3. Eat healthy

So there you have it, number two on the list of things you should start doing and start doing every day.

3. Eat healthy

Too often people get confused about what eating healthy looks like. Is it any wonder, with all the new diet fads out there eating healthy has taken on a whole new meaning? Now I am not a dietician or a nutritionist. I probably have eaten unhealthy for half of my life and in a twenty year period have probably lost 1,000lbs. (That would be a 50 lb.weight gain and weight loss over that time span). There are those though that can eat anything they want and not gain a pound and then there are those who are always on a diet and are still over weight. There are those who I fear for when I see them because they are approaching what I call the point of no return and are on the threshold of being bed ridden. Sadly many of these folks who are dangerously overweight appear to be young people between the ages of 25 and 30. I would suspect genetics probably has something to do with our body type, but our environment and the introduction of addicting foods have everything to do with what we eat. Now our parents don’t force feed us now, but when we were younger they probably did introduce some yummy foods that was either too sweet or too salty, for the record in my case the foods were salty.

I wrote an article some years back titled “Bare Feet And White Flour” I am going to share it here because I believe it has everything to do with where are belief system comes from and why it is so difficult to eat healthy.

Have you ever wondered why your parents did some of the things that they did? I did lots of times. My dad had so many regimented activities that I thought he had a screw lose or something. I’m only going to talk about two here because there are just too many to put into one essay.

I really spent time observing my dad as a kid and listening to him. It wasn’t until I was about forty that I realized some of the benefits of his behavior and, very recently, some of the real benefits of his behavior. My dad had an unbelievable fear of getting a cold. He came home from WWII with malaria and tuberculosis. He was always cautious of sharing food, towels, cups, and silverware. Any watermark on a piece of silverware in a restaurant was sent back immediately.

I remember one time in a restaurant in New York a fork went back three times. Some people send food back. He sent the silverware back. It got so bad that one guy sitting close to use told my dad that the he thought that the waitress was on Candid Camera.

If you sneezed you were accused of trying to bring a cold into the house, to try and kill him. He was hospitalized on December 27, 1967 due to a re-occurrence of the TB and was sent to the infirmary at the veteran’s hospital in East Orange NJ for 3 months. When he was released from the hospital anything and everything could give him a cold.

Two things were absolutes, cold feet and white flour. I never saw my father walk around without something on his feet. He wouldn’t walk three feet without putting on a pair of slippers. If

you sneezed, he would always ask you what you ate. My sister, my mother, and I thought he was crazy. Bare feet and white flour would make you sick and if you got sick, well as he put it, “If I get a cold I am finished.”

All of these things I observed always stuck with me. When I was about 40 years old I started to battle my weight. Always watching my calories and trying to stay in shape. The Atkins diet started to become very popular along with other diets that restricted carbohydrates, and other foods that contained you guessed it, white flour. Exactly what the old boy was talking about 50 years ago. Suddenly everyone had a carbohydrate allergy, was gaining weight, had type-two diabetes, high blood pressure, and all kinds of health related issues because of white flour. I started to watch my white flour, sugar and starch intake and I started to lose weight. The stuff I loved as a kid was something that could kill me. The stuff that my father said could make me sick was making me sick.

Recently I was walking around the backyard wearing a pair of three dollar flip flops. I have a tendency to drag my feet when I walk primarily because my feet are kind of flat, something I inherited from my dad as well. I walked from the shed to the concrete walkway and slammed my right foot into an Adirondack chair. I know I broke the middle toe. At least it looked broken.

The next day passing through the garage I stubbed the same toe on a hand weight in the middle of the floor. I got into the car in agony, looked down at my foot which had the same three dollar flip-flop on it and I could hear my father say to me, “Will you please put your slippers on.”

This isn’t the first time I stubbed that toe but it is the first time it dawned on me that my father knew me because I was just like him. He didn’t want me to go through the same agonies that he had gone through. He didn’t want me to get fat or stub my toes. Unfortunately, he just had a strange way of letting me know. I don’t think he ever gave me the reason why he did what he did. That’s probably why it took me thirty years to figure it out on my own. If I could ask for something I would ask that my three daughters learn the reasons why I do what I do quicker than I learned things from my father. There’s a question that kids ask all the time “Why do we have to do this?” Sometimes by the time that gets figured out, it’s too late. So put your slippers on and have a piece of fish with some broccoli, you’ll be glad you did.

So what does eating healthy look like to me? A bowl of oatmeal in the morning, a turkey sandwich for lunch and a protein with some vegetables and a salad for dinner; eating this way for me helps curb my appetite, reduce cravings and removes my desire to snack. Would this work for everyone, maybe or maybe not but this is my way of eating healthy. Do I eat this way all the time? No of course not. But when it comes down to consistency I think the most important thing is having a place to go. Oh you can get up later one day but you know where to go in order to rise early, you can have a piece of cake, but you know what your healthy eating looks like so making the return to it is a bit easier.

Exercise and diet go together. Jack LaLanne the late fitness guru from the 50’s and 60’s once said that staying healthy is 90% diet and 10% exercise if you want to remain healthy. We can’t exercise to eat more or reward ourselves with food after exercise. The truth is we can’t out train a bad diet.