Monday, August 3, 2015

One Neat Trick to Lose Weight Fast

I just lost 10 pounds without even trying!!

So I was ready to give away some clothes to charity because it was time to resign myself to my middle-age body. I had to accept that I wasn't going to fit into these clothes ever again.  Then I tried them on one last time, and THEY FIT!

It's a miracle!

And, even better, this radical new program requires absolutely no change to your regular activities. You too can drop the pounds WITHOUT EXERCISE!!

(But you should still more around some because it's good for you.)

You just have to cut out this one food from your diet - JUST ONE FOOD ITEM!! And I feel as energetic as ever.

I know you're just dying to find out my secret. And I'll tell you for FREE!

What is this one neat trick??

Stop eating meat.

SOOO EASY!!

I stopped eating meat this spring after watching a presentation by one of my students on factory farms. It was nothing I didn't already know, but hearing it all again was the tipping point for me.  That coupled with Chris Hedges' insightful articles on why he became a vegetarian.

Because it's not just about the suffering animals in cramped quarters never seeing the light of day, and, more to the point, it's not just about maintaining my girlish figure:
"By eating meat and dairy products we aid and abet a system that is perhaps the primary cause of global warming and is pumping toxins and poisons into our bodies and the rest of the ecosystem. Animal agriculture sends more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than worldwide transportation. The waste and flatulence from livestock are responsible for creating at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock causes 65 percent of all emissions of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops raised to feed livestock consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States. Seventy percent of the crops we grow in the U.S. are fed to animals. Eighty percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals. It is a flagrant waste of precious and diminishing resources. It takes 1,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk."
 We can have more clean water and food for everyone and fewer GHG in our atmosphere and fewer toxins in our bodies, all by just changing our diet just a little bit.

What do you have to lose, except your waistline?

2 comments:

Gyor said...

Say that everyone gives up meat, what happens to the chickens, cows, pigs, and other assorted farmed meats?

If you release them, many will die far worst deaths of disease, starvation, predatories, ect...

The ones that survive will upset the egological balance, perhaps creating an enviromental catasytpy.

We need to step up ethical farming stardands, and provide proper inspectors.

Marie Snyder said...

I'm not even a little bit worried that if we don't keep eating meat at the same rate forever, that the farm animals will create some environmental catastrophe. WE have already upset the ecological balance dramatically by factory farming. It's time to right that wrong.

To address your concern, though, it's unlikely we'll all stop on a dime. It's far more likely that, with any luck, people will decrease their consumption, which will slowly decrease the demand, which will slowly decrease production (and forced reproduction). The few animals left, if we ever actually get to a point of completely eradicating meat-eating in our culture, will become pets or live in the wild the way they did before they were caged by us.

You're right that, in the wild, some will die of starvation or predators. We can't guarantee a perfect, suffering-free life for all creatures. But we're definitely not creating one with the type of farming we're doing right now. I'd take my chances in the wild myself rather than be imprisoned from birth in unbelievably crowded conditions, pumped full of drugs that distort my body mass enough to make my legs break under my weight.

Ethical farming standards are a great idea, but I think the only way to take down the monolithic corporate farm structure, is to stop buying the product. The next best thing to reducing consumption is making sure to only buy from local independent farms that are truly free range.

My concern here is the sheer number of animals involved and the impact that has on the atmosphere. A more manageable number will do, but it has far less effect to say, "Hey, some of you should eat less meat!" than to try to convince everyone and hope a few get on board!