Dead Computer and SAD (standard American diet)

My MacBook has been acting strangely the past few days and this morning it seems to have died. I'm writing on Casey's Dell Laptop...ugh. I gave up reading posts on facebook because the way this thing scrolls is beyond slow and annoying. I'll have to do it on my Google TV later. I hope my Mac is fixable, but Casey said it looks pretty bad.

Anyway...today is the last chemo free day, but tomorrow it will have been a month since the last one. It has been great, having a month off. I am much stronger and better prepared for tomorrow's IP chemo.

I'm currently reading Kris Carr's Crazy Sexy Diet and it is confirming for me everything I already knew and that I learned in both the Anti-Cancer book and in Eating Animals. My choice is to go as vegan as I can. Yesterday I discovered there is a place close to us - 15 minutes away - that offers retreats. This summer I plan to attend one of their raw foods retreats where they will teach me to prepare raw, vegan, organic food. I will also be able to take yoga classes while there. In order to make sure the cancer never returns, I must free myself from eating animals, which includes dairy, and from alcohol. I will have a drink once in awhile, but not often.

I am never surprised when I discover that our government has lied to us. The lies about our food are evil and really bother me. The meat and dairy industries have so much clout that they call the shots and regulate themselves. It's one more example of the wealthy elite screwing the people. When the American Dietary Association changed the food pyramid so that meat and dairy were only to be eaten occasionally, they rose up, raised hell and got it changed. There is plenty of proof that eating meat and dairy on a daily basis leads to heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Add processed food to the mix and you have a nation of unhealthy, obese people. The sugar thing really makes me angry. Read your labels - there is sugar or high fructose corn syrup, in everything from your toothpaste to your cheerios. There is sugar in foods that don't need it. The reason? Sugar is addicting. Even if you don't feed your kids much sugar, they're getting it in every packaged food, ketchup...everything. The addiction factor leads to wanting more, which is why we see kids at school eating nothing but sugar all day. Then we wonder why our kids are obese, have diabetes, acne, etc. They say the current generation is the first in 100 years whose life expectancy is shorter than the previous generations'. They have added a daily dose of Starbucks or energy drinks to their unhealthy habits.

Why has this happened? Profit and corporate greed. Everything that has gone wrong for our country, from the housing crisis and the economy to our ill health, can be blamed on corporate greed. If we let our food be our medicine and ate whole, healthy foods, we would have very little in our medicine cabinets and wouldn't be spending so much on health care.

I don't know why I got cancer. There is certainly quite a bit of cancer in my old neighborhood and it could be environmental. It could also be diet related. I was a vegetarian in my 30's and 40's, but my generation grew up on processed food, white bread, white rice, meat at every meal, etc. During my cancer free year I ate meat, dairy, sugar...if I had been more concerned about these things at that point I may have avoided this recurrence.

I wish everyone would read Anti-Cancer, Eating Animals, and Crazy Sexy Diet. If you knew what I knew it would change your life. Americans are eating cows that are so sick they have to be pumped full of antibiotics (which make their way into you and contribute to antibiotic resistance)in addition to the growth hormones that cause young girls to start menstruating at 7 and 8. The younger you are when you start,the higher your cancer risk. The feces that makes its way into your hamburger and the puss that gets into your milk from the sick cows who are kept constantly lactating are major causes of food borne illnesses. Those two facts alone have put me off meat and milk.

I apologize if I sound preachy, but I know that our food is contaminated, the animals are suffering, and people are dying. These things matter to me.

No picture today, since I'm on Casey's computer!

Namaste, Jill