You may have heard this news story already. Seventeen-year old girl collapses and has to be injected with vitamins and nutrients. She’s been eating nothing but chicken nuggets for 15 years.
15 years.
She’s only 17.
My first reaction was to blame the parents. How could they let their child get away with this? What kind of parent feeds their kids nothing but fast food? Turns out her mother has tried and she and her other two children have a normal, healthy diet. So this girl has herself addicted to nuggets, to salt, basically. So she’s anemic, has inflamed veins on her tongue and a serious lack of nutrients. I don’t recall reading about her blood pressure, but I imagine it’s pretty high.
We’ve been trying to eat healthier since the beginning of the year. I thought it would be really hard to give up some things, such as potato chips, candy bars, french fries. But so far it hasn’t been that bad. There was that one time I was tempted to bum a fry from my son (occasionally he’s still allowed to indulge a little), but I was good. I resisted the urge. No, the hardest part has been living without bread. Sometimes I just crave a big chunk of crusty bread. There will come a day (hopefully soon) when we will start bringing starches back in our diet.
Our goal is to lose some weight while establishing better eating habits and thereby improve our quality of life and health. We can certainly use the extra energy. So we’re eating lots of salad, plenty of seafood, and drinking lots and lots of water. It’s paying off slowly. We’ve each lost some weight and as soon as the weather is warmer we hope to increase our activity level and burn more calories as well.
And no chicken nuggets for us.