Fear of Death? How About Fear of Skittles?

Fear of death is simply not a good motivator. I ate a bag of Skittles today. Skittles are pure sugar. I should say, they are made mainly from sugar. Refined, white sugar. Did you know that animal bone char is used in the processing of whitening sugar? That’s gross and another reason for me to avoid sugar. On top of that, sugar shocks caused the insulin levels in your body to spike. Spikes in insulin are bad. Over the long haul, problems creating insulin and sugar resistance within our bodies leads to things like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain types of cancers. So, sugar shocks…they are bad. Bad. They can quicken you down that path to death.

And I still ate a bag of Skittles. So, my hypothesis stands: fear of death is not a good motivator. The only time it’s a good motivator is when the threat of death is immediate and overt. Like when there’s a person holding a gun to your head. That’s immediate and overt, and it would probably motivate 99% of us to action. Once you remove the threat a little…motivation goes down. I’d love to know if there have been any studies measuring the critical distance between threat and action. I suspect that it’s not as great a distance as we would think.

Worse than death, I think, is the idea of living as a bed-ridden, diabetic amputee. Still, that’s a far-away prospect from where I am sitting. So, fear of a severe compromise of quality of life doesn’t really appear to be that effective a motivator, either. As a matter of fact, people I know often cite fear of compromise of quality of life as the actual REASON they don’t do what they know is good for them. “Who wants to live to be 100?” I hear them ask. Well…heck, I do! Why not?

Binge on sugar today, live in pain tomorrow. That just doesn’t make sense to me. If you think “binge” is too harsh a word, read some food labels! Despite what those irresponsible, outrageous, inexcusable commercials say, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IS NOT NUTRITIOUS OR HEALTHY. It certainly isn’t any of those things given the how prevalent it is in processed foods today.

Adjust your palate today, live a longer, healthier life with many tomorrows. That makes all the sense in the world to me. The only problem is that death is such an abstract concept. I need to latch onto something much more tangible and visible in my life today…

Fear of death? How about fear of Skittles?