By Kenneth L. Hardin

As I often do, I recently woke up in the middle of the night with a pressing thought flowing through my head with such intensity it made me sit up in bed. I can only imagine the billions of neurons firing throughout my brain telling my opposing hemispheres to engage in a warped game of cognitive pickleball instead of allowing me to rest comfortably. I imagined that little distraction, that woke me up, was in the form of a child playing hopscotch in my head happily jumping around from the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes. The little monster was unaware he was causing me so much consternation in the wee hours of the morning.

 I wasn’t thinking about how to find world peace, solving the energy crisis or even wondering why Will Smith continues to put up with Jada’s nonsense. Nope, I was sitting up, with my back against the headboard, arms folded and head flung backwards thinking about food.

Why was I jolted out of a somewhat restless sleep thinking about whether the foods I’m eating are sabotaging my attempts to maintain my healthy lifestyle? Welcome to the craziness that goes on inside my head on a nightly basis. Seeing as how I live life on the edge and have no fear of living so recklessly at 3 a.m., I got out of bed, walked over to my big easy chair and turned on a Netflix documentary entitled “What The Health.” It  unapologetically explored how uninformed eating leads to health dangers. I know, slow down Kenny.

I’ve always had a love-love relationship with food. As a child, I was called the “garbage can” at the dinner table. If there was anything my four siblings didn’t want or finish, my parents would tell them to rake it over onto my plate for it to be fully consumed. I was the youngest and was already used to getting their hand-me-down clothes, so taking their leftover food wasn’t too much of a stretch. I was an active kid and an athletic teenager, so weight was never an issue unless it had to do with waiting to eat. I recall often standing in front of the oven door watching the food bake and simmer in all its glory and being excited to hear that timer ring. When I entered the military at 19 years old, I was a trim 142 pounds. When my Uncle Sam sent me back home four years later, I was a respectful 196 pounds. Over the next couple of decades afterwards, I swelled to a whopping 276 pounds, making me eligible to join the 1980s rap group, “The Fat Boys.” What came with all that extra thick love, however, was diabetes and hypertension.

In between multiple stints of being rushed to the hospital due to extremely high blood pressure levels, out of control stress and poor eating habits, I lost 42 pounds and called it a win. The only problem is that someone forgot to tell my body. Three years ago, I was still stressed and on the poor eating merry go round until I heard the words of my wonderful female MD, “Mr. Hardin, looking at your chart, I don’t know how or why you’re not dead.”  Three years later, I still re-play that conversation in my head and use it as motivation on my healthy lifestyle journey. This Sister MD broke it down in plain, no nonsense language to me. She gave me a set of marching orders to abide by that included reducing my stress level. One of her directives was for me to change my phone number and stop making myself so readily available. She told me she wanted to see that I had completed this by my next visit. I did, and my phone book decreased from 700 contacts to 61, and so did my stress level.

The documentary began with a quote from Hippocrates, “Let thy food be thy medicine and the medicine be thy food.” The first eye-opening gut punch in the film revealed that bacon, hot dogs and red meat were considered carcinogenic or capable of causing cancer. “Eating bacon is the same as smoking a cigarette and the WHO says it’s the same as being exposed to asbestos.” This shook me to my core as a Black man because bacon is high on the food pyramid for skinfolk. My affinity for the taste is probably why I could never be a Muslim. A 2019 study revealed 37.3 million Americans had diabetes with 11.7% being Black. 

About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the U.S. every year with 48% being Black males.

Since May of last  year, I’ve been committed to healthy eating and exercise. I’m down an additional 40 pounds. Now, if I could just stop thinking so much and sleep.  

Kenneth “Kenny” L. Hardin is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists.