My daughter has just had a baby so life in all of its intensity and aliveness is on my mind. When we have a new born, we have all of this care and attention to baby’s well being. Mother eats well (meaning lots of veggies: folate comes from foliage of plants, not added to your bread!) for pregnancy, knowing baby needs nutrients to grow properly and develop appropriately. Mother stops poisons like alcohol. Mother tries not to be overweight, as this can set baby up to be overweight. What mother eats during pregnancy and breast feeding shapes what foods the baby is attracted to, which is going to shape its health. Mother tries to breast feed as everyone knows breast is best, nutrition wise and bonding wise. Mother tries to have a vaginal birth as this isbest for immune system of baby, as is breast feeding.
If the baby is lucky, this is the kind of attention and care with nutrition and environment the baby will be given.
Contrast this with how people ‘take care’ of themselves. Are we less valuable when we are 20. 40, 60, 80? People every day put stuff in their mouths that they know are bad for them. Whilst many people are fooled by misinformation about meat, eggs and dairy, most people know that alcohol, chocolate, lollies, McDonalds, Coca Cola, energy drinks, chips, biscuits are bad for them. Most people have a lot of these things: “a little bit won’t hurt”. Everyone knows veggies and fruit are good for you. Recent research by CSIRO found that 93% of Australians were not getting the recommended 5 servings of veggies and 2 servings of fruit per day! This is in line with results in America. Most people’s idea of veggies is a serve of hot chips, which is not a health food, due to all of the oil and possible cancer causing effects of acrylamide, a substance which is created in the deep frying process.
When we are having a baby we try and keep everything natural. The same applies to food: non-processed food is food, stuff from a factory is a food like substance, with the more processing the more dangerous it is.
There is a joke in our family which comes from a time years ago where we are stuffing our faces with potato chips and Julie says not to give any to our dog, Scarlet as they are not good for her! Her Dad, Val said, “look after the dog”, with the unspoken part being don’t worry about yourself. Needless to say we have stopped potato chips for ourselves as well.
I believe change is about a journey from somewhere undesirable to somewhere desirable.  We are motivated by wanting to leave an undesirable place and have an idea or a picture of what the desirable place is like.   I think a big thing holding up change for people is no or little experience, or no idea or picture, of the desirable location. That is they have never been truly healthy in their life.   When was the last time they felt alive: high energy, sense of well being, sleep well, feeling good?  This is our natural state. To achieve it, we don’t have to do anything but eat properly. As we eat properly, taking care of ourselves with the care that we would take for a baby, we will get more energy and want to do more things and we will feel more positive about life.  We don’t have to resolve abuse and neglect from our past or our personality defects: eat well. Eat well means, eat whole plants:nothing processed.
