Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [82]
If you want to read more on how to break through addiction, there is a whole section on it in my book Quantum Wellness. I will tell you one thing, though: whatever your fatal attraction is, at best it keeps you in a holding pattern and at worst it puts you in a downward spiral. In the case of being addicted to certain foods like meat or cheese, that downward spiral can be obesity, disease, or loss of sex drive, energy, or self-esteem. It can also involve a deadening of your awareness and empathy. When you know what the end results of poor food choices are (and you definitely know by now!), you can challenge yourself to break free in much the same way you leave off other addictive substances. The more you get the addictive foods out of your diet, the less you will actually crave them. Consider that when we eat uncontrollably like drug addicts, it is probably because we have grown desensitized to the tastes of healthier foods, and need more and more of fatty, rich junk food for the same rush of pleasure. Nothing—no habit or food or substance—should ever own us, so it’s worth gently pushing ourselves into a new way of eating. Just keep leaning in to healthier choices, and soon enough your body will reject the bad stuff. You simply have to get used to good food; give yourself the time to adjust—it will happen.
A Tipping Point with Food?
When we overcome our cravings and let the better side of our nature prevail over this decision about food, we aren’t just changing any old habit. Food shapes us inside and out. If we can turn our glimpses of a better way to eat into a new way of eating, then we take a quantum leap forward. What kind of people would we become if we exercised the muscle of awareness and compassion every time we ordered a meal?
We’ve all noticed that the benefits of a plant-based diet have been discussed more and more prominently in the last decade. Movies from Food, Inc. to Earthlings, and books from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals to Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s Skinny Bitch have brought the latest facts about food to new audiences. The U.S. market for vegetarian specialty foods exceeded a billion dollars for the first time shortly after the new millennium and continues to grow. When an activity attracts a critical mass of participants, the point at which its expanding influence is nearly unstoppable, that is known as a tipping point. Diseases, hobbies, fashions, tastes of all kinds have experienced this tipping point phenomenon. Many signs now suggest that as a society we may be about to reach a tipping point in our relationship with food. I have no doubt we are at a threshold.
Consider some of the things that have happened since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Working in association with the Monday Campaigns, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has advocated for “Meatless Monday,” becoming the first major U.S. public health institution to endorse a program that explicitly sets out to reduce meat consumption. The Meatless Monday initiative pursues the modest goal of a 15 percent reduction in meat intake by encouraging people all over the world to make their Mondays vegetarian.
Just recently we saw two firsts for this strategy of reducing meat consumption: Baltimore became the first city to start serving 100 percent vegetarian meals one day a week in public schools, and across the pond the city of Ghent in Belgium has become the first to officially endorse meatless Thursdays. The momentum continues to build. As well, San Francisco’s