What to say?

My life has been radically changed by food.  An entire truth that I based my life on turned out to be a lie.  We ate whole wheat because it is good for you.  We drank milk because it's good for your bones.  That was a truth my whole life.  Then everything got turned upside down.  The more I read, the more I understood about wheat and gluten and genetic engineering.  The more I read, the more I found out that what we were drinking is a far cry from milk anymore once you factor in all the processing and chemicals.  I now also understand that we as Americans consume more dairy than anyone other race or country.  We also loose the enzymes that process milk after the age of four.  We really shouldn't be drinking it like we do, and if we were worried about calcium, than all we have to do is eat our vegetables.  We get plenty from veggies.

But that isn't what this is about.  Sorry, it's hard not to get distracted on this topic.  The point is that I understand that it's hard to wrap your mind around a new concept of looking at food.  Especially when it will challenge all that you know to be true.  Take my word for it, there is nothing scarier than realizing that you have not only lived, but chosen intentionally, spoken about and tried to empower your children to live a certain way and then you find out its all a lie.  It is almost like the ground beneath you literally gets taken away.  All the boundaries you lived in are torn down and you are standing in the middle of nowhere and you don't know which way is up or down or right or left.  You don't know where you are or where you are going, and you don't know how to get to the place you know you're supposed to be but still don't understand what that place is.  Confused yet?  You should be.  I was for months.  I still feel a little lost sometimes.

We have all heard the saying, "You are what you eat".  I think we all live in this general idea that doughnuts are bad for you, you should stop at one piece of cake and make sure you eat vegetables at dinner.  But what happens when it goes deeper.  When you realize that even in the things that you think are good for you, they layer in toxic ingredients.

I would say that I believed that I could tell a general difference in my kids when they had sugar.  They had more energy and the giggles came out 10 fold.  What I didn't realize was how intricately woven what they ate truly did effect how they behaved.  There is no way around it.   What you put in your body directly effects how you feel, how you  respond to people, how you behave, and your emotional response to life and circumstances.  My husband would kill me and then make fun of me for life if I put vegetable oil in our car to make it run.  It doesn't run on vegetable oil, even though I wish it did.  We need good old fashion gasoline. If we put vegetable oil in our car, it wouldn't run.  It wouldn't work.  We wouldn't be able to drive anywhere because our car doesn't have the right fuel.  Just like our car, our body needs certain food to run, to walk, to live, to love, to be free, to be whole, to be healthy, to be healed.  It's hard to communicate sometimes what we have learned about food and how it effects us.

It's hard not to be angry at how poisoned our food has become.  It's hard to feel confident in what we now know is true, but others look at you like you are crazy.  It's tricky navigating your way through food issues and what newspapers say, doctors, nutritionists, and then there is the internet.    All these things that I feel make it hard sometimes to talk with others about the diet.  I don't ever want to offend anyone by the way we eat.  I don't want others to look at us and assume we are snobs about our food.  I don't wan to talk about why we eat what we eat and have my listener think I judge them for how they eat.  But in the same breath, knowing what I know, it is hard to not want to share about how much better the quality of our life has become because we changed our diet.  Why wouldn't I want others to experience the joy we have found?  But how do I do that?

I don't know.

I don't know much...but I know I love you.

Heh, sorry, its late and I'm tired and that music lyric is funny to me.

So I guess in the end, thank you for letting me process our food issues here.  Thank you for walking along with us while we figure it out.  And I'll say it again, if anything that I say here resonates in your heart, pray over that.  Pay attention to it.  Your conscious is trying to tell you something.  Be patient.  We are each on a journey that looks different from one another.  Mine conscious was trying to speak to me for a couple years before I listened.  I lost those years with Big fighting, crying, frustrated, fighting, working on guilt.  We still fight and cry here, but real conversations happen afterwards where we get to pray together because my son can concentrate on me now.  He can focus and hear me.  We have our life back and I will never stop appreciating that.