The Sitting Tree

My co-worker just IM’d me and said I’m missing free food in another room. A St. Patrick’s breakfast, so I ask “What kind of food?” To that I get the reply “bagels and doughnuts.”

This is the prime example why people are unhealthy in America. Bagels and doughnuts are not a balanced meal, and here comes everyone flocking to the place to eat this up, while a very small minority of people (a.k.a. me) say “no thanks.”

It just seems that everywhere you turn around everyone in society is perpetuating the wrong things. Is it so hard to offer a healthy, balanced breakfast? It can’t be that hard. They also had free coffee and orange juice. Well now! Let me drop what I’m doing! Coffee is coffee, but orange juice? I have absolutely no idea what orange juice they have. None at all. I promise. Swear? but I can bet you my bottom dollar that it’s the cheapest most unhealhty orange juice you can get, if it even is real orange juice to begin with.

I had breakfast at McDonald’s a few months ago (yes, yes, I know. I try to limit it to one to two times a year) and I had an orange juice thinking that at least I can have a healhty beverage. Nope! I have had real orange juice many times and this tasted like some watered down sugar water that had some artificial flavors in it or something. Now I remember being a child and eating at McDonald’s and thinking how good that orange juice was. One word: ignorance.

Also it’s very hard to remember when you go without something for such a long time. You forget how bad it is. I find I always will inevitably eat something that makes me feel like I’m dying and only then remember! That’s why I have come up with the idea of a DO NOT EAT list. However, I have yet to implement it. You may be reading this and say “Alex, what are you nuts? How can a cheesesteak sub or potato chips make you feel like you’re dying?” Well to that, my friends, I answer this: Stop eating unhealthy for long enough for your body to get used to it and then you too will see what I mean. Stuff that tasted like cardboard before will actually taste good, because we are destroying our tastebuds with all the excess flavoring in our food. Not permenently though, because it is one of the most amazing traits of the human body that it can adapt and get used to almost any conditions. Unfortunately we as Americans are adapting it to the wrong conditions.

We don’t need excess sugar, salt, butter, etc. in our diet. Your palate has become accustomed to that through years and years of eating all the wrong food. The entire American culinary system is based on drenching food in excess crap that we don’t need, and also providing portions so large it’s impossible for anyone to eat out and lose weight unless they refuse the large portions, get kids meals, or have enough willpower to stop eating at the right time and save the rest for later, all while giving the waitress a list of things not to put in their food. If that’s not bad enough it is a self-perpetuating paradox. No restaurant will survive if they stop putting excess salt, sugar, butter, etc. in their foods and start serving smaller portions because that is what we have been accustomed to as Americans and thus a very small minority of people would accept those changes.

Take Asian cuisine for example. There are hardly any (if any at all) true Chinese or Japanese restaurants in America. If you go to Japan and eat at restaurants their food is completely different than it is here. You can eat out at a restaurant every day in Japan and not get fat. The only Japanese food in America that is really Japanese that I know of is sushi and sushimi. That is due to the nature of what it is. You can’t really make sushi fattening or make it bad for you because then it wouldn’t be sushi.

I think there needs to be a new word proposed for the english language, and that word is genorance. As genocide refers to the mass-killing of people, genorance then refers to the mass ignorance of people. You can also think of it as genuine ignorance if you like.

I recently have been introduced to Cesar Millan, who is better known as the host of the National Geographic show The Dog Whisperer. At first I was somewhat skeptical mostly because I hadn’t heard of him and it was just a co-worker telling me of his methods, but after reading some web pages about how to take care of your dog, with lessons taken straight from Millan, I decided to order the Mastering Leadership DVD box set.

I didn’t find anything cruel about his methods. None of them actually harm the animals, and if you think that his methods “upset the dogs” then you are also asserting that you have some kind of empathic ability to read the dog’s emotions. After only using his methods on one walk, the change in my dog’s behavior was a night and day difference. Now people will argue and say that the changes are only temporary because it’s an easy rebuttal. See, it’s difficult to see into the future, and thus impossible for anyone to really be able to combat that argument. I’m not saying this is their intention, but it is definitely the outcome.

Cesar Millan says that it’s the people that need the training, not the dogs. He is right on so many levels, except that he is committing a generalization here because not all humans are completely ignorant of Mother Nature, although, regrettably, most are. Let me talk about the different arguments I have seen the past couple days against Mr. Millan’s methods: (more…)