Buying "Health Insurance"

When I moved to Maine I had to buy individual health insurance as I am self-employed. The monthly premium was $250. The annual deductible...$15,000.

This means that, short of a serious medical emergency, the healthcare bill is on me. That's okay. I accept it - grudgingly. After all, I'm in pretty good shape, and I go out of my way to not use the healthcare system.

My diet and my lifestyle comprise my real health insurance. The fake kind, that which I purchased, is really asset protection. If I get run over by a bus it would be nice not to end up having to sell my house.

Meanwhile, my outrageous deductible, in essence, goes towards subsidizing others who are using the system, abusing their bodies, and not paying the true cost of their healthcare.

This is a simple fact. This is why our healthcare system needs reform. This is why Obamacare just makes things worse. This is why Obamacare needs to be scrapped in favor of a system that makes personal responsibility and fiscal accountability its most urgent - and only - priorities.

The Cost of Breakfast

Most people assume that eating good food is more expensive than eating lousy food. This is not always true.

Lousy food is highly processed, often travels great distances to market, and requires a lot of advertising to sell it. These are all costs.

I buy good food from small, local producers. In doing so I spend about 60% of what I used to spend when I shopped at the supermarket.

Here, for example, is what my breakfast - a raw milk smoothie - costs:

one cup raw milk, 35 cents, one banana 15 cents, one raw egg 21 cents, one tsp. coconut oil, one tsp. lecithin, two tsp. nutritional yeast, two tsp. cod liver oil, two tablets dry liver approx. 60 cents.

A cup of coffee costs me about 30 cents, so for about a buck and a half I'm done. I've had a nutritious that will stay with me til lunch.

Happy New Year

With each new year millions of Americans resolve to lose weight. But losing weight is really less about resolve, or will, and more about awareness. If you are conscious of the foods you eat, their make up, how you eat them, and their effect on your body then you should have no problem keeping trim.

Overweight in America is really about lack of awareness. Of food. Of self.

It's easy to count calories - and thus easy to sell a diet to the desperate and unsuspecting. It's easy to demonize fats because, on the face of it, they equal, well, fat.

But they don't.

Fats, the right ones, are integral to good health and weight control. The number of calories you eat matter less; the quality more.

So here's to a new year and greater awareness about food and self. Eat fat to lose fat.