Funhouse food
In August, in an effort to lose weight, improve my health, and learn to cook, I took the Jumpstart class with the Rochester Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Any attendee who participates fully—measuring changes in their health, attending meetings, etc.—is allowed one free retake within 12 months. I'll be beginning that retake on Monday. I'm grateful for the opportunity, because although I learned a lot and developed good habits the first time around, I got off-track with Kika's passing and the holidays. I try not to make excuses, though. I didn't want that change enough. I didn't want it enough to overcome those challenges, anyway. I hope that the retake helps me to rebuild those habits and stick with them.
The RLMI recommends a whole-food plant-based diet. I've been vegan since the summer of 2011 for ethical reasons, but over those years, I became a junk food vegan. There's plenty of highly-processed vegan food out there, full of sugar and salt and fat, and it hasn't served me well. Although I'm not one of those people who thinks any diet can work miracles, curing cancer or some such thing, I do think eating more real food from the earth is probably better for everyone. This program helps participants learn how to do that. (If you do believe a certain diet can work miracles and cure cancer, that's fine, but please don't rely on that at the exclusion of modern medical treatment. It won't work.)
Although I had followed other diets in the past, some very successfully, taking the course in August opened my eyes, for the first time, to how terrible most grocery store food is. Most of those items with the big, bright logos, fun packaging, and exciting new flavors are filled with stuff that nobody needs. I'm not even talking about complex chemicals which have difficult-to-pronounce names—those things can be found in bananas, too. I'm talking about the heaps of salt and oil and sugar these brands pack their foods with to make them as delicious (and as unhealthy) as possible.
Since then, I've been struggling to come up with a term for this kind of food. Everyone knows the term junk food, of course, but that doesn't quite describe the food I'm talking about. Many people consider ice cream to be junk food, for example, but not oatmeal that's unnecessarily packed with sugar. I think we need a term for the latter.
After lots of thinking, I finally came up with one: funhouse food. If it has bright colors, a bold name, a cartoon character, or fun packaging, if it's loaded with salt or sugar or fat—if it's too much fun—it's funhouse food.
May I endeavor harder and harder to avoid it.