I happened to go to a shopping mall recently. Not something I am in the habit of doing so it was all a little unfamiliar. As I was a little early for a meeting with a colleague, I wandered around to see what was happening.
What was happening was that everyone seemed to have become fatter! And most of the crowd washing past me seemed to be eating or drinking on the move. I realised this was not altogether surprising considering the amount of unhealthy junk food that was available all around me in the aisle.
There was ice-cream (or frozen yoghurt which seems much the same to me), cookies, doughnuts, muffins, sweets, flapjacks. Everywhere I looked, there was stuff to “stuff’ your face with. And none of the stuff was good stuff. It was all the kind of stuff that doctors warn you about.
And, if I had cared to enter some of the food establishments, I could choose from burgers, pizzas, noodles, fried chicken and more. Not much ‘real’ food seemed to be on offer.
I realised I had probably hit on one of the main contributors to the obesity crisis. Because this stuff was enticing! I knew this because I found myself beginning to crave something sweet, sticky and smelly. Yes, smelly; the smell of all these unhealthy edibles was really most attractive!
Yes, the smell of hot cookies, burgers, coffee and so on is compelling. No doubt this is one of the reasons it is so readily available; the producers know we will be drawn to it!
This was not something that surrounds me every day so I did manage to resist the almost hypnotic seduction but I dread to think what the result of daily exposure might do to my self-control!
Maybe we should all try to avoid shopping malls – for the sake of our health and our figures!
Those place do seduce you with their smells of food and they fill them with ingredients that are not healthy but are cheaper and put chemicals in them so you want to eat more i.e. MSM. No wonder we are a nation full of obese people that leads to depression and lack of love for oneself because of the obesity!! Which then can turn into anger and we wonder why there is so much violence in the world! It all begins with a smell!!
Yup, it’s the same with most things in life. If you don’t see it, you don’t want it. I had a friend who worked in a town centre and every lunch break she’d wander round the shops and 9 times out of 10 she’d come back with an item of clothing or a pair of shoes. Only £10, only £20 – Bargain!! Not such a bargain when you’re doing it 3 or 4 times a week, month after month……