EATING FOR ENERGY     

          What you put into your body affects everything about you: your energy, your moods, your shape, your endurance, your skin, eyes and hair.  If you want to be radiant, glowing, and optimistic, you'll think very carefully about what you're using for fuel.

          If you were given a Ferrari and told it was the only car you could drive for the rest of your life, how would you treat it? Would you fill it with an inferior grade of gasoline, knowing that the valves would eventually become gummed up?  Or would you fill it with the highest octane, purest gasoline you could find?

          We live in a beautifully planned world.  Human beings need food as fuel.  The highest "octane", purest fuel can actually be grown, right in the ground we walk upon.  The soil is a living, breathing friend to all mankind.  When you enfold a tiny seed in the soil, wonderful, invisible nutrients feed that seed, and rain gives it drink, until a green sprout peeks out of the ground.  Then the radiant energy of the sun becomes part of the newborn plant.  If the plant were in your own garden, you might even go out and talk to it, adding love into the equation. 

          When the plant is full-grown, it is a wondrous thing, for in reality, it is sun, earth, water and air.  The energy of sun, soil, water and air is actually wrapped into its fibers.  So as you bite into a piece of broccoli, carrot or lettuce, you are taking a bite of sun, earth, water and air.   You are fueling your body according to the grand scheme of things.

          If this viewpoint seems a bit extreme, perhaps you haven't been paying much attention to your food-fuel lately.  It's so easy to forget how connected we are with the earth when we can simply go to the grocery store and pluck a can from a shelf.  But there is great satisfaction in showing our body the respect it deserves by carefully choosing what goes into it.