This post is from my new blog at Kids Living Longer.
As I was walking our dog, Nelly, at 6:00 this morning, I was thinking about how Americans have strayed so far from real food, and now 70 percent are sick and medicated.
What happened?
It is a complex issue, and I am only going to follow one thread: distraction. Distraction is complex, so I will drill down further.
Clearly women were meant to raise their children. They gave birth to them and they were equipped with the biology to feed their newborns. It is easy to see why women were with the kids before the Industrial Revolution. They had the most important family job.
With industrialism and the rise of corporations, women’s biology was replaced by illness-inducing baby formula, prepackaged illness-inducing foods were manufactured, leading eventually to the TV dinner, home education was replaced by industrialized schools, and women in essence lost their jobs. Those women were now faced with little meaningful work to do, and that is depressing and disempowering.
Fortunately, women turned their strengths and talents elsewhere when they sought employment, college degrees and careers, but that had its downside as well. We were told we could do it all, and we couldn’t. Women and their families suffered.
I am not saying that women should stay home and raise their kids in our modern world. I support women having careers. I did, and it was great! I also know
that not all women want to have children and are fully satisfied with their lives, and that is great! I get it – I was someone who NEVER wanted kids, until I had a dream about a baby at age 35, and that is great too. I now have two loves of my life and am grateful every day. Each person’s path regarding career and family is different and no one path is right.
What I am saying is that with nobody solely focusing on preparing food and instead parents largely turning their kids over to a corporate driven world, we have become a country of sick and disconnected people. Our fast-paced, economically challenging modern world makes having a parent stay home to raise and homeschool the kids, and cook and take care of the family in other ways, VERY DIFFICULT for those who can pull it off and IMPOSSIBLE for others because of financial constraints. We have to divide what was traditionally the Mother’s Work among everyone in the family. If we don’t, we will fail as families and a society.
I know what failure looks like. I tried to do it all with career and family, and I wrecked my body because I gave up sleep. Thirteen years later I am still recovering.
Regarding traditional “Mother’s Work,” I enjoy it as much as my career. I loved my career and still volunteer related to it, but there is so much meaning when you are literally taking actions to keep your family healthy and moving strongly forward. That is a career too. In fact, it is the most rewarding one I have had.
I have to admit that I get sick of cooking sometimes, but with Colson now in the kitchen with me, we spend meaningful time together, I have less work, and he is learning how to cook so that he can be healthy when he leaves home.
Colson must know how to cook because he has food sensitivities. He began cooking young, and now he is picking up the pace and creating cooking videos at our Kids Living Longer YouTube channel. He is no longer the food prep and clean-up guy and we share the workload equally. If we are pressed for time, Ryan (husband/dad) does the clean-up. Ryan used to be fully functional in the kitchen, but when Colson was born I took over and took his power. He has been demoted to food prep and clean-up. ;)
Because of the effort we put into our food, we are pretty healthy and we avoid joining the 70 percent who are sick and medicated. If we didn’t take the time to focus on the food we eat, all three of us would be sick and medicated.
Many people have been sick for so long they don’t remember what feeling well feels like. If there is one takeaway, it is to know that your body wants to heal, it wants you to feel great, you just need to give it the chance. Once you do, it will give you gifts you never expected, so take the chance as a family and watch everyone excel!
If you are wondering where to get started, check out the most important food we added to our diet.
Happy Hormesis!
(To learn more about hormesis watch this Colson video: Soda Insanity!)
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