Humanity have ended up with (rightly) doubting its ability to keep itself healthy, with being able to decide what is good for it.
Our instincts seem to tell us to eat foods, which, eaten daily and in the quantities we would like, would damage our health. I, for one, desire cheese in quantities which would delight dairy farmers everywhere.
As humanity is maturing, we find more and more ways that generations of our evolutionary instinct is steering us in the wrong direction. The scientific method is a machine for making discoveries which are reported by the media with the opening sentence ‘It turns out…’. As in, ‘It turns out that our mother’s were wrong: eating red meat every day does not give you chest hair…’
I was wondering if we should start having the same lack of self confidence, and doubt in our ability to make healthy choices, when it comes to happiness and contentment. For example, everyone I know seems to think they would be much happier if they won the lottery.
But research shows lottery winners are roughly as happy (or unhappy) a year after they won as they were before. So. maybe money is like water – if you have less than you really need, you cannot survive. If you have very little, you spend all your time thinking about it. But if you amass a lake of the stuff, you will discover that you can’t drink all that much of it.
So with money – having enough for basic comfort is great. But more will guarantee only as much happiness as you already have the aptitude to provide for yourself.
I’m on a bit of a health kick at the moment and I’ve come to realise something; as well as our evolved attitude towards food being not only irrelevant but harmful we also condition our children (as our parents did to us) to eat more than they need.
We are taught that we must eat all the food on our plate, ignoring our bodies protests that we are full and don’t need any more food. We are told to think of all the starving children in Africa, that we must eat to grow big and strong, as if stopping eating when full will save lives or leave us small and weak.
As such we end up with this attitude that wasted food is a terrible thing and that we should force ourselves to eat even when we don’t want to.
I ask you what’s worse; feeling bloated, uncomfortable and harming our bodies with an excess of food? Or throwing away that last bit of food (and wasting a small amount of money) because you’re full?
This prompted me to investigate how much we actually need to eat and I was surprised to find our stomach is only the size of our fist. If I compare the size of my fist to the size of the portions I used to eat I really don’t know how I managed it, I must have been stretching my stomach for years to put away as much food as I had been.
I’ve started eating fist sized portions and though they left me hungry at first (presumably due to a stretched stomach) as time goes on I am finding them more and more satisfying. The hardest part is managing to do this politely when meals are offered by friends or when eating out.
I am trying not to repeat these mistakes with my daughter and though I risk the ire of adults (who think I am a bad parent for telling her she can leave the rest of her tea when they have already told her she has to finish the plate) it is worth it if she can avoid the struggle with obesity that I have had most of my life.