Last week I started watching a documentary about eating too much sugar. I thought having the tv on while everyone was home would inspire my family to cut sugar with me, but my husband wasn’t interested and my four year old talked over the audio for 30 minutes. I finished the documentary today. But I’m not gonna lie. It left me a little heartbroken.
In the documentary, a 17 year old boy in Kentucky was having all his teeth removed because they rotted out. He regularly drank 12 cans of Mountain Dew a day. The dentist working on him mentioned that it was not uncommon for children to be given bottles of sodas and caffeine beginning at two to three years of age. It’s scary. Horrifying. Heartbreaking. Not just for their teeth, but for their health. And it’s so sad to me that these kids’ parents don’t know better.
I notice changes in my son’s behavior when he eats sugar. The reaction happens to all of us. Though maybe we don’t recognize the cause.
Mood swings. Breakouts. Obesity. Diabetes. Sugar highs. Sugar addiction. Hyper activity. Brain fog.
The list goes on.
There’s an epidemic. We don’t know how to care for our children and we don’t know how to care for ourselves. The food industry makes eating healthily even harder with hidden sugar, processed ingredients, and chemicals in everything we buy.
I eat icecream with my husband as a ritual after kids are in bed. (He’s a self confessed chocoholic and dessert pusher.) It feels stress relieving and nice to enjoy some down time together. But at the same time, I often don’t want the icecream. I feel like I’m eating it out of obligation. My body knows that sweets keep me from feeling my best. And the surge of carbohydrates and sweetness before bedtime give me a restless sleep followed by extreme hunger as soon as I wake in the morning.
For me, eating healthfully is less about weight loss and more about feeling my best. I want to have energy to enjoy and play with my kids.
I don’t think people understand what they’re doing to their bodies. I don’t think we know better. We’re given conflicting information. Things that seem like common sense to me clearly aren’t to others. Other people know things to be common sense that I don’t get. But I feel like we have to try. We have to educate ourselves. All we need to do today is a little better than we did yesterday.
In the same way my body knows I don’t want icecream every night, I believe our bodies have the answer to feeling our best and achieving better health. But most of us don’t know how to listen. I’m anxious to learn.
