Raw Objectivism

My journey to macrobiotics started with a cryptic phone call from my doctor after receiving the results of some routine tests. She left a message on my voicemail requesting that I call her back as soon as I could. Being the hypochondriac I am, I immediately decided I had cancer. It was really the only logical conclusion. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a hold of my doctor for the next four days (it was the day before New Year’s Eve and everyone was out of the office).

With my obsessive personality I immediately started Googling (yes, Google is a verb) cancer cures. How could I get cure this obviously deadly cancer that I was convinced I had? During my search I came across macrobiotics. Luckily I did not, in fact, have cancer (just a minor infection that cleared up with antibiotics).

The obsessive and panicked research I did, however, sparked my interest in macrobiotics. I purchased Jessica Porter’s book The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics. I started P90X not long after that and subsequently forgot about macrobiotics entirely until I saw the book sitting on my shelf around the end of July. Curious to know more, and looking for a way to lose that last bit of belly fat, I started reading.

So here is what you need to know about macrobiotics (Author’s note: This is a quick overview of Macrobiotics based on my reading of online articles and The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics. I am no expert on the subject and apologize for any inaccuracies in my information. Please let me know if you notice any inaccuracies so that I can correct them as soon as possible. It is not my intention to mislead anyone. If you would like to do your own research please feel free to follow the links referenced in this post.):

Yin and Yang

Macrobiotics is all about the yin and yang of foods and balancing that yin and yang in your body. Yang is contracted, inward, downward, heavy, dry, small, dense and hard. Yin, however is the opposite, expanded, outward, upward, light, wet, large, not dense and soft. However, as most of us have heard, everything on earth is a little bit yang and a little bit yin. It is the same for foods. So compared to salt, fish are yin, but compared to beans, fish are yang (see below).

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Tags: Belly fat, Body Pump, Cancer, Diet, Macrobiotics, p90x, Vegan, Vegetarian, Weight loss
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Vegetarian Origins

I have been a vegetarian since I was 12 years old, and I became a vegetarian for the noblest of reasons: to spite my mother. As any pre-adolescent is prone to do I rebelled from my mother’s insistence that I eat steak for dinner. She had made it and I was going to eat it, darn it! I loathed steak. The texture, the smell, the taste, the fact that it was usually pink inside and looked far too much like human flesh. It disgusted me. So I told her I wasn’t going to eat it, not thoroughly convinced I could follow through with this claim but boldly stating it anyway.

This is where my mother made her first mistake. She told me that I had to eat the steak unless I became a vegetarian. I saw an out. A free pass from ever having to eat steak again. I could just not eat any meat! It was brilliant. So I looked her in the eye, hands on my hips in defiance, and said “fine, I’m a vegetarian.” I’m not sure what she was expecting, but it wasn’t that. Once she recovered from the initial shock, she made her second mistake. “You’ll never last,” she said. So, of course, I had to.

Fast forward to 11 years later. At 23 I was still going strong on my lacto- ovo- vegetarian diet. Aside from some misunderstandings about what exactly was in Caesar dressing (anchovy paste? is that even food?) and the fact that crab rangoons contain crab (who would have thought, I know, though I was probably 13 when this happened, so some forgiveness, please?) I have not deviated from this lifestyle (suck it, Mom).

Being a vegetarian has never really been a challenge for me. I don’t think of meat as food anymore. I realize other people eat it, but I don’t always remember that they do. The idea just seems so foreign. I didn’t even miss much meat when I initially became vegetarian. Aside from bacon, liver sausage and liver dumplings (don’t ask, I’m Czech, this is what we eat) I didn’t miss meat at all.

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Tags: Ayn Rand, Belly fat, Body Pump, Diet, Macrobiotics, Objectivism, Omnivore, p90x, Paleo, Raw Vegan, Vegan, Vegetarian, Weight loss
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