A foot felt like a mile, a day felt like a year. I felt heavy and hollow, always anxious or depressed. So I’d down my chocolate and my chips, and other feel good foods, and I’d chase them with chai lattes or fruit juices only fit for the kind of kids who can handle that much sugar. And even when what I ate or drank didn’t set off some kind of sugar induced coma, I’d usually regress to where I’d begun anyway: lethargic, at best.
It took six straight months of depression and anxiety before I stopped blaming a “breakup” and haywire hormones for my wellbeing’s erosion. First, I started living my life again. And when I wanted to feel better, I started to experiment with food. When I did, I finally figured it out. After all the sugar and caffeine, too many carbs and too much dairy, I knew. What I was eating was eating away at me.
It’s all in your head, they’d say.
Friends and strangers didn’t get it, nor did they get me. And when they’d tempt me with their cookies and brownies, I’d shrug (and rarely, I’d give in). But when they’d brush off my attempts at taking back health by embracing nutrition, I’d dare them to eat organic for a week. So far, nobody’s taken me up on that. But when someone does, I’ll dare them to tell me they don’t feel differently afterward.
“It is a great challenge to admit the far reaching effects of our eating habits,” said Peggy McGrath, a raw foodist who’s working on a raw food cook book, and on a book about the connection between mood and food. “To challenge the way someone eats and what they are eating is often challenging their fundamental views of life.”
McGrath spent the first 20 years of her life eating like a typical American. She learned from her parents, friends and the media to match her food to the occasion, or to alter her moods with the foods that she’d eat.
“If you want to have fun, have pizza; if you want to celebrate, you eat cake,” she said. “If you’re depressed, go have your favorite food. No matter what the mood, I was taught there was a food to match it.”
If she needed energy, she’d choose caffeine; for stress relief, she’d turn to carbs and for pleasure, she’d indulge in desserts. She and I both grew up like that, with food that was fast, and canned and frozen.
“At 20 years old, I noticed fatigue, headaches, stomach pain, bloating, constipation, shallow breathing, decreased energy, depression,” she said.
The same sort of epiphany that hit me hit her hard, too, and years later, she is where I hope to be someday. It’s “taken 10 years of deprogramming,” she said; ten years, that is, to cultivate the kind of honesty and awareness necessary to take a look at her diet and make legitimately nutritious decisions.
But when I look around, I see why McGrath is the minority. In the stores where we shop, boxes and cans are stacked on shelves, wrapped in attractive packages that scream fat free, sugar free, low carb, no carb and that boast quick cook times. And it sells whether it’s laced with artificial sweeteners that turn to formaldehyde in our bodies. It sells whether it’s processed, unnatural, pumped with preservatives, nuked ’til its nutrients die, fried ’til it feels like it’s fake. It sells regardless of whether no one knows what it’s made of, regardless of whether no one you know can pronounce its ingredients. It sells because it’s there. And it’s easy. Plus, it’s a little conspiracyish.
“Our society is duped into believing the food that’s largely offered is good, and that they’re getting nutrients from it,” McGrath said. “There are millions of dollars spent on marketing processed food to us and it is marketed as convenient.”
And convenience is what we want, right? After all, many of us are too depressed, anxious, tired or stressed to spend more than a few minutes preparing our meals.
We are busy, we are hungry and we don’t have the energy to change our eating habits. I believe we lack the energy because we’re malnourished when we eat what’s convenient. And something tells me the ones who disagree can only disagree because they’ve been desensitized.
“Our bodies are amazingly adaptable to pain,” McGrath said. “There are so many levels of discomfort I didn’t even realize I was living with until I started eating real food and they disappeared.”
And that’s not unlike what I experienced after my food experiment more than a year ago. I ate organic for one week, and one evening toward the end of that week, I couldn’t figure out why I seemed so hyper. I haven’t had caffeine, I thought to myself. And I don’t think I had too much sugar.
A minute later, I came to a conclusion. Was I hyper? No. I had energy, and I’d forgotten what that felt like. When that week ended, most of my anxiety ended with it. And I’ve been different in a good way ever since.
Still skeptical? Well then try it.
I dare you.
