It’s About Time We Eat Real Food

Our food is killing us. Today's families are fat and diseased from a diet of processed foods, and our children will be the first generation to live shorter lives than their parents. Time is of the essence: We must change course right now. It’s time to start eating real food and stop eating ‘frankenfood.’ This is not just another fad diet. It’s about saving lives.

Gastric bypass weight-loss surgery was my wake-up call in 2003 to reverse my personal obesity epidemic and diabetes and hypertension — the death triad as I now call it (read my story). To borrow a phrase, I was sick, fat, and nearly dead in my 30s, a processed food junkie on ~10 prescription medications. Without bariatric surgery and lifestyle changes I would not be alive today. I would have missed out on my grandchildren. That’s a very sobering and humbling thought. Instead, I cheated death, I surely did, thank you, G-d.

The problem underlying these health conditions is the modern American diet heavily-laden with grains, refined sugars, unhealthy fats, and toxic food additives. Obesity is even harder to treat than the diseases/health conditions it causes. The low treatment success rate associated with obesity is likely because people need to commit to changing patterns deeply woven into social fabric, food and beverage commerce patterns, personal eating habits, and sedentary lifestyle. And if you think the bariatric surgery is an easy pass to skinny, then I’m here to tell you that it isn’t.

My approach is one of replacing grains, refined sugars, and unhealthy fats with fresh, local and seasonal food that is chemical-free, sustainable, and nutrient-dense. That was a complete turnaround for me. I had a career that kept me away from my home, and my kitchen, 45-60-hours per week. I did not want to cook after a long day, but I wanted to serve a nice meal to my family. So I relied on processed foods, aka frankenfood, like frozen stuffed chicken cordon blue, frozen broccoli in cheese sauce, and a white rice pilaf from a box.

However I learned to develop fast and simple recipes -- typically 5-ingredients that could be prepared in about 30-minutes. The food industry is very deceiving in their marketing. They craftily paint a picture of health and convenience for us, labelling processed food products as “healthy” or “all natural” and use words like wholesome goodness, when these claims in reality are not backed by truth. There are no regulations or standards that define “healthy” so just because something is labelled healthy doesn’t mean that it is. And generally-speaking, if a food was “all natural” it would not be packaged in a box with an ingredients label.

The food industry also has somehow convinced us that it takes too long to cook a meal from scratch. I know, I used to believe that lie! It’s really not much trouble to grill a chicken breast and some vegetables and serve it with a salad. In fact, in the amount of time it took me to serve up a dinner of processed foods, I was able to serve up a much tastier and far healthier meal of real food to my family — and the rewards are tremendous.

Dinner in my house typically is a grilled or roasted protein with fresh grilled or roasted vegetables and a salad. Sometimes I’ll make a stir-fry served over quinoa, or a homemade soup, or crockpot chili. These are all examples of how I make real food real simple in my home, and anyone can learn to cook like this. By the way, this is the way my daughter cooks for her family, too, as cooking skills whether good or bad are passed down from generation to generation. What cooking skills are you teaching your children?

I use some minimally-processed foods. I try to avoid at all costs those foods with any chemical ingredients, or ingredients list that contains more than 5 items. And I never bring any processed foods desserts into my home, such as boxed cake mixes, frozen donuts, brownies from the supermarket bakery aisle. If I want dessert then I have to make it from scratch and that’s fairly involved. Because it’s so much work I won’t make dessert every day; heck I won’t even make it once a month! You won’t, either.

Living larger than ever,

My Bariatric Life

www.mybariatriclife.org