What do we need?

I'm on week two of my new diet - I replaced 4 greasy meals a week with salad, and I'm already seeing the effects of it. My once tight-fitting jeans are starting to feel dangerously loose, and last night I was astonished to find that I could feel tummy muscles under my skin - I didn't know I had those!

I have never eaten a lot so I always wondered why I have always had a conspicuous bulge around my center of gravity. (I'm not a big guy which makes it look even sillier) It turns out that our parents were right and it actually DOES matter what you eat. After five minutes of internet research I discovered that a lot of foods we Americans know and love like McDonalds' french fries and microwave pizza may be tasty, but they're virtually useless to our bodies. So we eat until we feel full but we're actually starving our body of nutrients. The starving body goes into emergency mode and demands more food, building up an emergency supply of fat that it doesn't even need.

So conversely if you give your body what it needs (yummy vitamins and nutrients found in, gasp, vegetables!) that food actually gets used for fuel like God intended and your body stops stingily saving up fat for a famine that doesn't exist. So you can eat the same amount of food and lose weight. Crazy.

You probably knew this already but I just realized it and I'm shocked. Bear with me.

I never tried to adjust my diet before because everyone talks about how hard and miserable it is. I haven't had a very hard time with it... I just needed to set a realistic goal and find some healthy food that I actually like. Caesar salads are delicious... my stomach rumbles just thinking about them. I'm starting to actually prefer the taste of a good salad to a grease-bomb burger.

Hang on, I'm coming around to a semi-relevant point here... if this is what I've been doing with food it makes me wonder if there's other stuff we do this with in our lives - You know what I mean, right? Like, do we have other "hungers" in our lives that are telling us we need something, and are we trying to fill those hungers with things that only make us feel gross? Do we keep shoveling things into a hole unaware that it's just coming out the other end? That those hungers can only be satisfied by one thing, and it's the one thing we don't want because it's not sexy, it's not appealing, it's not sweet or greasy?

Do we need to adjust things other than just the food we eat if we want to grow? Would we feel more alive if we fed our soul what it's asking for? Or maybe we would we rather stay frail and unhealthy just to taste one more whatever-it-is...

Just something to think about...