that he’s made the intervention of local versus global–that means a fucking lot and I think will have huge implications eventually.
The entire EARTH is sick. It isn’t going to stop–this world wide fucking sickness–until we as a world wide community begin to look at how horribly we’ve violated the stuff we need to survive in a healthy meaningful way.
my acupuncturist told me that the good thing that she sees in her clinic is community patterns to illness—and as a result, she doesn’t think it makes sense to try to heal communities in an individual way the way doctor’s clinics and normal acupuncturists and other ‘healing’ sites do. And I think that can be applied to a world wide scale….the shit that we put on our crops to get rid of bugs is destroying land and water although into Mexico. It’s making everybody at the beginning and ending points and all the way in between–sick. we can’t “heal” all that until we create healing movements that DEMAND that sort of world wide community action. you know?
August 9th, 2009 at 12:47 pm #
btw, la lubu–the areas with the highest concentration of thyroid illnesses (hypo/hyper/cancer/etc) are invariably next to areas with heavy concentrations of factories–Michigan is one of the states with the highest concentrations of thyroid illnesses, and we just so happen to be right across the lake from Chicago (we’ve been struggling to deal with pollution from illinois for DECADES)–and the SE part of the state is basically one big factory.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:03 pm #
Exactly!! See, I watched the switch from glass to plastic packaging. There was a coca-cola bottling plant across from my grandmother’s house. That folded, and then pepsi bought it, and then that folded—there was no more bottling, no more returnable bottles. Just plastic ones that end up in landfills, breaking down over thousands of years.
There’s very little we eat or drink that isn’t brought to us by plastic. Even the household water lines. Copper is a “boutique” product for home water lines now; pvc is typical. The by-products of broken down plastic are endocrine disruptors. Just like the pesticides and herbicides. Factory farming creates and spreads disease in animals, so they’re pumped full of antibiotics. Just like they’re pumped full of steroids to get to the slaughterhouse faster.
I can’t help but think the increase in obesity is also related to the effects of endocrine disruptors; fat as an insulator. I’d find it hard to believe people are eating any more than in 1980, or exercising/moving any less.
It is on a worldwide scale. There is no escaping it, and there’s no way of buying one’s way out through “wise purchases” or what-the-fuck ever. I mean damn, DDT is banned in the U.S. but it’s still in our breastmilk, FFS.
On a positive note, I do see more wildlife now than I ever saw as a kid. Especially raptors. I never saw raptors when I was my daughter’s age; crows yeah, and I occasionally heard owls hoot at night, but I never saw hawks or falcons or eagles. Not even on the Mississippi. Now, they’re ubiquitous. I saw a golden eagle flying over the city the other day when I was picking up my daughter; I think s/he must have been trying to get back to the river. I see more foxes, woodchucks, etc. There have even been cougar sightings in Illinois.
Maybe that’s a sign of hope.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:08 pm #
Yeah, my folks are from around Joliet; I grew up with the smell of oil refineries both there and in the metro-east St. Louis area. Gahh. That shit can’t be good for you. In fact, I worked on top of a cooling tower at one of the oil refineries in Wood River; some of the water mist got on my tools.
And they rusted, even after I wiped them dry. There was something corrosive in that mist that pock-marked my tools. Who knows what the hell that does to human lungs.
August 9th, 2009 at 1:17 pm #
A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with type II diabetes. A few weeks later I stumbled across a book, “Diabetes: Sugar Coated Crisis” by David Spero, RN.
http://www.davidsperorn.com/diabetes_sugar_coated_crisis.htm
Spero characterizes diabetes as a social disease and outlines a program of social organizing to deal with it. Despite claims from the pharmaceutical industry, most major diseases have been dealt with through social health measures. Tuberculosis, for example, can be treated (sometimes) with antibiotics but the most effective treatments were preventive measures, especially the development of building codes that required proper ventilation in tenement buildings.
I’m having some real problems with the healthcare system lately. Why does medicine insist on treating sick individuals as numbers but refuses to treat social illnesses as something other than individual phenomena?
August 14th, 2009 at 7:12 am #
Can we delete comments here? I don’t see a delete function.
Could you delete my last comment? thanks.
August 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm #
I unapproved it so in case you change your mind, I can post it back up again, daisy. Can I ask why you wanted it taken down? It was a really good and insightful comment, I thought, something I had HEARD of but didn’t know about–enough for me to start googling, in other words!
Anyway, just so you know, if you change your mind, just let me know and I’ll reapprove it!