Thursday, February 2, 2012

Indigestion

Are any of you on Pinterest?  Let me tell you what I love about Pinterest, okay, one of the many things I love about Pinterest.  I see my friends pin the most delicious-looking recipes then pin a fat-burning exercise or way to flatten the tummy.  I do it too.  Cracks me up.

Okay, so after my rant last week I felt like we kind of all feel the same way when it comes to body image and our kids.  So, I now feel confident to have the following breakdown:

It's too much.  All of it.  I can't take it and I can't live up to it.  Everywhere I turn someone is putting something gross in my food.  Worse, they're putting it in my children's food.

Can't a girl just drive-thru and get a freaking cheeseburger without worrying about the 90 different ways it's going to kill me.  Look, I'm okay with worrying about nutritional content.  Clearly, eating burgers and fries every day isn't good for you.  But I can't even have it once in awhile without wondering now.  Thank you FDA for letting these things end up in my food.

I was sitting in the drive-thru at Taco Bell-y (get it?  My sister invented that one) and I noted a sign that said that their ground beef contained a whopping 86% ground beef.  What the f is the other 14%?  I'm certain I don't want to know.  McDonald's is now uber-proud of themselves because they're no longer putting that weird pink sludge in their burgers.  KFC uses genetically engineered chickens that have bigger breasts than a Hollywood starlette wanna-be.  All of my canned goods are leaching BPA into my cream-of-whatever soups.  There's too much sugar in 99% of the things that I like (not my Nutella!). 

So here's where all of this backfires for me.  I am so overwhelmed by all of it that I just throw up my hands and in a defeated voice order my Mighty Kids Meal (it's the perfect size and it comes with a toy!)

What the hell is a girl to do?  Look, I try my best to feed this family of mine delicious food that doesn't come out of cans, that is grown locally, that won't kill us with its food coloring, etc.  But I'm going to fail because:
A.  I'm not independently wealthy and stuff that's good for you is more expensive than the shit that will give your kids ADHD.
B.  I live in an area with a very sad showing for local winter produce.
C.  Even though I stay home with my children, I don't actually have time to bake all of my own bread, grow my own veggies, and churn my own butter.  I tried the baking bread bit for a while.  It was delicious but good Lord, I don't have that kind of time.
D.  Although I was raised by hippies, I am in fact, not one.

I admit it, I like the things that are bad for me.  I like the things that are good for me, too.  No one is yelling at me to not eat that grape, though.

Apparently now my precious sugar is in jeopardy now, too.  My sister sent me an article that made me never want to let my child eat another carb, drink another drop of juice, eat another cookie.  Apparently the sugar messes with the part of the brain that tells the child that they are full contributing to childhood obesity and a host of other issues.  This makes me sad, though, because I want carbs, juice, and cookies.

I've never been a successful dieter.  (BTW anorexia and bulimia are not diets, so they don't count.)  I can't deny myself things.  I have to have that mini ice cream sandwich after a long day of explaining why it's not okay to pull kitty's tail and whap sissy in the head with a book.  Fat?  Sugar?  Chocolate?  All in one delicious mini package?  Yes, please!

Well, I guess food is like TV for us.  I have basically phased out almost all cans at this point as we have phased out *most* TV.  I still use random cream-of-____ soup for my recipes just as we still watch a bit of Sprout and PBS here and there.  I have pledged to no longer let Claire have animal cookies, *sniff.*  But damnit, I can't cut out every freaking bit of fat, chemicals, and sugar.   

I read on Healthy Child, Healthy World's wall on Book of Political Commentary, I mean Facebook, that one mom's family is gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, corn-free, and sugar-free.  My brain exploded.  I don't know what we would eat if we didn't have those things.  Okay, I'm not trying to be a complete asshole here, I recognize there are real food allergies out there and moms are their child's first line of defense.  But come on.  I have decided Healthy Child, Healthy World spends way too much time allowing people to congratulate themselves on what they're cutting out of their diet this week rather than offering real solutions for real people.  I think I'll cut Healthy Child, Healthy World out of my diet.

2 comments:

  1. Nicely worded!!! I love reading your blogs. You are such a good mama. It is hard to make sure what our children eat is actually nutritional food that they NEED in their body to help them grow. I try hard to limit the amount of sugar the kids eat to "special occasions" and have them eat more friuts and veggies. Neveah eats salad and veggies raw with no dressing because it's too "sweet" in her opinion. Every once in a while you have to spoil yourself to eating outside of the house....but over the last couple years, I have been more aware of cutting that back too. Thanks for your blog, I love it!!!

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  2. Okay, every time I feel overwhelmed by all the 'nastiness' in our food (although the sand in McDonald's food I learned about last week has turned me off of McDonald's) I remember this: thousands of years ago, people lived off of unvaried foodstuffs (think about the societies that only grew corn, or the societies that only ate what they hunted) and I realize that human diets have always been precarious, at best. For the most recent eons of time the best thing you could do was bake some variety of bread and slather it with some variety of lard. So, unless we want to go back to foraging for tubers and bugs, or eating only bread with lard (which is kind of making me hungry) I am going to forgive myself the sometimes daily juice box to the kids or the Nutty Bars I enjoy shoving in my face.

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