What Are You Putting in Your Body? A story about a weed eater.

The other week I went to use the weed eater in our yard and found it was out of gas. I grabbed a gas can from the garage, filled it up, and proceeded to finish my yard work. When my husband came home, he was upset with me because I had put the wrong kind of gas in our weed eater. He explained to me that the weed eater could only use two stroke oil or else there would start to be a buildup of harmful material in the engine and the machine would cease to function.

I stopped to think about how upset he was that I put something potentially harmful in a machine that we bought for $25 on craigslist, yet humans continually put harmful foods into our bodies that are irreplaceable. Leaving out the more controversial ones, the foods our bodies were never intended to eat on a regular basis include processed foods, artificial sweeteners, (most) meal replacements, and fast food. These foods all have something in common: they are devised to be easily consumed and make you feel good for the short term. However, as time goes on and more and more processed foods go into your body, a buildup will start to occur, and your body will cease to function at its optimum capacity. In short, we are putting the wrong gas into the weed eater.

I’ve read a lot of articles over the years that say things like “We can’t compare human bodies to cars! We can live off a variety of different foods and it’s not like fueling a car!” And to that I completely agree… We can’t compare ourselves to cars. We are not machines. We are, by definition, omnivores, and can survive off many different types of foods. The human body is pretty amazing.

But is that what we want to be doing? Just surviving?

So in the end, maybe the machine really does have something to teach us: Don’t take the shortcut and use the cheap gas from the mystery gas can. Your body is worth so much more than my second hand weed eater.

xoxo,

Bonnie