Half of the people i know are struggling to afford to put food in their pantries and on the table. If something is a bit over ripe or about to spoil, we dont throw it out. We make use of it, because food is a huge chunk of our living expense right now. It has doubled in price since the pandemic while our hourly wages have stayed the same. Before the pandemic i lived comfortably. Now i am struggling to stay above that ever present line where i can use my paycheck to pay bills and not have to dip into my savings account because im aware im no longer in a position to “save” ever again so once that account is empty….the ear-marked money for the back end of the adjustable rate mortgage is gone. We ration the days we eat fish and try to hunt wild game instead of buy meat in the grocery because a box of bullets and the time spent is cheaper than filling a chest freezer with beef or chicken from the super market right now. Food is like treasure for myself and this half of the people i know and so showing up at somebody’s house with food or trading food for another resource in barter….its quite a valuable trade or gift given.
The other half of the people i know are on glp-1s, which let me tell you, looks very strange to those of us struggling to eat. We’d give so much to be able to return to a time where food was affordable and widely available. to watch people choose not to eat when they have the money to do so looks pretty near insanity to those of us just trying to eat in a world where doing so is now out of our price range.
There is an element of “this is dumb”, an element of sadness, and an element of “where does this end?”.
Don’t get me started on the commercials for glp-1’s. Im aware that every product sold is now marketed towards users of glp-1’s from gym equipment to yogurt, everything now has “great for people on glp-1s written on the packaging. But the commercials are a step too far. They are using singing dancing animated fluffy animals in clothes created by AI to market glp-1s. The scenarios these animals are acting out are ones in which the characters value is completely based on their outer looks and the entire family abandons them or hates them because they dont look good. Or, the ones where a spouse is cheating with a family member because her body looks good and the wife’s doesnt. Well then they get on glp-1s and depending on which commercial it is, the ending is that they either finally catch the cheating spouse’s attention and live happily ever after because they look good now, or the family finally likes them because they look good, or they realize they never needed the family because they were always holding them back and they set out to conquer the world alone as a smoking bombshell that everyone is paying attention to. So i think the creators of these commercials should be punished financially for what they’ve done, since that is the only language they speak apparently. They should be made to give up all the money they made ending reality as we know it for adults and children alike but i know, people will just continue to worship and further employ them for their excellent ability to make companies more and more money. The problem is this: they are either of the opinion that we as consumers are infantile and our attention span is one of 5 to 10 seconds so we must be sung to by cute little animals in a musical fashion for us to be listening. My intelligence is insulted if so. Or, they are marketing towards children. We are raising a generation of little girls who are going to expect to be left, verbally abused, or cheated on if they dont look like gym time barbie and a generation of little boys that are going to grow up learning that the outer shell of a woman is the only thing we should be paying attention to when selecting a mate and its totally statistically normal to respond with verbal abuse, cheating, or divorce if their significant other does not look like gym time barbie. We are living in a day and age where only a two income household can afford to pay a mortgage and bills so the majority of families do not have a stay at home parent influencing the kids. Television, after school programs, babysitters, and daycare are raising them. Television being the primary babysitter i know of for the families i know where both parents work. That screen is teaching them about the world more than we are and somebody has to tell these kids that the scenarios acted out by those cute little singing fluffy animals on screen is not right, not biblical, and why. I believe that these peddlers of glp-1s will be the death of young people looking for substance when choosing a life partner. They will be the death of the concept of a life partner because these kids will grow up thinking that if their significant other missteps in some way, they’ll just dump them and get another better one. I have a visceral soul level negative reaction to the singing animals with emotions written all over their faces as they are abandoned or cheated on for not looking nice. And its icing on the cake that the creators add warts, green eye makeup, and pimples to many of the characters just to make sure we know how gross the overweight woman is.
So first i will begin by telling you why this is dumb. When they say “oh, its okay, my insurance is paying for all this.” Thats not entirely true. Its paying for the glp-1 but its not buying all the things you have to take to supplement what you’re now deficient in if you’re taking a glp-1. You have to buy that stuff out of pocket. And, the insurance only pays for things if they are making enough money to do so. When i cancelled my health insurance years ago it was because i made just a few hundred dollars too much to receive a credit from the government to cover my health insurance cost. So, i owed them $10,000 a year for health insurance even though i only had two regular physical checkups in a 12 month span. Meanwhile, some people are paying 35 dollars a month for insurance because they make $10 an hour. It is the middle class with their credit revoked that pays in enough money to this system for the government to be able to afford to offer $35 a month plans to those on minimum wage. The insurance is buying most of your glp-1 for you because they are taking enough from the middle class that they may lose their houses to afford to keep paying that insurance. And they conveniently only tell those with revoked credits that they are revoked because they “made just at too much money” after the whole year of insurance has been had and the bill is due. Tax time. You can cancel for next year but you have to find a way to pay them for what you now know you already owe. Insurance is now priced above my and many of my friends’ heads. I no longer ride horses because i cant afford to break anything. But i digress. The reason this is dumb is because for centuries humans have consumed food for the purposes of survival, of building muscle mass so they can hunt and for nourishment so their organs will continue functioning. Now, humans are on glp-1s to prevent them from wanting to consume food. People think they’re being so discreet. They’re not discreet. Once healthy friends and coworkers start showing up looking lile holocaust victims with pencil thin arms, hollowed out faces, and visible collar bones, replace their wardrobe with xs everything and show up to the lunch table with a clear pink protein water drink talking about their lunch tastes so good and has caffeine in it and gives them energy….you’re not being discreet. I know you’re on glp-1’s when your whole lunch is a see-through pink drink where you added protein caffeine powder to water and put a fancy straw in it. The other clue would be the brown paper bags in the mini fridge with peoples names on the outside containing glass vials of glp-1s. There used to be sandwiches and bags of grapes, yogurt cups in the mini fridge and now its empty except for these tiny brown paper bags with vials of clear liquid in them. Try as i might, i cant change the minds of these people. They drank the koolaid and they love their little vials of “delete the food noise”. Okay, what is being labeled “food noise” is hunger. Hunger has been there evolutionarily for hundreds of years to let our bodies know when its time to hunt or gather in order to sustain the body’s longevity and continue existing. Hunger has a purpose. Its a good thing. A necessary, normal thing. Its not “food noise”. To delete it is not a good thing. Its a natural process that we are meant to have and be a part of. Scientists took advantage of this feedback loop and started engineering processed foods to be addictive and tell the brain that we need “‘more” at all times. If you just eat fruit, veg, meat, seafood, nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains, you will not have an OVERACTIVE hunger feedback loop unless you have a specific disorder. The average person, when not eating processed scientifically engineered food, only gets hungry when the previous fuel is being used up and its time to input more. I have food allergies and a budget so everything i consume is made from scratch and comes from fish, wild game, gluten free grains, seeds, nuts, vegetables, fruit, or legumes. I do not eat processed foods save for dairy free sugar free chocolate once in a while. On the weekends i only eat twice a day, not because of glp-1s but because when i dont have to work, thats all i get hungry for. If processed foods ruined peoples feedback loop surrounding food, the answer is not more human control but less. Quit fiddling with something nature designed and go back to the original. Eat real clean basic ingredients. Dont buy from the frozen or prepared section at the grocery. Make food from scratch. When you are full you will be full. Processed food has way more calories than we need in one sitting. From scratch natural hunter/gatherer food does not. Go back to a paleo diet for God’s sake. Why are we injecting ourselves with needles at work here? It doesnt make sense to me. I havent even gotten into the insanity of the whole concept yet. You inject yourself with a clear liquid to make you not hungry so you wont eat the food that gives you vitamins, protein, and the nourishment you need to build and maintain muscle mass and grow and maintain hair, instead of just eating a paleo diet and exercising at least twice a week. Well, then the glp-1 will not only delete fat but muscle as well so now you need protein and a vigorous 6 day a week workout routine to maintain that shrinking muscle mass. But, we dont like eating remember? Eating food is the enemy. So we’ll get protein in the form of a gummy. Now you have to take a protein gummy, a hair loss gummy, a greens gummy, a vitamin d gummy, a vitamin c gummy, a magnesium gummy, a calcium gummy…. So we’re working out 6 times a week just trying to not lose the muscle mass we have already whereas off the glp-1 working out twice a week would add muscle mass to what you already have. We’re eating a regiment if gummies instead of food, and injecting ourselves with diabetes drugs to delete a natural life-preserving phenomena called hunger that every other animal on the planet has and benefits from. If you have a capuchin monkey you have to take him or her to the wildlife vet each year to maintain your license to keep him or her and part of the requirement for keeping that monkey is keeping their weight within a healthy normal range. And you do that not by injecting the monkey with glp-1s but by feeding the monkey foods it would find in its natural habitat rather than pup cups, potato chips, and cup cakes. Im watching the people around me engage in idiocy and i cant stop them…all i can do is refuse to join them. I enjoy food. Im 105 lbs with a thyroid disorder that can cause weight gain. My weight is absolutely due to the foods i choose to put in my body. I would challenge anyone to eat what i eat for a year and see if they dont weigh what they desire to weigh. There’s literally no processed food in my diet besides the occasional square of sugar free dairy free chocolate or a box of oat milk for a fruit smoothie, but budget dictates oat milk must happen sparingly. I enjoy the taste of the foods i do put in my mouth and i refuse to give the “food noise” up because i understand its necessary and beneficial place in my life and i would like to continue enjoying good seafood, good deer meat, good quail, good chocolate, and good lemon pepper broccoli and good fresh persimmons from my tree, good roasted zucchini, garlic mushrooms, peanut butter on apples…. Its tasty. Why give that up?
The sad aspect of this is that i am watching people who were vibrant, thriving, beautiful women, at a healthy weight, who maybe thought they needed to lose the 5 extra they had hanging around their belly button to be bikini ready or something, go from looking healthy, fit, and beautiful in their uniform to looking like a holocaust victim with a uniform draped over them. Their cheeks are sunken in. Their face is boney and hollowed out. The veins are visible at their temples. Their hair is thinning. Their arms and legs are pencil thin. Their collar bones are visible and pronounced and the skin is draped over and clings to them. They look starved. My family members generations ago died in concentration camps and i can imagine they would also not be able to make sense of this. They did not have a choice in their starvation but these people are not held in camps behind razor wire. These people are starving themselves by choice. Ive kept my mouth shut thus far and just watched them do it as everyone has a right to make their own choice and if that is their choice, it is not my place to try and sway them from it, but the sing song animal commercials was a step too far. I will say my peace now and if it falls on deaf ears so be it, but i will have said my peace and my soul will know it. The people i am watching whither are mothers. I wonder what their children think of the frail figure that now stands where a healthy mother used to. I used to admire the figure of one of them so much. She was beautiful. For the life of me i dont know why she thought she needed to lose weight. She looked amazing. Now her face is sunken in, her hair is falling out, and i can see her veins and collar bones. She’s “swimsuit ready” if you want to see a skeleton with skin stretched over it in a bikini. I dont understand this insanity. But i was alive in the 90s. I remember a time when people were institutionalized and treated for eating disorders for this kind of body in the 90s. The children growing up right now think this is normal…a thing to shoot for, and we’re teaching them that the outside is the only important thing. Where are the speeches about how its whats on the inside that matters…who you are as a person? We forget that those young people missed our past and all they know is the present and the future and they dont have any of that grounded stuff to draw on later…its our job to teach them morals, ethics, logic, and truth……not this.
As far as “where does this end?”……if we keep going like this for 10 years it ends with a generation that doesnt know what it is to value someone for anything other than what they look like. That’s where it ends.