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Date Posted: 16:55:14 11/16/09 Mon
Author: SS
Subject: Re: ************ORTHOREXIAANSWERS***********
In reply to: SS 's message, "************ORTHOREXIAANSWERS***********" on 12:36:54 11/16/09 Mon

5) Because my parents still insist on eating highly-processed foods, and have highly-processed foods represent a vast majority of their weekly grocery shopping, inevitably my sudden shift to an organic lifestyle roused heavy concern from my family for quite a while since moving to Portland in 2004.

In April 2006, when I was amidst my transformation in earnest and my body mass index nonetheless plunged sharply during that time (I at one point near that time weighed 112)………..and though I was never in an anorexic phase at any given point but, nonetheless, it didn’t stop anorexia rumors from surfacing and getting blown out of proportion………and it was then, before I made my final canvassing route for my parent’s Allstate office branch in the Rose City Neighborhood in Portland, that my mother had a little talk with me regarding my appearance for the first time, saying how concerned she was with the way I looked and that if I ever felt sick or anything, which the truth is I have never felt physically sick all this time.

Afterwards, my mother purchased a Blender for me, and with it demanded I fill fat-enriched whole milk to the eight ounce mark, and pour some BioChem 100% Whey Protein Powder into it (which contains 100% pure Ultra-Filtered Whey Protein Isolate, rich in the highly bioactive fractions glycomacropeptide, beta-lactoglobullin, immunoglobullin, glycopeptides and lactoferrin, which feed muscle tissue and support the immune and hormonal systems, and also contains high levels of branched-chain amino acid and glutamic acids, plus a perfect ratio of other amino acids for anticatabolism (muscle sparing) and anabolic responses, which these low molecular whey peptides aid in the delivery of nitrogen into the muscle cells.) shake it up, and drink it twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Because the initial product she purchased was all-organic, I happily agreed to………….but soon afterwards she started purchasing this conventional protein powder loaded with synthetic ingredients, and despite attempting to explain to her I don’t want to consume artificial additives anymore, she said angrily to not complain to her and drink it……..and what happened was, whenever she wasn’t in the kitchen and I had eyed the area carefully, I would flush each container of the powder down the sink, adamant about not drinking any artificial additives.

Also, a year ago on my 25th birthday, my mother was mostly aware about my shift to an organic lifestyle and said she would respect my decision all in all, but nonetheless chose to bake a birthday cake for me using Duncan Hines cake mix and frosting, which is packed with artificial additives including trans-fat shortening. So, wanting to be as respectful as I can to her while being insistent not to have any of my own birthday cake, I simply left the cake alone as the rest of my family dug in. However, later that evening on my birthday, she said in a stern voice: “Why aren’t you eating any of your birthday cake?” and I replied softly: “I don’t eat artificial preservatives anymore!” and she replied “Does it really matter, Noah?” and when I said it mattered to me, she said angrily how I’m just wasting food and should be grateful I’m living in a first-world country that can feed its citizens, which at that point I gave a deep sigh and just walked away from her signaling to end the conversation (this year, in contrast, she understands where I’m coming from and purchased a cake from Trader Joe’s! =) ).

Beyond familial misunderstandings, however, given Portland is a very local-centric, progressive-minded city, I had few difficulties adjusting socially in terms of food issues with others in the community. Portland is a mecca for vegetarianism and urban farming, so most understood immediately where I came from. That said, there’s no question if I was living in a rural Midwestern or Southern town or community, it would be quite the opposite. I am most fortunate to live here in Portland! =)

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6) I absolutely believe I feel MUCH better and healthier under my current set of eating habits than under any previous eating habit regime.

I virtually never feel fatigue (studies have linked more regular/chronic fatigue to poor dietary habits and lack of exercise, while their healthier-eating counterparts report much less fatigue) and can jog half a marathon effortlessly fairly regularly without abdominal cramps, whereas before, even when I was on the cross country team when living in Colorado in my adolescence, I would stop several times before completing a 5K race course. Surely, in my youth, when sitting in front of the television set a majority of the day, I would always feel tired and would take naps, while now I never take naps because I never feel like taking one.

I also haven’t had a single headache as far as I can remember (at least nine months or so), have only fallen ill thrice over the span of seven years (about one upper respiratory infection every 2 1/3 years on average) and feel this greater sense of capability and self-esteem I lacked before. I now feel I can accomplish almost anything, and just feel internally sensual and pure all-around.

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7) I don't consider myself religious at all, but I nonetheless do consider myself a highly spiritual individual.

The real critique I have with contemporary religion is that it encourages, what Neale Donald Walsch calls in his critiques of contemporary religion, this “Separation Theology”; that is, that we are separate from some Higher Force in the universe we identify by different names (God, Allah, etc.) or that "we are here" and "_______ is there". I believe there is Divinity in everything, including ourselves, and all the great Masters throughout history has confiemed this to be true, including Jesus Christ, who said that the key to God’s kingdom is through unlocking ourselves. Yet, when religionists insist we are separate from that Great Mystery, what that Separation Theology does is foment this Separation Cosmology, encouraging us to see ourselves as separate from all other life on this planet, which leads to Separation Sociology where we're led to believe our purpose in life is to act on our own separate interests, separate from others, which leads to this pathological behavior, including all war in the world.

Recently, I’ve become most enthralled with Tantra, and I think the reason why I've become most fascinated with Tantra is that it's really more a spiritual philosophy than anything, which means different things to different people, but ultimately is about expansion and liberation. Tantra is a Unifying Theology, one that encourages growth and interconnectedness. And it encourages us not to resist anything and, regardless of whether each outcome is ultimately judged by others as favorable or unfavorable overall, is equally important in our collective learning experience and personal growth and creation in life. And sexuality, obviously, is just one fabulous facet of that.

Even so, part of me will always value the most positive proverbs and wisdom that echo all throughout the verses of the Bible. Especially the Hymns and the Matthews verses, which are all about helping the less fortunate, which always echo in my head when I'm working in a rescue mission, homeless shelter or other such environment. My turn to Tantra is truly no renunciation of my Christian faith, but rather a celebration of my spiritual and personal expansion! =)

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8) Breakfast: Nothing. Not because I was intending to starve myself or anything, but because generally I don't have an appetite until about one in the afternoon, partially because I haven't had breakfast in years.

Lunch: I generally would cook up a whole pot of a particular grain, then stir-fry a medley of produce from my refrigerator, mix some coconut, sesame or olive oil in it, sometimes turmeric, cayenne pepper, several other spices and a nut butter as well if I want to make a curry, and top the grain with it. Alternatively, I would eat two large bowls of oatmeal or natural cereal (Barbara’s Bakery, Kashi, Arrowhead Mills, etc.) or sometimes a tempeh fillet panini sandwich with olive oil, tapenade, sun-dried tomatoes and peppercorns.

Dinner: Similar to dinner, though with larger serving sizes compared to Lunch.

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9) I think the Food & Drug Administration and the U.S Department of Agriculture, primarily, are not fulfilling their societal duty as proper and efficient regulatory bodies, and are more influenced by corporate lobbyists than at any previous time in their history.

As it is, Monsanto now owns 1/3 of all organic seeds in the world and are among a wide number of forces encouraging the proliferation of genetically-modified organisms, including in Kellogg's breakfast cereals where the oil used in them are coming soon from genetically-modified soybeans. Plus, throughout my life I've had a distrust and scare of aspartame (found in NutraSweet, Splendor, Equal and other sweeteners) of beverages like Kool-Aid which have cancer-causing agents worse than red 40, among other things. I resent the impositions FDA Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs, Scott Gottlieb and other FDA cronies tied to large pharmaceutical interests and Wall Street make on everyday Americans; from FDA panels that write each drug usage guidelines having someone linked to drug companies 3/4 of the time according to a Spring 2005 Nature article, to their passive approval of the bovine growth hormone Posilac from Monsanto which exacerbates illness and destroys calcium levels in cows, to companies like StarLink producing genetically-modified maize that has caused allergy problems among many consumers, etc.

Remember that song you used to hear, and perhaps chant in your second grade class with your classmates, written by Rose Bonne and Alan Mills titled "I Know An Old Lady"............which is essentially about an elderly woman who swallows a fly, then in panic swallows progressively more ridiculous things in hopes of mitigating the problem caused by swallowing the fly in the first place........only to discover that, in spite of wishful thinking on her part that each thing she swallowed would be a remedy for the original problem, her problem only worsened every time she swallowed another animal?

With a wide array of corporate experiments on our food system, THAT is exactly what comes to my mind. Take GMO’s, for instance. Our instance of swallowing the fly began when we adopted monoculture crops and pesticides and then, when we assumed we could somehow fertilize them with synthetic substances and chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorous.......instead we throw entire ecosystems out of balance, which consequentially lead to increasingly erratic fluctuations in populations of various species, generate more complicated pest problems than ever toward our crops, and we attempt to rectify that problem by, applying even more fertilizer to them, and then much of that ends up leaking deep into our soil, into the groundwater, percolating into creekbeds, which pour out into rivers which ultimately empty into our oceans and, the final product being dead zones widening within them. And assuming the fertilizer is the proverbial "cat" in "I Know An Old Lady", and GMO's are its proverbial "dog" counterpart, I'm frightened to guess what the "goat" and the "cow" will be………..or with anything from synthetic sweeteners to antibiotics to herbicides, etc. for that matter.

Walt Whitman famously wrote in his 1867 poem "To The Sayer Of Words":

*

“The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.”

*

Much the reason I have chosen to eschew processed food in general, and gravitate to organic eating entirely, is because 1) I've realized how much I've taken for granted the beauty of nature in its diverse, original splendor, and that I can have it so much better by eating as naturally and traditionally as possible, and 2) it is well-known that over 85% of processed foods in America use oils, sugars and other ingredients derived from genetically-modified products. I have no regrets whatsoever making this transition, as I refuse to contribute to what Barry Commoner referred to in his 1971 book "The Closing Circle" as an "insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society" that has "blindly accumulated a debt to nature—a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us." I refuse to consume such deceit, which apparently the World Wildlife Fund and even Oxfam are struggling to do, especially if it will make my liver turn purple and dramatically alter my DNA, among many other possible worst-case scenarios.

The world is beautiful, the world is bountiful, the world can provide EVERYTHING for us if we let it, as the United Nations even reported last October that organic farming is the best way Africa can escape poverty and malnutrition, as well as help mitigate climate change, and I for one hope to see a future for my children, grandchildren and their great, great grandchildren where historic nobility, rather than historic notoriety, continues to govern our land.

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10) I realized I was all but certainly orthorexic when I began observing that the topic of food was obsessively dwelling on my mind throughout the course of each and every day. Where deciding what to eat suddenly became a chore to me, rather than the simple joy of eating, as well as the obsessive-compulsive urge to research for hours each day the latest “schemes” agribusiness were hatching up, out of the fear that if I missed a single update, something would “slip past me” and I would fall victim to them yet again. I felt like I had to be completely vigilant or I’d get hoodwinked again.

In spite of that, I believe my tenacity to my eating habits is justifiable, and the only real notable shift in my attitudes since then has been not to see my experience in terms of “limiting” myself, but rather in terms of “expanding” myself by being adventurous and trying new foods that are grossly overlooked in conventional grocery stores. And, in that, I believe my diet is actually more diverse than the conventional American diet.

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11) I feel my answer to this question is reflected in my answer to Question 10.

I’ll add, however, that food is certainly valued as a beautiful, necessary entity that enriches our lives in the minds of orthoretics. Orthoretics, if anything, revere the land in which we till, sow, reap and harvest upon, and believe the farmer is not merely a mythical icon that we worship only through folklore and nursery rhyme, but a benevolent sage that is vital to the future of civilization and the survival of the human race and of all living organisms. In that, I believe, since my adolescence, I now revere food through a spiritual lens, rather than just a four-letter noun that we must eat to survive.

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12) The real danger about orthorexia is when one fails to maintain it as a healthy “lifestyle choice”, and allow it to permeate every other dimension of your life like an invasive plant species or algae could forever negatively alter an ecosystem. Where, suddenly, what was once a harmless lifestyle choice suddenly influences everything in your life……………from how you judge your friends to how you exercise during the course of a day to how you spend your spare time. When it becomes a form of unconscious martyrdom as I like to think of it, it can lead to depression, chronic anxiety, and can even shapeshift into something like anorexia or diabetes when not checked and balanced.

What people must understand about orthorexia is that orthoretics DO love to eat. They just simply ask that the food they eat is truly nourishing and/or a celebration of the natural world we inhabit, rather than an artificial, chemically-produced representation of it. If one unfamiliar with this still-widely unknown eating phenomenon, then it will encourage relational empathy and help encourage our youth especially to lead healthy, balanced lifestyles, rather than becoming martyrs if too harshly judged.

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13) McDonalds Hamburger: McDonalds is an atrociously terrible restaurant, with an abysmal record on public health, respect for their workers and labor, the environment and manipulative advertising to children. My vegetarianism aside, I refuse to eat another one of them again.

Coca-Cola: Like McDonalds, Coca-Cola is simply dead to me. The aforementioned High Fructose Corn Syrup and phosphoric acid dangers aside, the fact they’ve been linked to the funding of paramilitary operations in South America, as well as having been implicated in numerous labor violations, gives me no incentive whatsoever to ever purchase a product of theirs again.

Blueberry Muffin: It depends on which ingredients were used in the baking of what is truly a potentially taste-tickling treasure! =)

I could never trust a blueberry muffin from a conventional grocery store bakery or bakery chain because they would all but certainly include both High Fructose Corn Syrup and Partially Hydrogenated Oil as host ingredients (along with artificial colorings as well). However, if they were made at a co-op, farmers market or whole foods store with natural ingredients like flax seed meal, evaporated cane juice, agave nectar, etc……..I could gorge down half a dozen in utmost bliss! ^__^

Banana: Even though I’d prefer purchasing most other varieties of fruits and vegetables in that there are no bananas grown within a thousand miles of Portland, Oregon, thus having the guilt of funding immense carbon emissions just to make their aerial transport to grocers and fruit stands across the United States possible, I otherwise believe bananas are absolutely delicious and excellent for digestive health, as well as ideal for daily potassium intake.

Spinach: (drools) Need I say more? Nutrient nirvana! Nutrient nirvana! LOL!

Quinoa: One of my absolute favorite foods! Can’t live without it! ^__^

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14)

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  • Re: ************ORTHOREXIAANSWERS*********** -- SS, 17:24:08 11/16/09 Mon
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