What You Actually Crave is a Connection to Real Food
Our food has become a weapon of mass destruction.
You need only to consider the rising rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and mental health disorders to know this is true.
Food is both energy and information for our bodies.
The great lie that “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie” only focuses on the energy side of the equation. It ignores the fact that food enters your body through the gut which sends signals to your brain about what nutrients are or are not available.
So when you’ve just downed a whole bag of chips - my arch-enemy of snack foods - there are no real nutrients coming into your body. So your gut tells your brain to keep on eating! That’s why you can’t stop. The “stop eating signal” created when you have enough nutrients has been muted.
We’ve been trained through advertising campaigns and the mindfuckery of bliss point foods to believe that junk food, ultra-processed food, soda, sugared cereals and snacks are perfectly normal parts of our diet and can be consumed regularly without consequence.
This second great lie is costing generations of people their health and wellbeing.
If we take a step back, and look at where we’ve come from . .. .not our family or neighborhood or country . . .but where we’ve come from as ancient humans, as hunter-gatherers and/or evolving agrarians . . .
. . . how is it that humans, as in the species Homo sapiens, have lived on the planet for some 300,000 years without dieticians and nutritionists, but modern people are sick and dying with all this science and “help”?
My contention, and my reason for writing here at The Naturalized Human, is that what we truly crave most isn’t the dopamine hit from bliss point foods, but what we crave most in our ancient hearts is a connection to where our food comes from.
We are hardwired to seek food, gather it up and store it for our survival.
Think about it.
If you go back even a few hundred years, large portions of your day would be spent obtaining, preparing or storing foods. There were no fridges and freezers. Food had to be collected when ready and stored properly for the future. Do this or die.
Everything was “organic” as in, there were no pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers being applied. And a large portion of food was produced in a livestock-plant system because that resulted in high value animal proteins with the side benefit of natural plant amendments to increase those harvests, aka a nature-based solution to keeping your food close at hand and growing more of it.
But the key thing in this equation is you - YOUR time and energy - would be focused on whole foods and your body would be receiving whole foods packed with energy and nutrient information . . . every day.
I am not romanticizing the ‘good ole days’ thinking this was an easy way to live. People worked hard and died young, and suffered diseases that we can cure with ease now.
The point is, you are still that ancient human on the inside. And a couple hundred years of modern living isn’t long enough for massive biological evolution to occur.
And that means, your brain and your body are still hardwired for the purpose of searching for, obtaining, and processing food YOURSELF. Hardwired, with all the sensory capabilities to see, smell, hear, touch and taste whole foods.
But in our sensory deprivation of the modern food system, pushing a shopping cart around a store - no matter how bright the vegetable display looks or what music is being played - is no comparison for what our mind and body craves.
As a small-scale farmer with a livestock-plant system, trust me when I say growing your own food is a full time job that takes me outside my door 365 days a year on top of how I earn my living. There are complex interactions between the farm and mother nature to contend with. Bountiful harvests and devastating losses occur. Mind-bending challenges arise that can take weeks, or months or years to solve. . . but at the end of the day, there is a satisfying meal to be had.
We can’t all be farmers anymore - and heaven knows there are scores of people who wouldn’t choose the lifestyle to save their own lives - But what we can take away from this radical juxtaposition of producing real food vs grocery store food-like substances, is that waking up to what we need for healthy minds and bodies means stepping away from what is now defined as the “normal” diet . . .you know, the food everyone eats these days.
Because that modern food is making everyone sick.
It is as clear and as well known as any fact we have. It is demonstrated beautifully by the absence of modernized foods from Blue Zones where people live LONG, healthy, active lives.
Reclaim Your Connection to Real Food
The journey back to real food is a work in progress for most of us, me included. It’s about hitting the reset button on the madness of the “food industry” that has replaced nutrition and common sense.
Something as simple as potted herbs on your windowsill, microgreens on the kitchen counter or a garden outside your back door are part of the solution. “Creating” real food for yourself becomes the high you cannot live without because your body on sugar vs your body on full nutritional energy AND information is no comparison.
Once you’ve kick the modern food habit you can’t believe you considered that stuff food at all.
Let go of your sugar-body and embrace the person you are evolutionarily meant to be.
Let’s start by healing yourself from food brainwashing with these steps:
End your isolation - subscribe to join the community here at The Naturalized Human and share your journey with a like-minded group of people asking the same questions about food, health, and wellness.
Educate yourself - check out the Mind-Body-Food Connection and Growing Food sections where you’ll find an ever-growing library of posts with a combination of research and human experiences to guide and inspire you
Leave the food-like substances on the store shelf and seek out real whole foods, that give you energy and information and medicine for your body
Learn to listen to your body again - this one takes time, especially if you are addicted to bliss point foods, but you are in the right place to find support, encouragement and a little humor to help get you there.
That’s a wrap
We are all fundamentally ancient human beings struggling in a modern world that denies us the very things that bring us deep satisfaction and connection: access to real food.
Understanding where you food comes from, and deciding to take control over even a fraction of how it comes into being changes everything.
The health and diet war-zone of the modern food system is meant to confuse you and funnel you into corporate money-making pathways that have nothing to do with your health or wellbeing.
Your mind and body crave real food. That’s the beginning and the end of the story.
There are a LOT of new readers and followers right now and I wanted to say hello and welcome! The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection. I encourage you to subscribe and become part of a like-minded community of people interested in creating health and wellness in an ever-more complex and distressing world. I seek out the latest research, and translate that into actions we can each take to improve our food, our health, and our planet.
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I’m so happy you are here and I look forward to getting to know you!
Good info and guidance, thank you, Sue!