We’ve all heard that old school phrase before, “you are what you eat.” Surely somebody’s mother if not your own or a teacher or television character somewhere on down the line in your life must’ve uttered the phrase, “you are what you eat” in your presence , no? But let me ask you something. What in the hell have you been eating? Ya know, I’d actually always known that I had been eating bad for for a long time, I really did. But like an STD, everyone thinks it’s okay to go rough-riding Johnny Bareback with their talan-talans all willy-nilly, thinking it won’t happen to them just before they get burned. Well the same applies after a lifetime of Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, Domino’s, Wendy’s, Popeye’s, Coke, Pepsi, Sprite, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, Snapple, Gatorade, Sobe, Campbell’s, Sara Lee, Cheeto’s, Doritos, Frito’s, Tostito’s, Snickers, Twix, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and M&Ms, supplemented by arsenic infused mass produced factory farmed chicken that’s further complemented by genetically engineered and hormone injected beef and pork, and cheese, cheese, more cheese, and before I forget, cheese whiz. But it will happen to you eventually and probably is already is happening to you currently whether you’ve realized it yet or not. Everything that you are eating is specifically designed to kill you slowly, and slowly but surely indeed it will kill you if you aren’t eating correctly. I know very few people with the personal discipline to take total control of their food intake to ensure that they’re truly eating clean It’s not cheap to eat healthy, but at the end of the day your health is essentially all you’ve really got in this world. It’s your primary asset unless you’re one of those people with the mind that can function beyond the necessity for functional mobility, and still, who wants to be that guy? Nobody I know, surely not me. What is the point of achieving the height of wealth, personal fulfillment, and success, if you won’t live it comfortably in good health? Why get rich or successful at all if all you’re going to end up doing is having a bunch of doctors, pharmacists, and health insurance cartels literally eat you up like a school of hungry piranhas? Ask yourself, is the food that you eat actually eating you from within?

For me, it all started a long time ago when I was bar-tending at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan Beach. I have a certain charm that would magically award me a big piece of tiramisu from the pastry chef almost daily when my back was turned. I had ballooned up to an unforgivable 196lbs, which at just under 5’6″ is more than a little thick. I had heartburn all the time, waking up nightly with stomach acid splashing the lower extremity of my esophagus, eating an unconscionable number of Tums or Rollaids on the regular.  I wanted to lose weight.  Before this job at the restaurant, I worked at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, which was an experience in which a random job saved me from myself only to get myself caught up in shenanigans stemming from my sudden popularity with the local cougar community, but I digress.  I realized at the time that I was a soda addict and that I was drinking more soda than water. I weened myself off of soda by buying Perrier or Pelegrino sparkling water and mixing it in with a splash of cranberry juice cocktail. It took about a month, but that was my first step in weening myself off from my soda addiction.

The USA is under a severe healthcare services affordability crisis right now. Had you ever entertained the notion that perhaps the system is acutely strained with rising costs in everything from visits, to treatments, to tests, to prescriptions, to insurance, to imaging, to even so much as talking to a person live on the telephone, because the American public doesn’t eat actual food? The road to salvation lies within recognizing the fact that this is no accident. If you ever find yourself wondering how to control 300,000,000+ people with access to firearms, just remember that more often than not it’s our vices that kill us in the end.

MORE TO COME!!

One of the first observations about the United States that Mrs S., had mentioned to me many years ago was that it seemed like there was a donut shop on every corner.  Interestingly enough, I’d lived in Los Angeles for 25 years and it had never actually occurred to me until she pointed it out.  Then again, truth be told she’s a tad bit more visually observant than I am.  That’s why she made detective and they booted my bumbling incompetent ass off the force, but I digress…

If I had a dollar for every time somebody told me that addiction was a disease I could finance a Tom Cruise movie and get Martin Scorsese to direct.  Okay, I’ll bite, but before anyone goes getting all uppity on me over my having said that, I’ll just put it all out on the table.  I have experience with addiction, myself.  I’ll start earlier and not so juicy.  I started smoking cigarettes at the ripe old age of 10 and developed a habit of smoking one to two packs a day until I was 32.  Not only that, but I also used to do a lot of cocaine for more than two years, doing anywhere from $40 – $80 per night all by myself, with an ass-pocket bottle of bourbon to keep me from going over the edge.  Every single night that I would find myself sitting in my car parked outside of St Nick’s on 3rd in L.A., trying to talk myself out of it.

“why are you doing this to yourself?”, I’d ask.

“You know this is killing you.  Are you really so sad that you’re willing to die alone in your shitty little apartment over some blow?”

“All you gotta do is put your key back into the car and just go.”

Then I’d stick my quarter in the payphone right outside the joint and say, “two invites, I’m right outside,” and dude would come out and we’d do our deal and I’d go home to wallow in my own misery.  But guess what, all of that was a choice.  One day I decided that I didn’t need that shit in my life anymore.  I threw out a brand new pack of cigarettes and stopped smoking cigarettes and doing cocaine on December 19, 2003, and haven’t looked back since.

But that’s not what this essay is about, is it?  It’s about a different kind of addiction.  It wasn’t difficult for me to quit doing blow and puffing smokey treats.  I just up and quit, no problem.  No meetings, no therapy, no gum, no patches, no hypnosis, no cravings or self defeating inner dialogue.  But you know what was harder?  The hardest thing that I’d ever done was to quit using sugar.

When I mentioned it at the top of the page about there being a donut shop on every corner, it was when I was struggling with quitting sugar that I realized just how addictive that stuff truly is.  I was driven to stop using it because I needed to detox my entire system after I was diagnosed with MS.  Make no mistake, processed sugar is a drug, and it’s in practically everything.  MS and many other conditions are connected to candida yeast overgrowth, and candida feeds off of sugar, so I had to starve my system of all forms of sugar.  I didn’t even eat fruit, except for blueberries, for more than six months.  I had to read every label of every food that I ate, not to mention that I had to quit using flour products, processed foods, dairy, basically everything that tasted good.  However, it wasn’t until I was at a grocery store checkout aisle when I realized something incredible.  The mental process that I was going through every time I was standing next to all those delicious and tasty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, M&Ms, and Twix bars at the checkout was identical to the mental process I was going through outside St Nick’s when I was trying to talk myself out of buying some cocaine.  It dawned on me, that there’s a reason that sugar is in practically everything.  It was the first time I realized that The Man wants you to get sick.  It’s not like heroin or cocaine, the drugs that can actually kill you on your first usage.  It’s happened many times, first time users who were experimenting with hard drugs like coke or heroin ended up dead.  But sugar, it’s sweet, it’s delicious, it’s addictive, and it has long term ramifications.  Between the sugar industry and the medical industry, they’ve got you coming and going.

MORE TO COME…