Advertizing for a Larger Audience

Okay so, anyone who knows me knows that I've been battling my weight for almost as long as I've been married (take off a couple years to give me time to gain it first). Of late I've been researching... well in honesty the husband has been researching and I've been absorbing the information by osmosis. At times it feels like the list of things that I can eat is much shorter than the list of things I can't or shouldn't eat. For almost as long as I've been batting the extra person I've gained in weight, the hubby has been dealing with digestive issues. We've always attributed it to over eating, too much fat, or some other ingredient of the food that maybe we should avoid. Now, don't quote me too much on this, because honestly I'm rambling from memory and I am not necessarily stating scientific fact. Most of it *is* based on scientific fact but I may be getting my stuff mixed but.... here's what it boils down to....

Nothing we are eating today is the same as it was 15 years ago. Seriously. Sure the packaging may be the same... the flavor the same... but just like contracts, there's this thing called fine print.... in contracts the fine print consists of all the little things that they don't want you to know that they can hold over your head later. On a food label the fine print consists of the ingredients. On some packages the actual contents are readable only w/a neuron-microscope and some MacGyver skills that even he didn't have. Or the ingredients contain things like "natural flavors" or "spices".... well a lot of things fall into those categories. The things that are in food now days may not have even existed years ago when we were younger, healthier people.

My recent favorite tv show is Fringe. I used to be an X-Files freak and I'd pick Fringe over Fox & Scully any day... (sorry). One of the characters is a brilliant scientist who just happened to spend almost two decades in a mental hospital and is a little ...well... he's still adjusting to being part of society. One of my favorite scenes is him going to the grocery store by himself and trying to get food. He decided to look at the ingredients of the box of PopTarts. I don't remember what it was, but there was a chemical in them that was toxic. He started spewing off the health risks and side effects of consumption etc of this. He was appalled that the grocery store would even sell it. Of course as the story goes security is called and he's escorted out... but.... the point is... our food is poisonous. Seriously, it is. And the worst thing about it is that we don't really know. We can't pronounce have of the things on the label. I'm starting to feel like if I can't pronounce it or if I have to go to google to find out what it is, I probably shouldn't be eating it. So... food food food.... some of the ingredients that are being used (sugar & high fructose corn syrup) have this way of tricking the human body into not noticing when the fuel gauge runneth over and we just keep on shoving it in... we like the taste, we like the texture... we're bored, we're emotional, we're.... it doesn't matter we just keep eating and eating and eating... the built in stopping mechanism is broke and.... we have issues like diabetes, or something called insulin resistance (i'll vent about that more at another time)... heart disease.... etc.

Now... where was I going with this little tirade... oh ... yes.... so... over the last two months the husband and I moved.... quieter area, but... more stuff.... like everywhere. We've got more restaurants and fast food places near us here then we did at the old place... and a lot w/in walking distance. So not only am I obsessing over food because I need to eat a specific way to keep my insulin from being wonky and making me feel wonky and bleh, now I'm getting food of all sorts thrown up at me and what makes it worse is that it's food that I can't/shouldn't/love to eat. So.... in an effort to help my scale remember that the numbers are supposed to go down, not up when I get on it, to give the husband a digestive rest, and to keep more fundage in the bank than exits were making some drastic dietary changes (more on that later too). One of these modifications is that we will be cooking at home 99.99999999999999999999% of the time. This past sunday some gracious person delivered the newspaper to our back door. Not wanting to let the gift go to waste we welcomed it into our home and promptly gutted it. Comics & Coupons spilled onto the floor and the lifeless carcass of the news was tossed to the side (to be shredded and fought over by the furry 5... more on them later too). Now a few days later.... the ads and comics wasted in a bag ready for sacrifice to the county trash pickup tomorrow I decided it would probably be a good time to go through the coupons to see what may be helpful to us...

First thing I notice... the discounts suck... but more along the lines of what I'm rambling about right now... was marketing. I'm looking at an ad for bottled water. We know we should drink water, it's calorie free and we're made out of it... and it is constantly going away... so we need more of it... but... are our kids really getting enough water? In all honesty probably not... and Nestle is taking advantage of this. Did you know 64% of children not sufficiently hydrated when they go to school. They don't come right out and say that the kids are dehydrated because they don't really have a way of saying that... but they can insinuate it... THEN... they say they have a Hydration Movement (drink our water). They even give coupons (yeah I know you figured that considering I'm talking about looking at coupons)... but here's the thing... most people have seen the news and read the articles that talk about how bottled water isn't usually that much better than tap water. Then on the eco side of it, it's a waste of resources. Just get a water bottle from a store and reuse it... that being said...they now have filtered water bottles at the local Walmart/Targets that are reasonably priced and will help the getto water taste better.

Second thing... inside that page is still Nestle ads but this time it's their icecream stuff... with coupons.... saying that we should celebrate summer with saving money... buy our stuff....

On the back of all that is a coupon for the overpriced frozen California Pizza Kitchen Pizza's. This one is special though... because you can get a Pizza/Appetizer combo box.... the ad by the coupon says "Two courses re better than one!". In a society where we are larger than ever, and it is such a public issue, it's a health issue, money issue, quality of life issue.... they're telling us to eat more??? it's frozen crap food! Why would we need to eat more of it?

All around us we're surrounded by bigger portions, wanting to get our moneys worth etc... well you buy bigger, you eat bigger, you get bigger... and then when you want to put on the breaks and back peddle you better hope that you're not broke because somethings just can't be reversed. I have no guarantee that when I lose my weight that my body will respond to its insulin better. I have no guarantee that my blood pressure will go away. I O.D. for one week on super salty sausage and BAM I have a water retention issue. I've reduced my sodium intake to almost nil and you know what? I still have to take a water pill or I have cankles and can shove my finger about a half inch into my lower leg and leave an indent. I hope w/time I can go off the medicine, but I don't know. And what burns me the most is that this was sneaky... the weight snuck on, the portion sizes got bigger. The husband used to tease me because i could never finish a meal when we'd go out to the restaurant... now he's surprised when I don't clean my plate and just say that i'm full. Once I was able to get up the courage to go to a doctor after months and months of checking various things they give me a diagnosis based off process of elimination and I'm left with a syndrome that makes it virtually impossible to lose weight and the only real way to beat the syndrome is to lose weight. If that isn't aggravating I don't know what is.... wait... I think I know... having this syndrome and knowing it is the reason why I can't have children, but if I can lose the weight I'd be able to get pregnant... that's a heck of a lot of motivation but, it's also a lot of discouragement when the scale wont budge and you don't know what else to do.


Well I think that's all for now... time to get dinner dishes washed and put away and get ready for another day to try to remind myself that food is just fuel, my tank is picky and needs the right combo... but... how to do it and not get depressed looking at a plate of food that you don't generally like that screws with your digestion and leaves you miserable and hating the fact that food consumption is a necessary part of life.... and wishing you could just get on with your life.... sorry rambling again.

In parting I'll leave you with two great quotes...

"If we are what we eat then I only want to eat the good stuff."

and

"I don't like food... I LOVE food, and if I don't LOVE IT, then I don't swallow."


(from the great minds of Pixar... thanks for the advise... Ratatouille.)

Dang domain squatters :P

For years my hubby has teased me about my little idiom of this, that or the other being "virtually useless". We are a bit geeky and even own our own domain so we never have to change our email address, no matter who we get our internet from and I have told him that the domain, www.virtuallyusless.com would be a great present to me some day... and so we go, we look up the domain to see if it's purchasable. We find out that it is not and so we zip on over to the site to see who has it and what they are doing with it...and we discover that someone has put up one of those annoying generic pages that has nothing, does nothing, and is nothing, well nothing other than a place holder so they keep the domain and then can sell it off to they highest bidder at some point. Yeah I could get something other than a ".com" but nothing else rolls off the tongue so well. So.... to satisfy my need to express myself, I decided, what better place to throw my virtually useless thoughts and random menaderings of a tired mind than on a blog! and yes, someone else already has virtuallyuseless.blogger.com... but I don't mind... I have a hyphen (-). makes it a little more easy to read. :)