Baby Steps #7 & #8: EAT ME! DRINK ME!

I’m getting sick of these baby steps! I have so many other things to tell you.

So tonight I’m condensing 7 and 8, EAT ME! And DRINK ME! (I just got a copy of Alice in Wonderland (full of vintage illustrations!) for 50 cents so I’m feeling very Wonderlandish. I’ll just assume you caught the allusion.)

Even if you couldn’t do any of the other steps, these 2 would cover a multitude of evils. And they are so simple.

EAT more fruits and veggies and DRINK more water.

Wow- do they pay me to come up with this brilliant stuff?

Well, no. They don’t.

But we all need to hear it more often than we do.

What if you decided you’d eat a fruit and a vegetable at every meal and every snack for the next week? Or that after breakfast you were going to eat nothing else till you’d eaten 10 (Ok, maybe 5) servings of fruits and veggies? For starters, if you’re trying to lose weight, you’d add a lot of fiber to your diet and that would help you feel less hungry all day. You’d also be less likely to feel those sugar-coffe-pop cravings in the afternoon and evening.

I don’t have much advice for people who think vegetables are gross. Except maybe, wake up and smell the cancer, and, for heaven’s sake get creative!!! And if you need help eating fruit then you may, in fact, be beyond hope in the nutrition department….

And what if you decided that after breakfast you’d drink only water for the rest of the day? Did you know that even mild dehydration can contribute to headaches, fuzzy brain, cravings, and overeating? Did you know that studies have shown that an apple and a glass of water decrease afternoon sleepiness better than a cup of coffee? Did you know that lots of people don’t drink water till they feel thirsty, when they are already quite dehydrated? There’s a great book called Water: For Health, for Healing, for Life: You're Not Sick, You're Thirsty!. I highly recommend it if you think I’m being silly on this water thing.

If you don’t like to drink water, then I’ll give you a big AMEN! I think tap water, in the dozens of cities and farms where I’ve drunk it, is super-yuck. Water should taste sweet and smooth. Most tap water is so riddled with impurities that it hardly goes down without a lot of doctoring up. There are lots of ways to doctor up plain water- lemon, cucumber, even cantaloupe chunks, frozen, for ice cubes (really good in the summertime). But you could also just drink water that tastes good. Many folks think a home-purification system is a luxury. But if you buy soda pop, juice, milk, coffee, tea, and whatever else people drink these days, you’re mistaken. A good-quality reverse-osmosis or steam distillation system costs between $300 and $1,500. And over the years, you will spend that much and more on drinks. Shoot, I have a friend who buys 2 Tropicana jugs a week at $6. In 1 to 3 years she could have a very nice drinking water system paid for, save her body a ton of empty calories, and prevent a lot of waste in the landfill.

The other reason to filter your water is for you (if you’re a woman) and your daughters. LOTS of people flush birth control down the toilet. Some on purpose, others because they don’t fully digest it and out it comes. Your municipality DOES NOT filter out pharmaceutical agents. You get antibiotics, hormones, and anything else people flush or don’t fully digest. Yum. And studies point to these agents as potent factors in many cases of infertility and hormone imbalance.

So, again, even though these Baby Steps are pretty simple, sometimes just hearing common sense for the zillionth time is refreshing and inspiring. It’s refreshing to me just to write it down.

And yes, we had a sugared Halloween, for those of you dying to know. We went to Halloween story time and trick-or-treated (two different times, in fact!). We survived and today there is NO CANDY in my house. Because otherwise I would eat it. All of it. Even the stuff I don’t ‘like’.


"Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong."
~Dandemis


Please note that since this is my blog, and I am the editor, and no one really cares, I’m not footnoting these posts. If you want to find the studies to which I refer, Google is your friend. If you still can’t find them, you can email me, and, eventually, I will reply with the info that I will have to go find. I read constantly and sometimes I forget where I found something. I am an abysmal note-taker. Cheers!