Day Forty Nine!!

Today I noticed that I have gone down a notch in my belt! Congratulations to me! 


I happened to notice a magazine that I picked up at Walmart. It’s their ‘Walmart live better” its for families, holiday 2018. There is a beautiful gingerbread layered cake with cream cheese icing. And way at the top left hand corner has a counter to the cake, in hard to read white lettering, is ‘7 health mistakes to avoid this season’, which is located on page 54 (the very back of the magazine), once you get past all of the ‘love food hate waste’, ultimate party platters, winter bounty, and carb laden advertisements. 
   
So after wading through all of the excess carbohydrates to be eaten for the holiday season, the idea for health, is to enjoy the festivities while maintaining your usual routine. I like the titles, ‘starving all day then binging come dinner time’, ‘over committing, overbooking, and overdoing it’, ‘taking extra cheat days’, burning the midnight oil’, ‘putting off fitness goals’, ‘eyeballing meat to determine if it’s cooked’, and ‘over indulging on low fat low calorie foods’. What I find interesting is that the titles reflect mistakes to watch out for, except the titles are big and bold and that’s all you really see. As for the taking extra cheat days, the idea is to enjoy smaller portions of your favourite foods more often, instead of gorging in one sitting. So instead of binging on all the cookies on the 24th, it suggests to choose your favourites and have one a day. 


So basically the suggestion is, instead of gobbling one big meal, to enjoy the festivities while maintaining your usual routine of over eating. 


So the point is, when you are reading a magazine, what is the real point of the magazine?
Because, if it’s to sell main brand foods and create foods based upon main brand ads (therefore high in carbohydrate ingredients) then that is actually the real point of the magazine. Every single picture of every single recipe looks like it should be low in carbohydrates because the recipe contains items that sound healthy, like for example; pear juice and ginger beer, rice and sweet potatoes, coconut milk, and bread stuffing. But if you take a closer look and you start to cut out the high carb foods listed, then you will quickly realize that the point of the magazine is really, to sell processed food. 


I love looking at these magazines, they appear to be festive and colourful and fun and I want to be apart of it. The truth is, it is a lot more work to view a magazine or anything else for that matter, with a questioning eye. It’s a lot easier just to go with the flow and continue to overeat as the magazine implies. Yet I know, if I eat a cookie a day then I am celebrating 365 days a year and that philosophy is based in continual weight gain. 


So, in order to be able to maintain my new weight management plan, it means that I have to choose my carbohydrate intake wisely. I need to stand in judgement of the dozens of baked cookies. I have to ask myself ‘what is most important?’ because the truth is, bottom lining it, magazines are about advertising! Because they need to sell more, and they come up with these recipes, not to make sure I maintain my health and well being, but because they want to entice me to eat more and therefore they will sell more. It’s all a marketing scheme. The goal is to be able to recognize it for what it is, and not to fall for the lie.