It’s taken a while to understand the meaning behind this and wrap my head around the implications of it.
Society teaches us that if there’s something you don’t like, you need to fight against it. Fight obesity; fight disease; fight war *oh the irony.*
Conversely, the Law of Attraction states that energy goes where attention flows. In a nutshell, if you’re focusing on fighting something out of existence, you are in fact bringing it into existence and it persists.
Seems fairly straight forward, right?
Over the past few weeks work has been crazy. One issue in particular is a query that needs data going back more than a decade. In an avalanche of numbers, figures, formulas and equations it’s been challenging finding a starting point, never mind a solution.
To attempt to solve this, I did what any logical human does; I went to the boss. He’s been doing this for years and rather than reinvent the wheel on my own it seemed reasonable to get his input on how to get moving on this mountain.
Simple. ‘Follow the money.’
Fast forward to today. In recent weeks I’ve rediscovered how much I enjoy cooking. The flip side is physically I haven’t been feeling great for a few months. Between the bloating and general poofiness it feels like I’ve gained 20 lbs even though the scale doesn’t seem to think so.
It’s difficult to find pleasure in cooking food from scratch when my body feels like I should be stapling my lips shut instead of feeding it anything.
With the new found interest in cooking I’ve been inhaling food shows on Netflix. Today’s choice was a documentary called ‘Fed Up.’
It addresses childhood obesity and the general dietary mayhem that makes up American culture. It’s a fascinating view; I’d recommend taking the time to watch it if you can as it definitely sheds a lot of light on obesity in general; not just from a child’s perspective.
Scarily we are sicker and fatter than ever before and it boils down to one simple fact: follow the money.
2 completely unrelated dots connected in my head; the circuit is complete and the light bulb just went on.
To solve the problem, we need to follow the money.
The tragedy is that there is no profit in health. The real money is in all the industries that feed us; advertise to us; ‘heal’ us; insure us; peddle solutions to us for all the problems that spring up around us. The weight loss industry is worth billions alone, never mind Big Pharma and the rest of it. If we all became healthy entire industries would go bankrupt.
We’re fighting obesity by dieting, exercising and ‘eating healthier’ when in reality we’ve solved nothing. The deck is not stacked in our favour. Advertising sabotages us around every corner. Health foods are laden with ingredients we don’t understand so in reality, we could be eating anything and how would we know?
With enough money scientific studies can be shushed and the studies that do make it into the mainstream are in fact funded by the industries they’re studying. Co-incidence much? Didn’t think so.
Any sensible gambler knows: if the deck is consistently stacked against you, you fold your hand and play a new game.
Remind me again why we aren’t doing that?! Probably because we have no clue that we were never meant to win the war.
One random fact that came out of the documentary made me laugh out loud at the sheer devious genius behind it.
When they ‘discovered’ that fats were responsible for heart diseases and cancers, blah blah, the industry moved to reducing fat in a bunch of stuff. One of those things was milk. Skimmed and fat-free milk became a thing and people were buying it by the tanker load.
Excellent. The fat that was extracted from the milk went where? Into cheese.
Cheese production went up by a ridiculous amount and suddenly, cheese everywhere. Burgers and cheese; pizza with more cheese; cheese-stuffed crusts; double cheese, MORE CHEESE; the possibilities skyrocketed and America started inhaling cheese on everything while buying tankers of skimmed milk for the health benefits. KACHING!
We have been royally screwed guys. If we’re collectively going to solve excess weight in our own lives we’re going to need to go renegade and fix it ourselves.
Diets and fads aren’t going to right this ship. Following the money and realising who is profiting at your expense will change your choices at the store. If you care enough to realise you’re being scammed by every teaspoon of sugar that you eat maybe you’ll walk away from the game and make a different choice.
Sugar is more addictive than cocaine. Ever notice how vitamins and macros on nutrition labels all list % of daily allowance? Notice how sugar has no % next to it? Because if it did it would be 200+% of daily allowance on some servings and you might think twice. It’s conveniently excluded so you can go on blissfully unaware that you’re knocking another nail in your health coffin while the health/insurance/food industries are rubbing their hands in glee at some more guaranteed income on the balance sheet.
I have no interest in living a life of deprivation where every edible pleasure is forever stricken from my life. What I AM interested in is not feeling like a sack of poo tied with string because on paper I’m eating ‘health foods’ only to find out the damage is just being packaged differently.
My challenge to you is the next time you go to the store, shop around the edges only. The outer perimeter of the grocery stores are fresh produce, dairy, fresh meat & fresh bread. None of the packaged stuff that lives down the aisles with a shelf life that could rival the lifespan of a bowhead whale. No venturing down the aisles….. except maybe the spice aisle. *No MSG ALLOWED*
Instead of fighting weight gain and obesity maybe try pro-health. Plan A didn’t work so giving Plan B a go couldn’t hurt.
