Documenting a Personal Journey Through Life

The title of this post is provocative and that’s intentional. This is not about physical wife/husband abuse, but something most of us do on a daily basis. The idea for this blog-post came to me when I read a blog post from miss-best. It’s about the food we eat, and the way we generally treat our bodies.

Our bodies, as I’m sure you’ll agree, are quite amazing. The things they can do amazes me every day, yet we take them for granted. Never do we appreciate the amount of work they have to go through each day to keep us alive. Clearly we couldn’t go walking around thinking about that all the time, but it’s a good exercise to take a few minutes and just ponder about it.

The sad thing is that we seem to believe that our body can cope with anything we put it through and the most common form of abuse comes from the food we eat. From an early age we are indoctrinated into thinking about food in a certain way. I’m talking about cooked food. A huge portion of the foods we eat today are cooked. We’re in some sort of cooking frenzy. The mantra seems to be that if you’re going to eat it you cook it. I’m waiting for the day we start cooking our salads… hopefully that day will never come.

Heat kills

Take anything, anything at all. Heat it up and you will most certainly change it in any number of ways. The molecular structure of pretty much all that we know of is affected by heat. Some things, like ourselves, are very sensitive to temperature change and even just a few degrees will make us very ill. The same thing goes for food.

Take any type of food and I’ll bet you that it will be very much affected by changes in temperature. Plant a seed and you’ll have to care for it like it was your own child. Nurture it, feed it, water it, all to ensure healthy growth. Neglect it and it will die, take note on the last word, DIE. This goes for pretty much anything that we would consider food.

So, assuming food dies when heated (as made obvious by the above mentioned observation) why would we cook the food we eat? Clearly, not everything goes away when cooking, but wouldn’t it be rather foolish to assume that it’s not affected by the heat? It’s empirically proven that food is affected by heat, yet for some misguided and unknown reason, we don’t make that connection when preparing food in our kitchen.

Somehow we’ve manged to survive for quite a long time eating cooked foods, how could that be possible? I believe the answer is due to the massive amounts of food we eat daily. Even if much of the food is changed or destroyed, there’s still some left and that’s how we survive. But the dead food has to be processed within our bodies somehow, and perhaps it will be treated as a foreign and dangerous entity which our bodies will attempt to eliminate. It’s not that hard to believe, is it?

Most people also don’t exercise at all and I wouldn’t exactly want to say that we’re healthy. There are so many diseases that affect, and kill, us daily. What we’ve done I wouldn’t want to call survive, but something else I can’t even name. We’ve spread. That’s what we’ve done. Through “modern” medicine we can trick our bodies, at least for a while, to think that it’s healthy and functioning, but in the long run, I believe we’re only playing with the inevitable death.

Introducing raw food

So,what’s my point in all this ranting? Well, I quite recently began eating more raw, uncooked, foods. It’s amazing how quickly your body will adjust to a “healthier” diet. As you introduce more natural, unprepared, foods into your eating habits the less “crap” you can get away with. I’ve experienced this first hand. Previously I could put pretty much anything down my throat and be okay with it. Sure, I’d be constipated for days, but hey, isn’t that normal anyway?

Today, since introducing more raw food, I get away with very little, especially if I eat something “naughty” in the evening. Potato wedges will make me hungover. The day after I’ll have a headache, feel sluggish and generally quite lethargic. Never did I feel that way before. Perhaps I’ve gotten weaker? I don’t think so. Thing is, I’ve began to listen to my body. What most people don’t realize is that it will tell you pretty much anything you need to know about your state of well-being. All we have to do is start listening and observing.

I never cared much for my body before. Sure I wanted to look good so I worked out, ate protein powder (because clearly that’s what makes you big, sigh). Listening to my body? No, never did that. Today I allow myself to listen to my body when something is wrong. It’s funny how we’re always told that listening and communication is so important when it comes to normal relationships, but we’re never really told to listen to our bodies.

We’re strange

So, my conclusion is simply that we humans are a most peculiar race and I’d even dare to say, rather stupid. Sure we’ve made some technologically amazing advances, but when it comes to our bodies, we’ve not exactly done the equivalent of the moon-landing. We are the only species on the planet that cook food, and drink the milk of other entirely different species. When it comes to food we simply don’t seem to get it right. Hopefully one day we’ll be intelligent enough to realize that cooking food, wasting energy on eating meat and drinking the fluids of other species is plain stupid in every conceivable aspect.

Until then…