Making Choices

I’ve been struggling for the past few weeks. Like everyone my motivation goes in and out. So last night as I ate my Haagen-Dazs Cookies and Cream ice-cream I thought about what I could do to find that motivation again. Yes I’ve made excuses for myself like, it’s too hot to cook I need to eat out, I’m going through a really emotional time right now, I’m studying for the LSAT and junk food helps me study, etc., etc., etc. But the conclusion I came up with is that motivation is not magical being that comes into and out of our lives like the wind, it’s a series of choices. We make the choices that lead to our lifestyles. I am making the choices that allow me to lead an unhealthy lifestyle. And that’s all it is. It isn’t that my magical motivation is on vacation this week, it isn’t that life has left me with no choice in what I do. I make all the choices. I make the choice not to say no when people want to go out, I make the choice not to say no when vendors send packages of goodies to my office, I make the choices to order a deluxe when I go to the diner, I make all of these choices.
I like to think about things from a historic standpoint. Human beings are amazingly adaptable, as are all animals. We are created for survival and varying climates and conditions. There have been groundbreaking stories lately that have shown that people with periodic times of starvation tend to live longer than those who don’t. Why is this, because as animals we faced periods of starvation, and our bodies expected and were adapted for those times. It’s almost like we’re poisoning ourselves with too much food. Now, I’m not about to give up one of my three meals a day to go back to my pre-civilized roots, but I do think it’s important that we consider what our body is capable of and what is most beneficial to its maintenance. What would we have been eating if we were still dependant on tools for hunting, and not a sale at the grocery store. We’d be eating mostly fruits and vegetables, because they’d be most readily available to us. We’d eat eggs that we could steal from nests. And once and a while we’d be eating a lean gamey meat. Would we be eating bread? No. Do I like bread? Yes, very much. And am not willing to give it up, but I am willing to eat it in moderation. Would we be eating dairy products, that’s seriously doubtful, unless we had an extremely overbearing and slightly demented mother who forced us to breast feed well into adulthood. Why, well because it’s weird that we drink and eat dairy products. Except for a small percentage of Caucasian people of Northern European decent, most of the world is lactose intolerant. Now, I really love dairy, really, really love it! Does it love me, not so much. Why, because like most people, I’m slightly lactose intolerant, much like most of the adult population. Most people are born able to digest milk, but only a certain type of milk, their mothers milk! And once they stopped requiring their mother’s milk, they lost their ability to produce the lactose digesting enzyme lactase. I’d like to dissect milk drinking for a second. Human babies drink human milk, which is made to help them grow in to strong reasonably sized toddlers before they can start chewing their own food, human milk is meant to help human babies more than double their birth weight. Cow’s milk is meant to help new born calfs turn into adolescent cows. To do this they have to multiply their birth weight by 5-8x. So Cows milk is meant to make a baby cow turn into an multi-hundred pound adolescent. We only want our babies to get up to 20-25 lbs before we stop them drinking milk. So why do adults drink cows milk, because we have been conditioned to. I admit that I have a carton of skim milk in my fridge. It’s seriously become such a strange part of our daily life that we need milk.
The Dairy Industry has paid for many studies that show that milk helps build strong bones because of the calcium levels associated with milk. Do you know that the dairy industry puts the calcium in the milk themselves? It’s a supplement; just like all the vitamins that wonder bread puts in their bread. Pasteurization takes out most of the natural nutrients in milk, leaving it sort of like white water, then the milk producers (the companies that pasteurize it not the cows themselves) add in calcium and vitamin D (vitamin D aids in the absorption of calcium.) Now do I plan on never eating Brie again, absolutely not, that’s some great stuff right there! But, once again, those are things that should be limited and not ingested every day. I’m going to try and wean myself away from regular milk and work on using more soy or rice milk. (Although my mother is convinced that soy milk is evil and poisonous, but I’m still waiting to see how she proves it.)
I’m not sure how I got on this tirade, but the point is that our bodies should be respected and appreciated for all of the wonderful work they do for us. We need to take responsibility for our actions, for the foods that we eat, for the way we choose to live our lives. Get back to basics, walking to places instead of using the car, buying organic foods and limiting things that we’re not well equipped to handle. You don’t have to stop living your life, just live it responsibly.