Future note: This is the third Brian Explains Life blog article I am including as part of the Thoughts from Life blog, but it should have been the first. I thought it was strange that the introduction to the blog was from 2010, but the articles were from 2011. To make up for this screw up, I’m going to take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of how the screw up happened. Let the behind-the-scenes tour begin!
From 2004 to 2022, I hardly wrote any Thoughts papers. I was working on many different projects involving animation, music, and writing, but writing my thoughts wasn’t what I was doing. I’ve been looking for other writings that could fill in for the lack of Thoughts papers and I finally came across my Brian Explains Life articles. As with my Thoughts papers, I want to make them nice and pretty for you, the reader. This means editing them and correcting grammar mistakes I missed when I was young and stupid. I’m usually about a month ahead of when the articles are scheduled to be posted to the blog. The time I spent finding the Brian Explains Life articles was time I wasn’t spending scheduling new articles.
Yes, we’re on to the third paragraph of explaining how I screwed up and I haven’t even gotten to the real screw up. I had the Brian Explains Life articles slightly organized, but I was interrupted by a vacation to Jamaica. Patti and I were off to celebrate our 26 year anniversary. You’ll hear about that when you get to my Thoughts from Life in June 2023. I quickly scheduled the first article just before we left. I edited and scheduled the second article the day before it would be posted. Quickly doing things is never the way to do something right. Here comes the screw up. I had skipped to the last of the articles instead of starting from the first of them. Now that I have organized them all by date, I will present them in the order they should have been presented. The first article was on hair. It was lifted directly from the first Thoughts from Life article I presented from 2007. Some of the other articles were taken mostly from my Thoughts papers, so I will skip those too. Now, I take you back to the article from October 1, 2010. It’s about my thoughts on food.
Brian Explains: Food
Food has had an interesting existence in human evolution. We have always needed to eat, but what we ate hasn’t always had the same importance. When humans walked the earth as cave dwellers, they didn’t care if they ate buffalo meat or bugs as long as they ate enough to not starve. Cave dwellers were no geniuses, but they knew their hunger pains were caused by a lack of food. Today, we have better working brains than cave dwellers, but we use them to come up with illogical justifications for the items we put in our mouths. Food is a social event, a status symbol, an art form, and a personal statement. We don’t just eat to get rid of the pains within our stomachs, we eat to get rid of the pains within our hearts. It is food therapy that doesn’t work as well as real therapy.
If you eat crap, you are going to feel like crap (and probably look like something resembling crap). If you eat healthy and nutritious food all the time, you are going to make everyone else around you feel like crap. And isn’t that the point of living – to make everyone else feel like crap. (The preceding paragraph was brought to you by the word “crap.”)
I am not saying I have studied food and/or nutrition my whole life, but I have studied people. People search for meanings in everything (look at religion) and food is no exception. They want their next meal either to transform them into a ravaging hunk of muscle or to transport them to the land of the quenched tastebud people. I only give these two extremes to illustrate how most people think. It’s all or nothing for them. Life should not be lived in the East or the West, but somewhere in Nebraska.
Ultimately, it’s your choice to eat whatever you want. The only guidelines exist in your goals. If you want to be a couch potato, take two bags of chips and lounge in the morning. If you want to run a marathon, you need a psychologist (because you have to be insane to run that far when all you get out of it is looking like a skinny, emaciated freak). Being overweight or obese is not a glandular problem you can take acne medicine for. If you’re overweight because you eat too much, you’re probably eating too much sugar, which acne medicine can help with.
But seriously folks, what you put in your mouth is a serious indicator of your longevity in life. Those people who say, “Well, I don’t want to live to be a hundred, anyway,” are kidding themselves. Their hundred is going to take place at forty-five. They’re going to get the same aches and pains as the hundred-year-old who ate better foods. To eat crap your whole life and be surprised when you get illnesses and ailments when you’re older is to live in ignorance. Don’t just eat food for how it tastes. Eat food for how it makes you feel. Wait a minute, isn’t that the opposite of what I said a couple paragraphs back? Most people who are allergic to strawberries simply avoid strawberries. Conversely, if you feel sluggish after you eat certain things or amounts of things, stay away from those things or amounts of things. That is all I have to say about food, I’m going to go have some strawberries. I’m allergic to them, though, so I won’t have too many.
Thoughts from Life 
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