I’ve been gone for a few weeks. This is because I have been busy with a lot of things. The month of July has been a chaotic month, in particular. I lost two of my dogs this month, one to a heart attack and the other to a devastating mistake that I won’t go into here. My roof was damaged by a ridiculous windstorm that ripped shingles off and I’ve been trying to find someone who can fix it in the middle of nowhere. I also learned at the beginning of the month that I was going to be teaching middle school at the school where I’m employed, and I’ve been scrambling to get my lesson plan finished. This doesn’t even cover graduate school. So I’ve been gone for a while.
The random topic selected for this week was mining, and there are a lot of things I could say about mining. There’s the environmental impact of lithium mining. There’s the unbalanced practices of some green energy producers who say they are for the Earth but continue to destroy it like any oil baron. There’s the fact that a lot of people who live outside of my community think it’s a mining town. It is not; it’s an agricultural town. But I’ll save all that for next week.
This week I want to talk about health. Or, rather, I’d like to talk about health fixation. I’m not talking about people who are interested in health topics and read up on different medical studies and things of that nature. No, research is not the same as obsession. I’m talking about those people whose entire focus in life switches from actually living to pretending they’re living.
Let’s go over the things I’m not talking about first. I’m not talking about knowing your vital signs, numbers, and lab tests. I’m not talking about seeing your doctor every year. I’m not talking about making strides to exercise daily and eat healthy. I’m not talking about taking vitamins, or keeping up with your prescriptions, or talking to your doctor about concerns. These are all healthy things to do.
I once knew a person who got obsessed with healthy eating. They had a chronic medical condition and were somehow convinced by some guru that this was because they ate wrong and that all health problems stemmed from bad eating, that everything could be cured by “the right diet.” That’s where this person’s downfall began.
It started innocently enough. The person, whom I will call Paul, because that isn’t his name, cut out junk food. Fine, that seemed like a step in the right direction, because Paul’s eating habits weren’t the greatest. He ate a lot of fast food and guzzled soda like it was water, and he broke both habits when starting his new diet. But it didn’t stop there. The gurus convinced him that other things were considered “junk food,” too.
Paul reduced the amount of fat he ate. Then he reduced is dairy and meat intake. Then went his sugar intake. These are all healthy choices, or they would have been healthy, had Paul stayed in his lane, but he went further and further down the rabbit hole.
Suddenly meat was “the enemy,” and he became a vegetarian. He started watching all these PETA videos about the meat industry and sharing them with his friends, trying to get them to swear to be vegetarian. It didn’t work very well, and he started viewing his friends as his enemies. He stopped seeing friends socially because he said “they provide too much temptation to stray from my diet.”
Paul took it a step further when he decided that no one should consume dairy, ever, and decided to be a vegan. Not only did he decide to be a vegan, he admonished anyone who ate meat or dairy. He consumed a great deal of processed soy, and it started making him sick and exacerbated his existing health problem. Unfortunately, Paul did not get the correct message from this phenomenon.
Somewhere, he found some other health guru who told him that cooked food was “the enemy” this time. Paul, of course, blindly became a raw foodie. Everything had to be “raw and whole” to be eaten. He accused the few friends he still saw of having a “cooked food addiction” and was constantly criticizing their diets. He lost a few friends over it, but this didn’t bother him. Paul said that they were never his true friends to begin with because they were “enslaved by cooked food” and he shouldn’t hang out with them, anyway.
Yes, we are now in cultlike territory. Paul’s entire life was food now. He spent all his free time soaking nuts and beans, fermenting stuff, and otherwise preparing or thinking about food. Food was everything to him, though he kept telling people that food should not be your whole life. He believed that food should never be a reward, and it wasn’t meant to be pleasurable, it was simply something you did to survive.
Paul continued to cut down on his diet. Left and right, he started eliminating foods. These were foods that were considered “bad” or “harmful.” After a while, Paul got to the point where all he would eat were different kinds of beans. He even stopped spicing his food because most spices (except garlic, that was somehow a miracle healer) were somehow toxic. I remember seeing a picture of his latest dinner, which consisted of a green slime with no flavor. He told me that this is what healthy food looked like.
I started seeing drastic changes in Paul’s health, and not for the better. He still suffered from his chronic condition, which continued to plague him every day. When I asked him about it, he said it was because he was failing at his diet. At least that’s what the gurus said to anyone still suffering health problems after following their guidance.
Paul became pale, almost gray in color. One day he passed out and woke up in the emergency room, where doctors said he had severe anemia and needed a blood transfusion. He did everything the gurus told him to do, and this is what happened.
He gave up raw food after this, but it was hard for him to get back to a regular diet. I suspect a preexisting mental health issue did not help matters, but I won’t tell Paul that. I remember a year or so after his hospital scare, his dog died in her sleep at a very old age. (She must have been about 19, which is a long time for a large dog.) Paul was beating himself up because she should have lived longer “had I just been able to feed her properly.”
You’d think Paul would be over his problem, but he is not. Ten years after his scare, he is still obsessed with food. He still consults diet gurus, even if he has rejected the raw food community now. There are all sorts of diets out there to tempt him, from the Paleo Diet to high ketone plans. I fear that Paul is still ruining his body in an attempt to cure his condition.
Let me say it outright that I hate health gurus. I’ve seen too many cases where they take advantage of mentally vulnerable people like Paul and pull them into some cult. That’s what it is, a cult! When you are pulling someone in up to the point that they are isolating themselves and giving up friends, it’s a cult. Worse, it’s a cult that can get them killed.
Paul almost died. My father did die, though it took him a few years. He got involved with an MLM called Art of Better Living that sold all these products that made promises that they couldn’t keep. Among them was something called “clustered water”, which always made me sick when I drank it. Dad said this was the toxins leaving my body, because this is what he was told, but I knew it was bullshit and stopped drinking the stuff.
Dad started taking their weight loss products. He dropped about a hundred pounds in six months and was left with a bunch of loose skin. He also got moodier than usual, snapped at the slightest thing, and slept maybe three hours in a day. The end result was congestive heart failure.
The Art of Better Living eventually vanished, and it’s so far gone that you can’t even find it on an internet search anymore. I found out from further research that the man who founded the company, and many others like it, was in prison because his diet supplements contained illegal drugs. Yes, it turned out my dad was taking speed to lose weight, and he didn’t even know it.
I’m only glad he didn’t try the newer product they were pushing. It was some sort of “body cleanse” that killed all the organisms in your system to the point that you had to take supplements to put them back. He wanted me to do it with him and I refused. After he developed heart problems from his weight loss supplements, he decided to drop the whole idea. But it took a health scare to snap him out of it.
His whole life had been Art of Better Living. Everywhere he went, he talked about it, and it seemed to be the only thing that mattered. Whenever he had his doubts, the positive thinking gurus like Wayne Dyer and Zig Zigler would convince him to keep going. It was a health cult again, and this one was after his money. At the end of his MLM ventures, Dad was in debt and had to declare bankruptcy, on top of the fact that he was dying.
So what is the point of this article? My point is that it is perfectly fine to want to be healthy. It’s even fine to do research on health, if it’s something that interests you. However, if it starts to become your entire life (and you are not a doctor by career), if you start making extreme decisions that leave you sick, if you start rejecting friends and isolating yourself, you need to think twice. This isn’t health, it’s insanity.
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