Pay Attention (Part 1 of 3)

When you were a kid sitting in class, what was the instruction you heard most? Well, maybe you didn’t hear it quite as often as I did, but during my elementary school years, I was told to pay attention many times a day. Although I had to be told more times than I can even remember, I did eventually learn the importance of paying attention.

Attention is important in all areas of life. It started in school when we needed to pay attention to learn the lesson of the day. Once we knew the lesson, we could complete assignments and take the quiz or exam. Eventually this would all cumulate and we’d get a grade for the class. If you didn’t pay attention, what kind of grade did you get?

When I see the state of health in America, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if everyone started paying attention. I’m not sure where we went wrong. I have a few theories and can walk through a few steps to show what has occurred, but that is a whole new article.

Without getting into the entire history of US health, I just want to discuss the power of attention. If nothing else changed, what would we gain by paying more attention to our health? That question has been stuck in my head for a while, so I had to share a few ideas of what I think we would gain from paying a little more attention.

Part 1: Nutrition

The food we eat today is barely food. We eat more chemical preservatives than we do actual food these days. Everything we eat comes from a box, can or a bag handed to us from a drive-thru window. This “food” is literally destroying us from the inside out. Look at the health statistics. Our children (born this decade) are the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than we do. (5 years shorter!) With all the technology we have, it took us many years to add 5 years to our life expectancy. Now we are going the wrong direction.

Why are we continuing to eat foods that only do us harm? We eat this way because we stopped paying attention. We let food manufacturers and restaurants choose our foods now. We leave the decisions up to the big companies and assume that the government agencies would only allow safe and healthy options to be sent our way.

We are wrong. There is a wide range of food options ranging from the processed crap (technical term) to the fresh produce grown on a farm only miles from your home. Just because it is in your favorite store in a happy container doesn’t mean that a food item is good for you. Just because it is on sale, doesn’t mean that food can’t be bad for you.

Question: Do you have any idea what is in the food you eat?

You can choose to eat a vegetarian diet of only fruits and vegetables, an Atkins diet heavy on meats and dairy, or anything in between. But in order to know what you are eating, you have to pay attention. If not, you have no idea what you are putting into your body. If you are trying to lose weight or simply maintain a healthy weight, the math says that you need to take in less calories. Most people have no idea how many calories they take in on a typical day.
Another question: Do you know how many calories you take in each day?

The fact is, you can start on a healthier path simply by taking a minute to think. Take a minute to think about what you are eating and you will be taking a big step. You don’t have to make a drastic change right away. You don’t have to try to eat completely different food starting tomorrow in order to be healthy. Just like every other goal we’ve discussed, it all starts with a baseline. Where are you now?

Where do you want to go? In this case it’s more like: What are you eating? What do you want to be eating? If you don’t know what you are eating now…I can think of a great place to start.

This is part 1 of 3. Later I will discuss the areas of exercise and healthcare. We can greatly improve our lives in all of these areas just by paying attention.