To be the change you wish to see in the World, you actually have to change what you do until you are the representation of what you feel is best for the world. Speaking is great, it helps to put your ideas in focus, you still have to act, with no action, your words are full of air, with action, your words are full of iron, they become real.
Here are some basic and fundamental ways to effect this change. As you are what you eat, we will start with the essence of your life, your food!
1. Start reading labels, you need to know what you are putting in your body, you have to start caring for yourself, very important sentence, many people say they care for themselves, but we know people are full of good intentions and words, not so much actions, you must act out your good intentions for the world to become a better place.
You start with yourself
You are what you eat
Start eating good organic wholesome for you meals made with thought and caring using the best possible ingredients and tools available and the world will become a better place. Take time to look into how your food, that you eat is currently made. Do you know where it comes from, who makes it, how it is made. All of these questions are very important, why, because you are what you eat. I know people that will only buy thier drugs from certain people due to wanting to know whats inside it, but then they eat fast food. Morons!
2. Drink more water. You are made of water. Scientists, the same people that figured out your car, getting electricity to your computer, and the computer you are reading this on, agree that you are between 70 and 80 percent comprised of aqua.
Everything in you is made of water, even your nostril hairs have water, as you move through life, moment by moment, you dirty this water at a cellular level, simply being alive you dirty your “bathwater” so to speak.
Clean water at continual intervals throughout the day. Starting the day, first thing in the morning, keep it by your bed even, two large glasses of just water. This will detox your body and help every aspect of who you are, keep the cleanse going by drinking water throughout the day. On average you want, AT A MINIMUM, one gallon per day. Do not kid yourself and rationalize coffee, sports drinks, soda, tea, etc. to be water. Water is Water, and even in this day it is a scary prospect. Compare any bottled water to a spring or a clean well, there is a world of difference. Learn, investigate, be healthy.
Further – The vehicle you drive requires specific amounts of various fluids or it will break down. Why then is it hard to believe that a human body would not demand AT LEAST, the very same when it can heal on its own and is waaaaaaaay more complex than anything man has created?
3. As you are a human, you will rationalize everything that comes through your senses in order to allow you to remain comfortable even in the face of habitual activities that can lead to demise. Rationalizing is the same as making excuses, though rationalizing is a pre-emptive strike, where as excuses are usually used after the fact. Either ay, the end result on life quality is shockingly apparent once you take the time to step out of “your life” and look honestly at it.
Lead your life by using your gut/heart, and brain before falling prey to the joys and wonders of your senses. If you cannot bring your own senses under control, who will? Who will be your keeper in this life if it is not going to be you? Who will be responsible for the personal choices you make on a moment by moment basis that in turn create who you are. Everything that happens, does so because of what choices you make every moment of the day.
This is the human condition, accept the inherent responsibility and thrive, deny it and suffer, only you will live out the consequence of your actions in the end.
4. Have you ever heard, “Ritual saves, Routine Kils.”? It is in healthy rituals that we find joy, beware that you confuse yourself and linger in the shadow of ritual named routine, this will bring misery as it slowly builds a prison without walls around your mind. If you do not fully understand, the best I can do to paint an example is the following:
You are in a new country, having a cup of coffee with freinds on a vacation. You suddenly wish you had your three shot espresso, organic soy latte with two tablespoons of organic raw cane sugar at one hundred and twenty degrees and the person behind the counter need only see you to make it.
While it is all relative, the above represents one small way that routine can damage new experience. It causes this damage by taken you out of present moments and wishing for others based on habits you formed as they allowed you to cope with your life. The habits are so narrowly defined that they become a routine or program that you follow on a regular basis. When you do not follow this routine, you become unhappy. When you lose the present moment, you lose the meaning of why you are here, when that happens, you miss the point, lost the plot.
No longer is a cup of coffee a delight, which I may add is a delight that many will never enjoy and it has only happened recently to male it available to the masses when once it was reserved for Kings and Queens. Do you see?
Ritual – I like a good cup of coffee
Routine – I like a good cup of coffee as long as it is from such and such and made with this and that and served so and so. Oy!
5. When working towards losing the fat, go easy on yourself and pay attention to your portion size, remembering not to use your plate or bowl as a guide.
Plates, since just the sixties, have expanded nearly 2 inches, or 33 percent, causing people to eat over TWENTY TWO percent more!!! But it doesnt stop there, with the advent of Genetic Modification of Organisms [GMO’s], everything centered around your plate,whether you are vegan or not, has exploded in size over the years. As size has grown, quality has plummeted!
Your hamburger is 23 percent larger than the one your dad ate as a kid, the soft drink – 52% larger and that bag of chips, 60. Across the board things are getting bigger, its called value sizing, you feel like you get more for your money and since all other food places are doing it, everyone feels they have to do it, largely based on you. Since we as people dont take the time to educate ourselves, we fall prey to this marketing and drive the demand. When your parents were growing up a handful of Spinach provided all major nutrients and vitamins, now it would take a bushell, a bushell weighs 20 pounds. WOW.
We make fun of the “hoity toity” people eating thier high faultin’ meals at an exhorbident cost and they get those “tiny” portions of meat, and only slightly larger portion of veggies and some carb. Never realizing that they are eating sensible protions with high end organic/non gmo food driving the fare onto plates that are the rightly sized with the focus being paid to the balance of energy provided by the different – QUALITY – parts of the meal. Your stomach, if you havent stretched it all to heck, will be full with roughly, ROUGHLY, a fist to two fists of food. So, you make a fist and that is how much food you want in your stomach. Depending on what you do, i.e., if sedentary doing minimal physical activity, you will need closer to one fist and if you are super active, more than 4 hours a day, perhaps you will be closer to 2 fists. So this high end over priced meal is actually following age old wisdom, not only in the ingredients used, but in the actual portion size!
Many of us meanwhile would rather eat a value meal from mcDonalds, which now according to certain lawsuits floating around are a veritable cess pool of lies and disease waiting to happen. Your burger may be 23% bigger, but now it conatins only 33 percent meat, of which very little is actual beef so much as it is the organs and sinew and other… Ah, things that unless processed with a very powerful grinder would be unedible in the sense that you would have a lot of trouble chewing it, and the rest is wierd synthetic fillers!
The actual beef that is in there, has been jacked up on antibiotics to take care of the nasty things that grow when an animal made for eating grass is instead fed grains and the processed remains of its brethren, of course it also has plenty of hormones and the cow itself many times is actually GMO! AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHGGGGGGGRRRRRRR. The same thing is happening to your plants vegans, so be quiet, this isnt the time to be drawing straws, there is a serious problem afoot!
6. Mindless eating is a phrase, that for me, represents our habitual eating of food when we do not need food for one of two reasons.
First and foremost, when we are thirsty, which many of us are as we are living in a state of dehydration brought on many times due to a lack of water intake which is brought on due to our spurious belief that gatorade and all these other sports drinks can take the place of water, not realizing that they actually increase your bodies need for water as they have many constituent parts that have to be cleansed from the body, a process that needs…. WATER! So we mistake this thirst for hunger. Always best to just drink a glass of water and see what happens.
My second belief is that in eating many of todays Bigger and therefore Better fruits, veggies, and in many of your cases, cuts of meat and dairy, you end up with a tricky situation of a full belly but deficient intake of what matters – nutrients, vitamins, minerals, all the little no seeums that make the wheels on the bus go round and round.
No matter how big the meal, if it is not made up of quality ingredients, or if in a humble meal if it is not grown in a quality way, you will be full, but left still hungry as this is your bodies way of trying to get what it needs in order to keep your dumbass alive and running around all day everyday. Despite what you allow yourself to tell yourself is O.K., your body will do what it has to do to fix your continuous input of damage.
It isnt rocket science to look at the increase in the size of plates and how it coincides with the increase in the size of the actual produce and how it coincides with the increase in size of people and at the same time the lack of health in those people and the lack of vitamins, minerals and good for you stuff in the foods. At the same time we see the increase in petro chemicals, synthetic hormones, broad spectrum anti biotics and other little evils of modern man that are touted as saviors becoming more and more prolific in the simplest foods, and yet, they are the very thing that are destroying you to the point you have to be saved. Its kind of like your tax dollars being used to blow stuff up in a country and then using more of your tax dollars to rebuild what was destroyed. In eating s@%$ty food, you allow yourself to become a cog in the machine which is driven by dollars, not health. If you eat food, you want to have the focus of yourself and every cog in that system focused on health. Let food be thy medicine and they medicine be thy food. Hippocrates, the guy that every Doctor has to swear and oath to uphold his wisdom before they go forth and become swept away by greed and pressure from pharmaceutical companies.
7. Work out. Do something physical on a regular basis with proper form. Make sure it covers the joints, bones and muscles of the whole body. Learn from a person who actually knows what they are doing so that you may do whatever it is properly. One of the biggest set backs for people is injury in the beginning of an exercise program. You are now forewarned, ergo, you can avoid one of the largest set backs! Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers say it best – If you dont run, you rust. Its truly is that simple, lack of exercise will start a negative feedback loop of degeneration, meaning that doing nothing will make you sick and tired. Exercise on a regular basis will start a positive feedback loop and you will get exponentially healthier and healthier.
8. Reward yourself with food. Do not eat to simply eat. Many people use eating as a form of therapy for a host of issues from personal confidence, boredom, sadness etc. Having these issues is fine, you are a human, and as a human, you must learn to control what these issues have you doing. As I personally have trouble when it comes to food intake, many times I will only allow myself food as a reward. Quite simple, want to eat, do the Batman workout before eating, push ups, pull ups, sit ups. Takes 5 minutes, you can be doing it throughout the day. If you have no workout program, this will be one, so it is a step in the right direction. If you already have a program, this will serve to merely make you stronger. Either way you are a winner.
In using food as a reward, ensure that you have taken the time to learn about quality food and supplementation. Once you have learned, and your a human, you are what you eat, this should be covered by now as it is essential to your health, health is in turn essential to your quality of life, or where your “trip” takes you. So take the time to learn, and then give yourself foods as a reward. They must be foods that reward the body, not the taste buds.
The human tongue has 2 to 10 thusand taste buds, you have roughly 10 TRILLION cells in the human body as a whole. Do not sell out all those cells for the few that make up the taste buds!
This is an evolving article and will have more as the ideas filter through the bedrock of my mind, of course, if you have any ideas, please share! Aloha!
The Vegan Ninja 