I had a rather interesting discussion with a Swedish retiree the other day, who is part of an online book club I’ve been a member of for a while. What this discussion did was bring into focus just how much perspective can shape one’s view on pretty much anything. He’s a traveler, this guy, but his travels have mostly seen him escaping the biting winters of Scandinavia to live it up under the sunny skies of Southeast Asia. So even if his perspective assumes more of a world-view on things, it’s still limited by the places he frequents as part of his travels.
Of course there’s Google, YouTube, Facebook and other online portals through which we can all get more information about the places that interest us and about other things as well, but it’s not quite the same, is it? So this bloke in particular knows nothing about the huge push-back against Monsanto and their mission to dominate the GMO food production market, let alone some of the restrictive laws they and other such companies are trying to lobby for, such as that law which effectively gives some GMO food producers a license to produce crops that are incapable of reproducing to produce more food.
The gentleman from Sweden was rather wide-eyed and awestruck from what I could make out based on the appearance of his face on the web cam feed, and I could tell that he genuinely didn’t know anything about this other side of the GMO movement. In his part of the world, which is indeed quite a thriving socialist country, the sentiment is generally pro-GMO, sold on account of providing food security in places where it has been a real challenge. They weren’t told anything about the ill-effects of genetically modified foods, especially the potential long-term effects and they definitely weren’t told anything about the socio-economic impact of something like owning the patent and rights to the only food crop production mechanisms many of these big GMO firms are trying to gain control of.
Be all of that as it may though, ultimately the decision to live a healthy lifestyle comes all the way down to the level of the individual and the kind of ailments they have. For those with eye vision problems, eating healthy may not be enough. They might have to undergo eye surgery at a LASIK vision center or take medications accordingly. Some may just have to eat healthily and exercise. Yet some others may need more motivation than others to get started down this journey, like some new workout gear, to help them feel good and keen to get started (if you are going to buy clothes, make sure you check sites like https://www.raise.com/coupons/nike to see if there are any savings to be had on the top brands). At the end of the day, it really is only you who can decide to live healthier and follow-through on that resolution, no matter what challenges you’d be facing.
Here are some of the challenges you’d need to be aware of, awaiting you on your quest to live a healthier lifestyle:
- It’s generally cheaper and more convenient to fill up on fast-food that has very little nutritional value than to stock up on raw ingredients with which you’d want to cook a healthier meal from scratch
- Widely available information about the best practices when it comes to healthy living is either not accurate or is incomplete – you’d be lucky to find some good, actionable advice on health which you can implement and get great results out of without having to pay anything extra
- By resolving to lead a healthier lifestyle, you are fighting against years, decades and perhaps even a couple of centuries of the kind of conditioning by big business and the media to have us focusing more on remedying the ill-effects of an unhealthy lifestyle than taking more of a proactive approach to it
Now, these are definitely some challenges which will prove to give you a real run for your money to overcome, but by no means are they impossible tasks to overcome.
It’s not impossible to enjoy great-tasting food that is also good for you, health-wise, and if you look really hard enough you’ll realize that bridging the gap between the low cost of unhealthy living and the indicatively high cost of healthy living is possible too, only if you link up with other people who are on the same terrace.
For example, if in your neighborhood there are 100+ people who all order organic food from a specific supplier, the transport costs for the delivery of that food will drop considerably, creating a knock-on effect which has the price of the food proper dropping. Each of you can only benefit from this if you’re all aware of the fact that you’re effectively part of a community of health-conscious people who are all taking delivery of healthier food supplies from the same supplier!
So it all starts with making the choice to lead a healthier lifestyle. The rest will follow, with regards to how you’re going to make it happen in practice.
