Digesting the Truth

A few months ago, in the middle of my exams, I was the victim of a gas attack. Fortunately or unfortunately, this gas attack was internal or in other words as a result of gas generation from within. It seems like a trivial problem, I mean if gas builds up inside, it is bound to escape, either when one burps or when farts. For some inexplicable reason, mine just stayed inside like gas stored in a huge LNG container and gave me 2 of the worst days of my life. It was like a storm within and never in my whole life had I ever prayed to God to let me fart.

The good thing was that this experience made me look at my eating habits. When you come from an Indian family, where you drink curry like you drink water, a healthy diet is unthinkable. In which case, the only option left was to eat healthy at school, which wasn't happening with all the nasi lemak, nasi padang, chinese mixed rice with 3 meat and 1 veggie and the frequent chocolate waffle that I treated myself to every now and then, just to remind myself that life was great.

Ironically, my eating habit was still much better than those around me. I had friends who would not touch their vegetable during NS. After Macs made sharp cuts in the cost of its burgers at my school, everyone started frequenting it more, despite the fact that the additives they add cause everything from heart disease to cancer. Recently during my internship, I tried out the famous Golden Shoe Nasi Lemak that was ridiculously delicious at a ridiculously low price. I remember looking at one of my friend's plate that was filled with all kinds of fried food. "Only 3 dollars!", he exclaimed. And we would drop by there every now and then.

It struck me how cheap and accessible unhealthy food had become. In the past my father used to say the ice cream man would only drop by only once or twice a month. The little toffees we cannot be bothered about any more used to cost quite a bit of savings or need a generous donation from a visiting relative. Now, we can get anything we want, anytime and at very little cost to us. In the midst of this gluttony, we forget that our body has its limits, limits that we test every time we overwork it with all kinds of food we can get our hands on. As much I hate to say this, our liberal eating habits is certain to rear its ugly head within the next 10 or 20 years of our lives. 

At the end of the day, it is entirely one's choice what one want to eat. A study found out that people felt more guilty if the suffering we went through was a direct consequence of our actions that we had a choice about doing, but we consciously chose the wrong one. 

With regards to food, we do have a choice. All that is left is to choose the healthy one.