Fed Up

This weekend was a helluva great weekend for watching movies at the shipping depot job. Fruitvale Station, Let The Fire Burn, The Armstrong Lie, Begin Again, Project Wild Thing… it was a lot of fun and pretty informative. But there was one movie that really stuck with me more than the others: the Katie Couric produced “Fed Up”.

It’s basically about childhood obesity and what it really means to lose weight. It was an absolutely brilliant look at how big a role soft drink and fast food companies play in the current epidemic. It also touched on a subject that I recently discovered: the myth of “calorie in, calorie out”. The popular myth that if I count my calories and work out enough, I will lose weight and be in shape. It’s a load of shit, but I didn’t need the movie to tell me this. Once I started DDP Yoga, I started losing weight. But it was eating the homemade food and eliminating prepared fast foods from my diet that really melted the weight off. When I hurt my hand and couldn’t work out, I was still losing weight. Even now, I’m still losing weight and I haven’t done DDP Yoga in almost a month. And all I’ve done is make my food at home. My portion size has actually INCREASED, as I have bigger breakfasts and lunches… and I’m still losing weight! It’s the one thing that Coca Cola and McDonalds can’t sell me, so it makes sense that it’s the thing that actually works. All that low-calorie stuff is all a big lie and excuse for companies to sell their shitty products in different ways. Instead of Coca Cola, Coca Cola Zero. Instead of Pepsi, diet Pepsi. And all the while, they keep the original products on the shelves. It’s so easy to see to open eyes.

The hardest part of the movie to watch was the marketing of crappy foods to the one group of people that can’t defend themselves… kids. They showed how 80% of schools have deals for funding with soft drinks companies to sell their shit to children and it… ugh. It really sucked seeing fat kids surrounded by fattening products, and then they get the blame for being overweight because they don’t have enough “willpower” or don’t exercise enough. I remember teaching in junior high school and how much I hated that kids were given maybe 1 or 2 options for healthy foods, and the other 200 options were shitty foods like pizza and the like. It… just sucks.

The movie simply confirmed something I already knew. The more homemade food I make and eat, the more likely I am to stay in shape. The only times my stomach felt bad after meals for the past two months were the times that I bought a quick thing from outside, like the pizza I had last week to celebrate my $10 application fee racket. My stomach was killing me the next morning, probably because the pizza wasn’t fresh. It’s what I’ve known from the beginning: the only person who truly cares about me and my well-being is me. I’m the only one who really cares, without hidden agendas or budgetary concerns, about what I put in my body. How stupid was I as a kid to believe anything other than this? Then again, how could I have known?