Full text of personal trainer Hether Crawford’s talk: You REALLY are what you eat at TEDxAntioch conference. In this talk, she shares her ideas for how we can change our lives via nutrition and committing to one small change in order to watch our bodies work the way they were designed to.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hether Crawford – Certified Health Coach and Personal Trainer
I’m someone that does not like to waste time. I was married at 19, started my family at 21. And at the age of 25 had my second child.
We were your typical American fast food family. Always on the go, we very frequently went through the drive-throughs. And when at home we ate quick-boxed meals.
And like a lot of people, we lived on soft-drinks in the mornings to wake us up and sugary snacks in the afternoons to keep us going.
But none of us was overweight. So it couldn’t really be hurting us. Right?
Well, I had thousands of dollars in dental bills. I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome and my husband had severe allergies. But it was my children that finally made me look at and take seriously the phrase ‘you are what you eat’.
My daughter was struggling in school. Her mind would wander. And she often left her class work unfinished. Her grades and her self-esteem were tremendously suffering. It was so frustrating for me to not be able to help her get more organized, “She was so smart. Why couldn’t she finish her work?”
My son was pretty much born sick. He was diagnosed with asthma. He had chronic upper respiratory infections that required frequent breathing treatments, multiple ear infections that led to three different ear surgeries. We had his pediatrician on speed dial and we spent so many holidays together.
Not only that though, he was sick all the time, but he was also a wild man. Actually him. We got calls almost weekly from his preschool and he very rarely got smiley faces sent home.
Now, if you’re a parent, you know how hard this can be to hear. It was emotionally exhausting to not be able to keep him well, but it was just humiliating to not be able to control his behavior.
One day when someone in the school system asked if I was going to have him tested for ADHD, I felt like a complete failure, had it really come to this? This can’t be normal. Children should not have to be drugged to function. I thought back and I couldn’t remember a single childhood friend that was on daily medication.
And in that moment I decided to do some research. I’m not a doctor. I can’t stand up here and rattle off my credentials or my clinical research. I’m a mom.
And what I’m going to share with you is my research was come straight from my personal experience.
As a mom, I am passionate about growing my children to be the best that they can be and I just couldn’t fathom that medication was the way to do that. I immediately started learning from so experts, many who have shared their research on the TED stage.
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I learned that childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. And that food additives such as dyes are being linked to hyperactivity in children.
Dr. Feingold found that the artificial colors and flavors can trigger or even exaggerate learning disabilities and behavior disorders.
When I looked at the tubes of yogurt and the juice boxes and the candy that my kids were ingesting, food dyes were in all of it. And not only that, but the sugar content and these juice boxes and yogurts, were just as high as the software drinks that they were also having.
I also learned that right now in America, it is very normal for children to be medicated. They’re medicated to modify behavior. They’re medicated for diabetes, allergies, asthma and so on.
But this hasn’t always been the case. What has changed?
According to a study released in 2013, by the centers for disease control and prevention, food allergies among children increased approximately 50% between 1997 and 2011. The prevalence of autism in US children increased from 1 in 150 in 2000 to 1 in 68 in 2010. Rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 5% per year from 2003 to 2011.
What was going on?
I found out that things were being introduced into our food system that didn’t use to be there. These chemicals and genetically modified organisms are being linked to things like allergy, asthma, autism, brain problems, heart problems, and even cancer.
Fast food is filled with this junk. But even things that I thought were good for my kids, like milk was full of growth hormones and antibiotics.
I was angry. I had been given this stuff to my kids their whole life.
Was I making them sick? Why didn’t I know any of these things?
We are being told that products are good for us when in fact they’re hurting us. Fast food companies are marketing to our children, things that are going to impact their health negatively for the rest of their lives.
I started watching several TED talks on the way the food system in America is deceiving us. And I got really fired up. I am so thankful for people like Robyn O’Brien, who has several TEDx talks on the way she’s taking on big food.
And Vani Hari, also known as the Food Babe, who’s raising up an army to go against these big corporations that are formulating their products in other countries without these harmful ingredients, but not doing so here in America. And they’re even refusing to label them here.
This was the last straw for me, but what was going to be my role in all of this? What could I possibly do? I did the only thing I knew how to do, and that was to share this information with my family. And once I had them on board, we changed the way we ate.
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