When did we lose our time? Time is one of the biggest issues my clients bring to me as their problem. Well they don’t outright start by telling me they don’t have any time left in their lives, or that this lack of time is the issue. What happens is that they come with digestive issues, cravings, emotional eating, inability to concentrate, tiredness, fatigue, lethargy, lack of motivation, feeling constantly worn out, with what are unexplained weight issues. But lack of time is a root cause behind so many of these health issues, because of a life that became overfull, overwhelming and stressful and an inability to find time to look after themselves with one of the most fundamental things we need to do, eat properly.
So I come back to my point, when did we start to lose all the time we had to look after ourselves properly? I truly believe that the current model of living is making us ill. It’s creating a series of long term health issues which are clearly now rearing their heads currently with increased obesity, lack of control overweight, inability to lose weight, increased depression and mental health issues, never mind the chronic diseases that most are suffering from.
The perspective we collectively now seem to have about our lives has led us to move our lives far from the natural order, almost to the point where I question at times whether people even care about nature any more? How we now treat our environment gives me personally such a good indication of how we no longer care not only for ourselves but the environment we live in, and why we seem to not care about nature as we used to. There is a saying about a dog not dirtying in its own bed, but this to me is what we are doing with our direct environment.
Empty packets from junk and processed foods that can be eaten on the go and in the car litter the walk I do around the lanes in the countryside with my dog. I see junk food packaging thrown out of cars whilst I’m walking, empty cans, fizzy drinks bottles, disposable drinks containers from coffee shops, crisp packets, McDonald’s packaging for their meals, polystyrene packaging for hot food, and sweet packets. All food we turn to so we can eat and carry on doing what we apparently need to do, it’s fast and easy to eat. I never see plastic millet packaging or packaging for blueberries on my walks, just junk and processed food packaging. When we fill ourselves with food type items that are not natural why would we care about nature? Foods that can be eaten quickly and easily on the move, the type of food that is slowly killing us, but apparently giving us more time! We not only do not value the environment we are littering with this junk packaging, but we are also not valuing ourselves when we eat it. Each bite moves us further down the continuum away from naturally good health to unnatural health affecting the balance of our hormones, our skin, our microbiome, our digestion, our nutritional profile. Because we no longer seem to have any time…
This food (I loosely call it food because the list of ingredients reads more like a science lab than a food you would prepare in your kitchen) has been created because we no longer have any time to prepare our own foods, so the companies we castigate for producing it are just filling a market opportunity, is it really their fault or ours for giving our time away so easily?
What happened? Why did we let this happen? When did things supersede our health and well-being, because the need to do other things and have other things has become a higher priority than looking after ourselves with the most fundamental thing we can do, feeding ourselves naturally good food.
We have to turn this loss of time around, and take our time back, prioritising living with natural rhythms and within natures laws again. I’m not sure how much further away we can get before we no longer collectively can even recognise good health anymore. But this is a collective suffering we are starting to experience, no one goes untouched by what we are collectively allowing to happen. I’ve never seen so much litter as I see currently see on my walks and as I said this food is fast food and sweet packets or fizzy drink bottles. Each mouthful we take of these foods changes us, we are what we ate, what we metabolise, each mouthful changes gene expression, which way? You decide, each mouthful changes our pH, our microbiome, and ultimately our health. All because we spend our time rather than investing it in ourselves. When did spending become so much more important than investing in our health?
