Eating like the rest of the world
Our church challenged us to eat like the rest of the world this week. That is, not much in terms of quantity, and not much in terms of variety. One goal is for us to know what it feels like to be hungry most of the time.
It began today, and so far I've had one new realization - no leftovers! When my lunch consisted of a single serving of rice and beans, I found myself digging out every last grain of rice and eating it. Likewise the single serving of rice, chicken and veggies tonight.
The feeling of hunger I already know, since the True Hunger weight management system I follow ensures I feel hunger before eating at most if not all meals anyway. (This is a simple secret of the already-thin, who only eat when hungry. Duh!)
One other big change for me personally is drinking mostly plain water for the week - with no diet soda, and no fruit juices.
We are advised to be sensible about health, so I'm making sure I get enough calcium, and hopefully enough calories to maintain the muscle I've worked so hard to develop in place of visceral fat in the past four years. But I'm still making sure it all totals far under my usual 2,200C/day, so I get the full effect. I can't remember ever doing such a thing before when I wasn't overweight.
Tomorrow we have guests arriving from Ecuador for the week. It will be interesting to see what they make of our efforts to eat as they eat. It will also be interesting to see what effect this has on my exercise this week.
Whatever we save on groceries by eating this way (about $100 in our case) we are asked to donate to help feed hungry children in Zimbabwe. The next phase will be for us to help pack literally tens of millions of meals for them. That too will be a good experience, though I'm very concerned about how we'll ensure our food doesn't become yet another weapon used by that sad nation's dictator (Robert Mugabe) to reward supporters and punish opponents. I know we'll try to channel aid through churches, and hope that is a sufficient protection.
One other important point was made in this past weekend's message: there are several levels of poverty. That's an important distinction, because folks we think of as poor in this country are generally still rich by world standards. As one citizen in Soviet era Russia said after viewing a propaganda film about the evil U.S., "I want to live where the poor people are fat."
The truly poor in our world live on two bucks a day, tops, without safe water or health care. Short of becoming the World's policeman (and probably not even then), we can't do much about the many nations with vile despotic governments whose policies ensure hardship. But that leaves many other countries where we can help. And part of that help is for the ecologically-minded among us to stop harming folks further by discouraging the use of DDT to stop malaria, and trying to prevent gifts of genetically-modified food to the starving.
Two relevant comments from friend Greg:
1. "I know the intentions are good, but the 'eat beans and rice' for 5 days strikes me as silly symbolism over substance. I don't need to starve myself, eat less, or go hungry to know that not having enough food to eat is an undesirable thing."
2. "I remember thinking that Mugabe was leader of a different county, but after confirming that he is indeed the leader in Zimbabwe where we are sending all this food, I feel confident in saying that at least 90% of the food we send will not go to the people we'd prefer it go to. It will, instead be used as a weapon against his enemies as with everything else that is sent to that country.
It brings to mind something that Rush Limbaugh has said many times in the past, 'the problem is not the unequal distribution of resources, the problem is the unequal distribution of freedom.'
Just think, in your lifetime the problem of world hunger has changed from a production problem to a distribution problem. Throughout the entire history of the world (or at least since Adam and Eve), people starved in this world mainly because there was not enough food to go around. In the last 50 yrs (20?), that has changed. Now, there is more than enough food produced to feed the world and that food either cannot get to where it is needed, or it is actively prevented from getting to where it is needed. This world surplus of food is due primarily to 2 things ... 1) capitalism and free enterprise and 2) the United States. It seems that the socialists in the country downplay, ignore, or refuse to acknowledge this simple and obvious fact. Sadly, this group seems to increasingly include the church."
Greg also asks: "I couldn't exactly tell from your blog ... are you for genetically modified food, or against it? Given your fondness for DDT (shared by me), I'd think you fall in the 'for' camp, but it wasn't all that clear."
To which I replied "Genetically-modified food absolutely beats no food, every time. I
really get upset when someone who shops at Whole Foods weekly suggests
someone who's literally starving to death is better off dying than
eating genetically-modified foods.
I have a personal preference for simple, whole, fresh, unmodified
food, with my one notable exception being that I eat sugar-free
sweets. Nina Planck's book "Real Food" seems about right to me on
what's good for us to eat when we can afford whatever we want."
Update:
I didn't do this to lose weight, but did so anyway. Though I only cut my usual maintenance level (2,200 Calories per day) by enough to lose 1 pound, I actually lost 4, putting me at 168.4# this morning, the lightest I've been in 20 years. Even so, I remained strong enough to bike 44 miles this afternoon.
One other update is that our teaching pastor went out of her way at yesterday's service to assure us our partner in Zimbabwe has a very good track record of actually getting food aid to those in need and keeping it from being used as a weapon by the government there. Here's hoping...
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