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Charlotte Amalie
Thursday, March 28, 2024
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The Crazy Woman’s Guide to Health

Years ago – before there was an Internet – I wrote this column, “The Lazy Woman’s Guide to Health,” for a local print publication. I was much younger then … and far less healthy than I feel today.

Since then I have been yelling at the people I love – and random people whose attention I am able to get in bank, post office and (my favorite) grocery store lines – about what they should and shouldn’t be eating, doing, thinking, etc.

So I decided the new and improved version should be called “The Crazy Woman’s Guide to Health,” because watching what people do to their precious bodies and minds really does make me crazy.

Note to readers: Body and mind are not separate items.

In putting my experience and ensuing beliefs into words on “paper” again, I can avoid the glazed-over looks – or outright hostility – I get from my sometimes unwilling audiences.

I will offer my take on how to live this human life we have been given without the use of antacids, painkillers, pharmaceuticals or hospitals.

I have spent the last 30 or more years changing the way I eat, drink, think and live. There are lots of things I am still working on, but I have come a very long way from the mind-altering, junk-food eating, cigarette-smoking, dazed television addict of the first 10 years of my adult live.

I am free of most addictions; I wake up at 65 years old most mornings without pain or stiffness, grogginess or worry. I feel good and good about myself. I don’t live with shame or regret and I do not think, no matter where the next 30 years take me, that I will ever say, “I wish I had ….”

Those are my qualifications for writing this column. Those and the hundreds of books, articles and months at nutritional, spiritual and emotional retreats I have devoured.

I have lived for decades believing certain things, starting with the basic Taoist adage: “The proper use of food is far superior to medicine.”

Let’s start with one of the assumptions that makes me a crazy: Cancer and heart disease and diabetes are inevitable.

That belief that these deadly diseases are a fact of life is not true, not one bit true. The depressing premise is based upon a combination of addiction to sugar and carbohydrates that keeps us telling ourselves, “you’ve got to die somehow,” coupled with marketing support for that excuse from the medical pharmaceutical complex.

Billions of dollars are being made by unscrupulous processed food producers who care not one whit for us and our health or well being. They are part of the greedy, sad people who live to make money.

Several books, movies and newspaper and magazine articles have exposed the fact that these corporations know what they are peddling is deadly. One of my favorite books that lays bare the ugly underbelly of the not-real-food industry is "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite," by none other than former FDA commissioner David Kessler. Who could possibly know better what the industry is manipulating and how.

But if books are too much for you, get “Fed Up” on Netflix. Produced and narrated by Katie Couric, it chronicles the lives of four obese children. It will make you cry. It will make you think of someone you know. And hopefully it will make you angry.

The movie was squelched in its distribution, just as Couric points out that Michelle Obama and the World Health Organization were when they went after the sugar industry.

Note to reader: Billions of dollars are at stake.

So the food industry sets the stage for the pharmaceutical industry, which are the foundations of the health insurance industry, which robs us all of our independence and freedom. In the end we face physical and financial bankruptcy if we don’t fight back.

It is time to get free, to stand up and say “NO” to this vicious, deadly cycle. But that’s going to take a lot of courage. It means saying no to the substances we have become addicted to.

For some it means learning how to cook. That was another recent revelation. There are gazillions of people out there who, as a result of fast and processed food, do not know how to cook.

I want to join with all of you who care about yourselves, all of you who know you do not have to spend your life destroying it, and share with you the freedom I have come to know.

I am excited (and crazy enough to think there are a lot of people out there who care enough to do the hard stuff).

More to come….

Food note: “Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised.” -Michael Pullan, author of “In Defense of Food.”

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