This obesity map I found on CNN just makes me sad. What will that map look like in 10 or 20 years from now? Completely red? I sure hope not. It scares me to think how unhealthy our nation is, as a whole. And I’m saddened thinking about how many untreated food addicts are out there, floundering around, trying to figure out what’s wrong with them. The dramatic increase in hydrogenated oils in our food supply in recent years plays a large part in this problem. Most people just buy what’s on the shelves in the stores without giving too much thought about the ingredients. That choice is proving to be fatal, as the food industry does not have our best interests at heart. There’s one thing on their minds and that is the almighty dollar. The more addictive they can make a food, the more it will sell. It’s like a group of people in the industry suddenly realized 20 years ago that there are certain foods that are highly addictive like sugar, white flour, and hydrogenated oils, and said, “Let’s load our foods up with these - we’ll sell more of them!” And they did. Now our country is paying the price for that greed, and I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to go back.

Here’s a follow-up to the story I posted about the honeybees disappearing. Apparently the crisis isn’t as bad as the original article I found made it seem. I guess there are two schools of thought on this, really. Some people believe this is a major crisis, and others think it will be a minor inconvenience at worst. You can read some thoughts on the latter in this article. And you can see what the good folks at Fark have to say about both sides of the story right here.

I’m falling somewhere in the middle of the two - I’m a little bit worried, but definitely not panicked.

I need to figure out some more options for “portable starches” in my food plan. Right now the only thing I really eat for starches are brown rice, potatoes, beans or legumes. For example, I will eat meals like this most of the time:

Meat, rice, veggies all mixed up
Meat or tofu, potatoes (sliced or whole, baked), and chopped veggies
Salad with refried beans and meat on top
Chili with meat, veggies and beans

Basically, these are all great meals for eating at home or in a restaurant. However, there are times when I need to eat on the road - like tonight! We are going to a screening of a movie that starts promptly at dinner time for me. The theater is about 1/2 hour or more traveling time from here, so I’ll need to eat my dinner in the car or sneak it into the theater and eat it there. I was planning on bringing chopped up raw veggies and some tuna, but I can’t figure out what to bring for my starch. Times like this make me wish I still had rice cakes on my food plan because they are so portable. I wonder what my sponsor would say to me adding those back - only one way to find out. She’s out of pocket today, though, so I need to come up with a plan that fits my current food plan for tonight.

Any ideas?

Have you been paying attention to this honeybee thing? They are dying off in large numbers. At first I thought, “Yay! Not as many bees in my yard this year!” Then, I started reading more about the situation and realized how much the honeybees affect our food supply and I got scared. The line from the article that says, “reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet” scared the hell out of me.

Here are a list of some of the foods the honeybees pollinate, thereby ensuring the crops are plentiful:

Apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers, citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

That’s a big part of my diet right there! Not good at all. I sure hope they find out what is causing the bees to die off so something can be done about it. Scary.

Technorati Tags: honeybees, honeybee problem

I want to make a habit of recording my monthly weighing here. Since joining OA, I have only weighed myself on a monthly basis. For too long in my life, I was a slave to those numbers, so it’s just not a good idea for me to be on the scale any more frequently than that. I have found, along with a lot of other wise people, that weighing monthly is a good way to ensure I’m staying on track without becoming so obsessed with the numbers game.

This month I lost another 2 pounds. I have been losing weight for 5 years in a row now. Isn’t that amazing? There was a period of about a year and a half where I stabilized and stayed the same weight, and I thought I was done. I would have been fine with that number, because I was 175 pounds at 5′11″ tall. I wore a size 12 and was very comfortable in my own skin. However, I changed my food plan about 6 months ago and the weight started coming off again. I’ve since lost another 8 pounds, bringing me to 163, for a total of 117 pounds lost all together. Incredible. The most incredible part is how little effort I have put into actually losing the weight. I’ve concentrated on getting well and healthier emotionally and spiritually, while following a sound food plan, and the weight has just come off on its own. It is a true miracle.

Technorati Tags: weight loss, 12 steps, OA, Overeaters Anonymous, recovery