09/20/2024
Back in 2012 I got sick for the first time with something serious, bronchitis. I was a lifelong vegetarian in denial that my diet (which included lots of pasta and cheese and sugary desserts) was killing me.
I decided to switch to only raw foods for a few months (something I'd done before) to improve my health; one day I bit into a caramel chocolate truffle that had been one of my favorite treats before; shockingly it tasted like wax and I threw it away after the first bite.
I realized that my taste buds had been so dulled down by the beige foods that dominated my diet, that I wasn't even able to tell (because of the high amounts of sugar and salts in my food) that even the most "gourmet" confection tasted dull and lifeless.
Eating real food woke me to the truth about what I had been eating before. I had been asleep, literally, with the vegetarian diet that wasn't much better than SAD. In the afternoons I barely had any energy to function after eating lunch and wanted to take a nap, so I would turn to something like a Snickers bar to pep me up. It was a dead end and no wonder I later became so sick with mold illness and chronic Lyme Disease!
In our world where so many addictive foods have been created, it's really difficult to fall out of 'the pleasure trap' once we are in it. We want more of everything, food, money, stuff and we don't realize how gluttonous this can be. And this manifests itself as disease, this stuffing of the body with way more food than we need, because it has ingredients causing us to want more and more.
When my kids were little, we had a children's book about a toucan who filled his house with fruit every single day. He would pick the fruits and hoard them in his house. He refused to share any of the fruit with the other animals of the forest. One day they rotted horribly and his house broke apart because of how heavy they were. His friends helped him build a new house and the story ended happily. When we fill our bodies with too much food and treat our digestive tracts like a black hole where we can throw anything in and have it taken care of, what actually happens is that the food rots and putrefies inside us, and we carry around this toxic waste, which infiltrates our blood and every cell of our body, eventually leading to the horrible diseases the western world has been plagued with. It seems normal to us because everyone is doing it, even the majority of the practitioners we go to, to advise us on our health.
The Pleasure Trap is a fantastic book that helps us to reverse our endless search for happiness through momentary pleasures, to find true happiness and health. In today's live (for my private community Beautiful Biomes) I will be reading a bit from this book and we will discuss. If this intrigues you then you will love my group! Say yes in the comments or send me a message and I'll give you a link to learn more about Beautiful Biomes membership.