goodsugar by marcus antebi, noah's arch

Veganism

If we’re going to consume the flesh of an animal, at the very least we should have the compassion to insist that the animal roams free during its life. (For the record, I am 100% plant based.)

I’m not meaning to be judgmental, and I’m not just trying to communicate something to you that I think is extremely important. People have to come to their own conclusions about such things. I didn’t come to my own conclusions from people trying to judge or shame me. But what I am trying to do is help you to accelerate your own personal growth. I get nothing out of you changing. I do get satisfaction from knowing that I can potentially help someone, but I have no agenda other than to communicate to you what I believe is the truth.

A very important aspect of your own weight loss is that you are living a life of compassion. Compassion, love and other such qualities that are good enrich your chemistry in a way that very few substances can match. When your heart is filled with compassion, that means that your mind is pure. In order to fill your heart with compassion, your mind has to become more conscious and more awake. Compassion sets us free from our own suffering.

And how do we get there? We start by simply trying. We take compassionate actions, even if we don’t feel particularly compassionate. In order to truly be compassionate, you have to feel the pain of another creature. And that pain hurts deep. But it hurts much worse to the creature or person that it’s happening to.

In moments that we are not suffering, we have to be grateful beyond words that we have such moments that we are free from suffering. If we are suffering, we have to work in the midst of that suffering until it passes. And one of the things that helps alleviate the suffering is when others have compassion on us.

The entire journey back to where you want to be with your weight and your health, as well as to a good feeling in your body, requires tremendous compassion of self.

In the process of writing this book I am attempting to teach myself compassion. The irony is that I’m writing a book to teach you things that I worked my ass off to discover, and these things are secondary to greater lessons that we learn when we are on our healing path.

There is an opposite of the healing path that you know. There are times in our lives when things that are happening are just hurtful. And there are times in our lives that we make choices to do things that are hurtful to ourselves and to others. The revelation that I pray that you have from reading this book is that so many of us have been deeply wounded and hurt. It’s hard to come to terms with that.

We have tremendous defenses and adaptations that we’ve developed to be able to get on with our lives and cope. But there are signs that we struggle. The signs are really symptoms when it comes to our body. We have aches and pains, inflammation, and all kinds of ailments that are directly linked to our internal emotional struggles. That is why the most effective health program entails that you go right in for the kill by dealing with your emotional shit.

You’re wasting time when you just deal with the symptoms of your maladies. Time is slipping away. We may achieve very little if we only address the symptoms of our problems, whatever they may be. We’ve got to get to the root cause of them, or we risk dying not truly knowing who we are. We risk leaving the body without ever sensing the great purpose.

This journey is not about weight control and burning fat. That’s all marketing bullshit. This journey is about your broken heart. This journey is about my broken heart. It’s about fixing it and moving forward finally. Enough of the bullshit talk that people spout about “just moving on.” The people who I know truly moved on from the past problems, the people that I know truly forgave those who hurt them, are people who did a tremendous amount of emotional work. They got busy writing out their problems, they got busy talking about them. They got into support groups, they had therapy, they read books, they cried, they went out and helped others, and they made a valiant attempt at building their character and working a program to increase their consciousness.

So when it comes to organics, my dear friend, there’s no debate about it: Pesticides are not good. They have no redeeming qualities for this planet. Their sole purpose is to murder insects and disrupt the beautiful and harmonious relationship between creature and crops, between the soil and the water. All for the sake of increased profits. The problem is not only with growers but with the chemical industry that produces and distributes poisons and lobbies to keep their poisons legal.

The simple truth is that the vegetation on this earth is meant to be consumed by not just humans but by microbes, insects, reptiles, and mammals. Human beings don’t like that. It doesn’t make a difference what the consequences may be. Once modern commerce has a say, you should expect perversion and corruption to occur.

We should all stand up and demand that our favorite restaurants only use organic produce. Then we should vote with our dollars, not returning to restaurants that don’t comply until they change their ways. You don’t have to be that much of an activist. You just have to become aware of the problem and keep trying to change things for the better.

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