Sometimes it's okay to be a control freak ~

Recently I posted about dangerous toxins and how they have invaded every part of our lives. Whether it is the toxins in food, household items, self-care products or even toxic people (we call them energy vampires, I believe) we need to find a way to rid ourselves of them.

Did you know there are thousands of ingredients that the FDA has approved for use, but no one has studied in over 3 decades, or for that matter, some not at all? And little to no studies have been done on the cumulative effect of all these industrial food-scientist-created ingredients in our food system. 

Many of these ingredients are created by substances contaminated with carcinogens, some make us addicted to non-food substances that are cheaper to produce than real food, and some are downright dangerous.

If you feel overwhelmed and are tired of all the conflicting reports and information out there, making you want to throw your hands up in the air, I have one suggestion. And it's simple. It will reduce your exposure to these toxic substances, at least in your food, and it's called, cook at home. 

“The most important thing you can do with your health is cook. Cooking is more powerful than any medication.” ~ Michael Pollan

But the key here is that you cook using whole foods, meaning food that is not processed, not from a box, and with ingredients you can pronounce and know what they are. Eat at least 15 meals a week at home using ingredients you buy (so you are in control of what you are consuming) and cook yourself.  Make it fun and  involve other family members. It is a great gift to teach your children to cook. 

That's 5 breakfasts, 5 lunches and 5 dinners. And these can be simple meals, you don't have to get all fancy with it. That leaves you 6 meals a week where you can be flexible to eat wherever you choose, dinner at a friends,  have a night of take-out, or at a restaurant.

Cooking at home is beneficial in so many ways; you save money, more time with family, you can flex your creativity, and of course, you know exactly what is being consumed by your body. You control the amount of salt, sugar, and fat you use, as well as being in charge of portion control. Another extremely important benefit that you will get from cooking at home is that you will nourish and ground your relationships, creating a loving and healthy environment for those around you. 

Control Freaks

Why as humans, do we constantly question our purpose on the planet? Why is it that we have to create, build, discover, learn, explore, finish, manipulate, regulate, control and decide the roles of every living thing on earth? Did this all come from the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the I-Ching, and all the other religious texts? Where did we get such a superiority complex?

Other life forms just seem to be content to live in the natural world, to exist, satisfied by a good meal, a good nap, a litter of little ones to take care of, just kinda taking it easy. Then of course, there are those  issues like finding food and surviving their next "around the corner" predator, but hey, that's pretty much things we have to deal with too.  Our finding food, actually comes in the form of finding the money to afford the food, and our survival, well, we all know that our biggest predators are our very own brothers - as in humankind.

Another school shooting becomes just another news story, good for a couple of days, maybe drag it out for a week if there are enough deaths or injured. Actually, the dead and injured don't really count that much, we like to focus on the killer, the whack job, the mentally ill, the sick bastard (or sick bitch) in some cases. Write a book about it, better yet, see the movie.

You start losing faith, you start to fear sending your kids off to school, you start skipping trips to the mall, you feel nervous and scared walking in your home alone, and it doesn't even have to be dark.

No, this isn't a fire drill

I don't know the answers. But I do know, that with all the good humankind does, and I'm not discounting all the good we do, it gets overshadowed when this kind of thing happens. This post isn't about gun control, or knife control, or how too much sugar and weird chemicals can poison our bodies ~ no, I think it is simply that we're not as grand as we think we are.  We are not as evolved and civilized as we think we are.

They say in nature that an animal only kills when he needs to eat or is defending himself from another animal who needs to eat.  He doesn't usually just get pissed off and take out a few of his fellow breed or any other animal, for that matter. Unless of course, there can be rare cases of mental illness, which has happened, especially when we use them for our own entertainment, taking them out of their own habitat and enclosing them in one of ours.  Yes, I'm talking SeaWorld, with their small enclosures and forced training, tearing them away from their families; Circuses, where we make them perform and jump through hoops; and Zoos ~ nothing more than animal prisons. And we, nothing more than control freaks.

Animal cruelty on display

This morning all kinds of things are going through my head - and I'm sick of hearing about all of this gruesome behavior from my kind, as I'm sure you are.  I am pretty sure that of all the animals on the planet, we are the most messed up. And with every dreaded news story, with another tear shed in front of the TV screen, I can't tell if it is my numb mode or my survival mode that is being kicked up another notch.