Have trouble eating right? Help is arriving....

Today's post: Thursday, 2-19-2009

Fitness and fat loss author and expert, Jon Benson sent out a truly troubling and moving experience he went through recently in his regular info email.

He witnessed an older toddler with his mom. The toddler wanted some affection and reassurance, so he asked to be picked up and held. His mom was used to providing that by giving him candy, so he asked for that too. But it was clear that what he actually wanted and needed was to be picked up and held and to feel loved.

The problem was that, he’d eaten so many pieces of candy and so much junk food, he was so fat, it would have been like a major weight lift for his mom to pick him up and hold him. And she did have some candy, so that’s what she gave him. Ouch !!

Jon knew that this toddler had had already had too much candy and his health was already at so much risk from being that fat his mom was actually harming him. But the fact that his mom was harming him instead of giving him the love he actually wanted and needed—and that it was totally unnecessary -- touched Jon emotionally and made him angry.

He wanted his readers to forward his email to everyone they knew as a way to help this kind of tragedy stop.

The good news is that there are now forces in play that will help do this.

Even better, there are two ways they will make it easier for you to eat right and to take off or avoid gaining excess fat.

1. First, the facts that eating junky foods and desserts plus lack of exercise makes people fat and cause multiple diseases, all of which are expensive to treat, is now becoming much better known. Plus with so many more people becoming fat and getting these diseases, the problems caused by this are becoming impossible to ignore.

Seeing to it that people know these facts and eat dramatically less of these kinds of harmful foods may not lower their lifetime health care costs according to some analysts since people would live longer. But it’s also very clear that having people stop eating this junk and getting some regular exercise WOULD eliminate many medical costs; it would at least postpone medical costs; AND it would help ensure that people who are working can think well enough to do a good job, be at work instead of at the doctor’s office or hospital, and work well for more years.

The incoming health care reforms, whatever they do right or wrong in managing the costs and delivery of health care otherwise, are certain to include coaching people and even requiring people as part of their medical care to learn and follow this information.

It will take a few years. But this will increase the number of people who know how to stay healthy and who also do it. And, the more the people around you do this, the easier it will get for you as well.

Better yet, when the market for food begins rejecting junk, the food companies will gradually stop making money by making it and selling it to us. And, the more we will find health supporting food easily available to us.

2. But I agree with Jon. The current situation is unacceptable and needs to be changed as fast as possible. Yes. It’s changing already. But it would be desirable for it to change completely in ten years rather than changing partly in 40 years.

Here’s the good news. If you learn to eat right yourself and begin to do it most of the time and you keep exercising or figure out how to add exercise to your normal life and keep doing it, you can help this change happen sooner.

But there’s more. If you can help the people around you do this also and help some of the people who are making it hard to do reverse course and make it easier to do, you gain two huge benefits.

One is that the people you convince will be less likely to make a health supporting lifestyle hard for YOU to do.

The second one is even more powerful. The more you learn about how to live a health supporting lifestyle and the more you advocate it, the more it becomes a part of you and the easier it will be for YOU to live a health supporting lifestyle yourself.

To help this along, we will begin to add posts on things you can do to help the people around you live a health supporting lifestyle and/or STOP doing things that make it hard to do so.

Here are two of those subjects we will begin to post on more often.

A. Since some foods and some food components are really bad for people, some should be outlawed, such as hydrogenated oils. And the ones that are harmful but take longer to cause harm should be heavily taxed, such as high fructose corn syrup and refined grains.

B. Many workplaces today, serve these foods such as bagels, donuts, desserts, and soft drinks or make them easily available in vending machines on a daily basis and at company meetings and events. Then they complain about lower worker productivity and higher health care costs.

This is about as smart as having your employees build bonfires in rooms not designed for them and complaining about the costs of fires and fire insurance.

So, if you help us get junky food components banned or heavily taxed or help us get employers to provide health supporting workplaces instead of health-toxic ones, you’ll find it easier to eat right as an additional bonus.