By Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness

I’ve written a lot about eating healthy, but I’ll admit that I struggle with it. The funny thing about it is that it really doesn’t have to be a struggle, and all it takes is the willingness to refuse foods we know are fake or filled with so many chemicals that they can hardly be considered food.

For most people who want to eat healthy, the struggle lies in the fact that they’ve been conditioned to eat unhealthy food since childhood.

It isn’t necessarily the sole fault of their parents, who were also conditioned in their own ways, but either way, we need to break the cycle and feed ourselves things that actually sustain our bodies instead of gradually forming disease.

Even though I say this and truly believe it, I’ve had trouble following through with it. I’ve made some progress, but when I examine my habits and impulses, I realize that I still have a lot of disciplined work ahead of me.

If you think about it, it’s strange that so many people, including me, need this discipline in the first place.

How is it that so many people have been so heavily conditioned that they don’t question their food? Where did we go wrong as a society, and when did we start to depend so heavily on corporations that we let them feed us whatever they want?

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to self-sustainability and why western society struggles with it.

Some of the writers whose work you might see featured alongside mine are probably successful gardeners or food growers and are very particular about what they eat, but I represent the indulgent masses because I’m still a novice in this field.

I’m new to healthy eating, and I had no real idea how important it is until I discovered Rastafari. Maybe I should give some backstory in order to explain how Rasta introduced me to the importance of healthy eating.

When I first became an active part of the conscious community, I was what they call a “New Ager”. I was very interested in channeling (ETs, Ascended Masters, etc.), and I’m still interested in intuitively connecting with the inner voice/higher self.

While I was a successful channel for a long time and my writings and messages went pretty far down the New Age rabbit hole, which I’m not necessarily saying is a bad thing, I eventually realized that I needed something more.

I needed to learn more about this earthly life before I could even consider spiritual evolution, and growing closer with the earth has helped me realize what I’ve been missing. There’s a lot I still don’t know about this world, and I’m glad I’ve started to explore new territory instead of staying rooted in one belief system.

When I started to stray from New Age beliefs, the first “new” belief I was introduced to was Rastafari. I’ve always liked reggae music, and I learned while researching the beliefs that underlie the music that most Rastas regard their bodies as sacred and refuse to eat anything unnatural.

Rastas don’t drink alcohol either, which really intrigued me because I also don’t drink, in a culture where nearly everyone in my age group does (I’m 21). It wasn’t until I learned about Rastafari that I realized that the body really is sacred and what we put into it is crucial.

Rasta philosophy goes deeper than most people think (you know, the people who think it’s only about smoking pot, wearing dreads and playing bongos), and some Rastas believe that if they treat their flesh with respect, they could live forever.

It requires the willingness to reject Babylon’s (the establishment’s) indulgent, unhealthy meals, and I have Rastafarian philosophy to thank for my awareness about gluttony, indulgence and population control via fake food. Since my initial introduction to healthy eating, I’ve learned all kinds of things.

I’ve even learned that eating right is a big part of the New Age movement I once participated so heavily in, and I never even knew it. I probably didn’t know anything about organic food until 2012 or 2013. That’s how much of a newbie I am, and it’s why I tend to struggle.

Like a lot of other people, I have some deeply rooted eating habits to break – chief among which is my reliance on food that’s void of nutrition.

I also have a pretty strong dependence on sugar, and watching bits of the recent food documentary “Fed Up” opened my eyes to the necessity to turn away from fake food (especially sugar) and toward food that actually nourishes the body.

Fake food gives us the illusion of nutritional satisfaction by making us feel “full”, but it depletes the body of the nutrients we were hungry for in the first place. It’s pure madness, and it gets a lot worse than that.

I wrote in my last piece on this subject that the people who are responsible for social conditioning are more to blame than the citizens who’ve been subjected to it, but this doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible for making a change.

Some people think it’s an easy switch, and for them it probably is. But for those of us who sincerely want to change but get bombarded with fake food on a daily basis, which we willingly consume at times, the fight will be long and hard.

Even still, we have to fight this artificial, unhealthy food with everything we’ve got. We have to stand up to the interests pushing it and say no, we aren’t going to keep letting you poison us, and the first step is to refuse to eat any fake food, no matter how much we’re tempted.

This is also the hardest step, but we have to try. We can’t roll over and let them control our bodies, and in my opinion, we have to return to a more natural, self-sustainable way of life.

If we don’t, we’ll reap the consequences. If you think the obesity rate is bad now, just wait a couple decades and watch the terror slowly unfold. We can prevent this if we stand up and make a change right now, but until we can willingly reject this fake food at all times, nothing we say or do will matter much.

Awakening others will be easier when we make a personal eating change and stick with it, and we might really be able to achieve something.

It takes discipline and the willingness to stand up to Big Food by refusing to let them feed us or our families, and we have to draw our line in the sand and say enough is enough.

We’ll feel a lot better when we eat food that comes naturally from the earth, and hopefully, we’ll spread enough knowledge to empower the rest of the world to feel better too.

The next time we’re tempted to eat fake food, let’s remember that we aren’t just refraining for ourselves – we’re doing it for the rest of the world, which will eventually awaken to the fact that their food doesn’t resemble the food their ancestors consumed.

Raising awareness requires us to take our own advice, and helping others will be easier when we make the personal changes that are required before we can thrive.

Share freely.

I’m a twenty-one year old spiritual writer, blogger and channel for the creative expression of the inner universe, and I created The Culture of Awareness daily news site.

The Culture of Awareness features daily spiritual and alternative news, articles I’ve written, and more. Its purpose is to awaken and uplift by providing material about the fall of the planetary elite and a new paradigm of unity and spirituality.

I’ve contributed to a few different spiritual websites including The Master Shift, Waking Times, Golden Age of Gaia, Wake Up World and Expanded Consciousness. I can also be found on Facebook (Wes Annac and The Culture of Awareness) and Twitter, and I write a paid weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to for $11.11 a month here.