While some of your choices - like job availability and certain stressors - are often beyond your control, many other choices are still yours to make. The message of this website is that we can take responsibility for overall food selection. We can choose to limit much of the stress in our lives and learn ways to manage unavoidable stress. We can choose to exercise. In this section, we will present some basic data about nutrition, examine the reasons behind our imbalanced use of food, and highlight ways of growing in awareness and love through our diet and eating habits. These suggestions will help us define a whole new circle within which to live.

One of the most graphic examples of increasing obesity in the United States is the disappearing seats of a famous baseball park. Yankee Stadium was built during the 1920s. It had about 82,000 seats. After remodeling during the 1970s, the seating was only 59,000. During that fifty-year period, between Babe Ruth and such baseball greats as Thurman Munson, Ron Guidry, and Reggie Jackson, the average American bottom" had widened from fourteen inches to nineteen inches. Today, patrons at the Mickey Mantle Restaurant in New York, where a few of the original seats were installed, have found them to be a tight fit. - Charles Atwood, MD, A Vegetarian Doctor Speaks Out Hohm Press 1998

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