Food lovers and Cebuanos, the ones born here as well as the ones that settled here by choice have a well know love affair with food J.
We just love to dine, go out and enjoy great tastes and atmosphere which is why Cebu is bubbling with delicious flavors and aromas at every possible location and some impossible locations too.
However this love affair is somehow tainted as our appetite for easy and cheap access to food and nutrition grows while our time to do so diminishes in an unhealthy proportion to each other. So that is where fast food comes into mind but fast food has a very pricy tag attached to it and I am not talking about the ever loving peso no it is our health that pays that bill.
More and more of fast food chains local and imported alike compete for our favor offering us more and more quick fixes to what originally was supposed to be a love affair and we fall for it. Opting for grease and colorants in place of aroma and nutritious benefits and the results are showing. Large parts of our fellow Cebuano battle with serious health concerns, obesity, diabetes, cardiac disease, asthma, allergies, high blood pressure and many more the list is smilingly endless it even affects our ability to reproduce! And worst of all our children.
My husband and I are no exception to this development, following our busy routine all day long we barely find time to eat and in the evening we drop exhausted onto our respective spots on the couch too tired to get up and stir up a meal – well maybe the pasta dish occasionally – but it is just sooo much easier to grab the phone and have it delivered so what are our choices? Pizza? Burger? KFC? Maybe something local? But what can get here fast?
9 out of 10 times we end up with a more then questionable choice indulging in fatty foods and quick fixes out of a cardboard box accompanied with a soda of choice mostly Coca Cola and the results? – Well skin problems to start with, overweight which results in joint pains and a bad back aches, high cholesterol and funny sounds on the heart and ah did I mention alarming blood sugar levels, bad eye sight, chronic fatigue, bad breath and hormonal imbalances resulting in bad mood? Insomnia, reduced immunology and increased infection rate, battle with various viruses, fungous and bacterial infections and all that paired with an increasingly low self-esteem.
We realized that we were heading for disaster with a blinding speed and had to turn around drastically it turns out there have been so many there before us so the market for solutions is enormous, you have the pricy drugs at every pharmacy that promise weigh loss without effort there is the gym member ship which is pricy too and worst where once you crossed a certain line you get started at and of course you can always opt for a nice OP in which they will reduce your stomach to half and suck out the mayonnaise straight from your rear end!
Yes neat but is that healthy? Will it save our lives not to mention can we pay it? And once done how will that help us become healthy and stay that way in the long run? We still have the same jobs and the same routines that had lead us here to begin with.
It turns out all it takes is some common sense and determination.
We stumbled upon this man Joe Cross – he is an Australian guy who had a similar problem he was 40 years old, fat, sick and nearly dead and that is how it started.
Joe decided to turn his live around and he was kind enough to share his way of doing it by filming it and making a documentary about it. Joe realized that his body can heal himself similar to what happens when you have a scratch everything else can go back like hitting the factory settings button and rebooting the system on one of the devices we all use everyday Joe did the same thing to his body.
How? He decided to detox his body – basically the idea goes like that – the human body was build to live of what is around us that is fruit and vegetables and form time to time maybe some eggs and fish but that required skill now for thousands of years our body has been evolving to optimize our survival chances on this diet. Now with this fine tuned machine we stumble into a culinary market filled with high calories and processed foods choices and we instantly fall into the fast fix trap – then what once was a once in a while high calorie treat with lots of fat and sugar high has become our daily meal(s) as a result we become quickly addicted and lose desire for healthy organic foods which take longer to prepare and satisfy but also we take such an excess of calories to us in comparison to what we actually need that we start storing it for the bad times to come, only that modern day man does not go through long periods of hunger and our storage grows and grows and grows and … well you get the picture.
Joe figured he needed to get out of the vicious cycle and reset his body so he came up with the optimal method to do this – take in the highest possible number of micro nutrition to give your body all the vitamins and minerals and all the other good stuff it needs to heal itself while at the same time giving our digestive tract a break and allowing our body to detox and lose its acquired addiction to fats and sugar intensive foods.
Joe went on a juice fast for 60 days! All he learned and how he healed himself he shared in his documentary and what he started could be called a movement by now healing and affecting the lives of thousands of others in return. If you want you can find the info here: http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/ .
My husband and I jumped on determined to turn our lives around and today is our day 30 of the Juice fast we both have lost weight and we are feeling great. Energetic and I dare say 10 years younger the evenings are less dreadful and the atmosphere in the house become a cheerful one. We picked up power walking in the morning and enjoy an hour of family activity since our son has joined us. He by the way is proud of his parents who are changing by the minute.
I have lost 15 pounds my husband close to 30. We have both dropped several clothe sizes. My husband is pain free and more mobile, I have lost my migraines and my chronic fatigue …
We have saved money instead of spending more with astonishing results we become a happier family.
Now while you are progressing on your juice fast you will notice that your senses will also increase you will smell fruits and vegetables and appreciate their aroma in a whole different way, your taste will shift away from sweets and you will crave things you never noticed before. This new intensified sense of smell and awareness of our meals made us also more sensitive to the quality of the product found in our malls and our markets. Sadly Cebu is a hard place to shop the over grown fruits and vegetables form dole that resemble news paper ads but adapt the taste and aroma of the packaging around them, or the heavily lead infested produce form china and Taiwan are scary to say the least, local product on the markets and from Baguio, Mindanao and the local farmers are a welcome alternative but unfortunately our fellow countrymen and farmers have embraced the quick results given by Bayer and Co. and the side effects of this kind of regular intake are dreadful. So what to do?
Suddenly I realized the whole new dimension of the word organic! Yes ORGANIC is the answer – this is what this whole idea was about in the first place detox – reset – reboot – back to what we are supposed to be. And that is where I found my answer Sam Gimignano Wellness Farm, Eleanor Rivera a wonder full woman who has lead a full live and has now come back to Cebu her home has set out to give back to the community by creating this spot right here in Cebu. Eleanor came to the same conclusions during her long years of practice as Educator and Consultant in NY watching Cardio disease plagued patients fight for survival from sickness induced by our modern way of eating. She decided that it is in the intake of nutrient that lays the secret of long live and happiness. Eleanor is running an organic farm and let me tell you once you tested or even smelled her herbs or some of her kale, botchy, papayas, sweet potatoes or any other product you will be delighted. That is how real food is supposed to be. It is shocking how enchanting smells can be. Eleanor can be found every Sunday in Banilad Town Center offering her fruits, vegetables and Herbs among other product and if you like she will take the time and talk to you and give advice and wisdom.
We are at day 30 today and between Joes inspiration and Eleanores crop we are looking at a whole new live starting now!
