Feeling Good

When I read the Eat to Live book, it promised a vegan diet would make me "feel good."  This sentiment was echoed by many people that I talked to about the plan. "It's going to be hard, but you're going to feel so good!" The problem with such a high level assessment is it falls under the psychological phenomenon discovered in a study of manufacturing process almost 100 year ago: When people are asked about how well something works, they will always say there's an improvement because the process of asking affects their assessment.  So now that I'm asking myself everyday if I feel better, I'm psychologically inclined to say yes.

So what metric can I use that 's more accurate than "feeling good"?  I'm tempted to use energy level, which has indeed improved. For a long while, my night of sleep would begin on the couch after conking out while watching TV or reading a book.  This hasn't happened since the diet change.  However, there are too many factors to simply declare this is because of what I'm eating

Even if I discount energy level, there are several tangible changes I've noticed over the last week:

1. All my life, I've had dry scalp problems (that's a coded way of saying dandruff, since no one wants to admit they have dandruff).  It was severe at times and the only relief was through the regimented use of medicated shampoos.  Within a week of my improved diet, my dry scalp is gone.
2. I also had severely chapped lips.  While this hasn't gone away, it has greatly improved in the last week.
3. Cathy informs me that my skin is much healthier now.  I have to take her word on that one, since I don't look at my ugly mug in the mirror often, and when I do all I see is an ugly mug.
4. Here's the big one.  Whenever we'd go out for a big meal, especially a dinner after a good size lunch, I would have cramping that would result in running to a bathroom and [gory details omitted].  This was particularly annoying when the cramping and need to go would kick in soon after we left the restaurant and we had a long drive home.  Yesterday, after our second enormous vegan restaurant meal of the day (I swear the burrito I had for supper was the size of my head), I realized hours later that there had been no bowel issues.  This was the first time in memory that I'd eaten two large meals in one day and not had problems.

I need to point out that I'm not connecting these improvements with any single change in my diet.  For example, I'm not concluding that not eating meat or dairy is what cured my dandruff dry scalp.  The more likely cure was removing caffeine and minimizing salt, but I don't even know that for sure.  While I can't say with any certainty what part of my dietary changes solved these problems, I can say that the sum of the changes did solve them.

Looking at those four changes, I can say that I'm feeling pretty good right now.  While I could focus on the removal of meat and dairy as the reason, the frightening thing I've noticed is how much crap is in all the processed foods we eat. I've always had an unhealthy love affair with salt, and would douse dishes with generous dashes before even tasting them (to Cathy's dismay).  I stopped doing that for this program,  but immediately noticed that almost everything you get out of a can or box or bottle has a ton of sodium in it, as well as an array of chemicals that I'd need a PhD in chemistry to comprehend.  As I said previously, I'm applying common sense to my dietary choices, and the less my food resembles a chemistry experiment, the better it is for me, in my opinion.  The huge companies that dumped all that shit into our food didn't do it because they were worrying about our health. Now that I'm avoiding these processed foods, it seems likely that their absence contributes to the changes I've seen.

Even if you don't feel the same way, I encourage you to read labels. Perhaps the tenth chemical on the list will cause a change of heart (and if not, those chemicals may literally change your heart).  Thanks to lobbyists and our government, you might also be getting additives like pink slime that aren't mentioned on the label, so don't believe everything you read. A little more food for thought: When you eat at a restaurant, they don't tell you what they put in the food.  If that doesn't scare you, I'm not sure what will.

P.S. Whenever I read about pink slime, the theme song from the movie Green Slime pops into my head.