You may or may not have heard of Dr. Bates and his methods for mind relaxation and proper thinking that people use to improve their vision without corrective lenses decades after his death.
I ask you, why would someone go to all that trouble when they can just put on glasses?
I submit that they would not adopt such a lifestyle if better vision without glasses were their main end.
They adopt the lifestyle because the relaxation and the proper thinking are the main importance, and the better vision without lenses is a side benefit. Otherwise, a person will stick to it for a while and then give it up.
So it is with eating good food. It takes initiative. One must prepare the food, so it is easy to give it up and just order a pizza if one is only doing it to lose weight, avoid cancer, control sugar or care for the heart.
To be long term, it must be a lifestyle as I am sure you have heard. Lifestyle requires a long-term motivation in addition to initiative and gumption. So why do I always tend to good eating?
If I come home tired and it's late, a pizza sitting there hot is hard to resist while what I really want to eat is going to take some work in a cold dark kitchen. But after I eat, if it was the pizza, I am not going to feel great. If it was what I wanted, I am going to feel great not only because I have no guilt and because I was such a stud and worked, I am going to feel great because good food....now get this -
Good food tastes great, it feels great. It makes you go, "Oh Man!" when you are chewing. It feels great going down. It costs less money - if you think about such things while you eat. It feels great down there. It feels great all the way out. And the next day, you feel great. After dinner, if it was a pizza, you just want to go sit down, hold your blanket (or your beer) and suck your thumb (or watch tv). If it was good food, you feel like going out to the garage and hoisting that motor out. Your muscles feel like lifting some weight, your legs feel the need for speed, and there is a bounce in your step. This is the main motivation for eating well. Maybe avoiding cancer or cataracts down the line are side benefits that dim in comparison, so much so that even if a person knew he was going to get both anyway, he would still want to eat good food.
If he is going to get cancer, but he eats well anyway, he will have the strength of a wrestler to deal with the pain when he does get it.
I would rather live to the age of 70 with the energy of a wrestler than live to 100 in the condition of the average American today. That is how my dad did it, but he made it to 85, not 70. Well, actually he did make it to 70, but YKWIM.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I am not saying you are going to like the exact same types of food preparations as what I detail in this blog. The things I love, my wife cannot stomach. People vary. Learn to cook for yourself. You need not eat like me, but like me, you should reach a point where, using the most fresh, valuable and simple ingredients possible, you enjoy your own cooking far more than you could ever enjoy the fare from any world-class chef.
It is a huge advantage for me to have been raised in a good food environment but that is not sufficient. It is 82% more easy to be disciplined and indifferent toward "plastic food" if those you live with are with you in their diet. But that is not sufficient. (Plastic Food is a loose term I will use from now on to describe commercially prepared foods that in general come in a bag, box, can or plastic molded package and contain sugar (or worse), white flour and ingredients that you don't know how to pronounce, let alone identify, and that worse than for what harmful ingredients they may contain, lack hugely something fresh or with food value. I am concerned that my kid eats enough sugar to choke a horse and I am concerned about the preservatives and such; I am more concerned that the thing with the most nutritional value he eats is peanut butter on commercial bread.)
Another Note:
Pizza is by no means the epitome of plastic food, not at all in some cases. But some of it comes close enough to be worthy to be picked on here. It illustrates how even "okay" food can easily replace food containing what you need for your body tonight, or right now.
