I think that everything in moderation is ok. Soda doesnt make you fat nor will the TV as long as neither one plays a large factor in your life. As long as you exercise and eat healthy, a soda every now and then isnt going to hurt you nor is watching your favorite TV show once a week.

I agree that a little bit of soda will only harm you a little bit.

Moderation is an interesting word. I want to be spectacularly fit and healthy, not moderately fit and healthy. I'm extremely interested in raising disease-free kids, not moderately interested.

Some people find that watching a little TV and eating a little junk is fine. Most people I know find that extremism is actually much easier, especially at the beginning of a transition. You wouldn't ask a cocaine addict to just snort in moderation - you'd recommend a program where they could quit completely and get the support they need.

The problem with toxins in moderation is that it's very hard to maintain a non-addictive stance toward them.

We each have to figure out what works best for us.

this is really cool!

Howie, I see your rationale and no i wouldnt ask a cocaine addict to only snort coke in moderation however food and cocaine are on extremely different levels. While you want to be EXTREMELY healthy, i think thats great. Me personally, i run about 5 of the 7 days a week so i would think that i moderately exercise but i am still going to watch my favorite TV show and drink a soda maybe once a week. I dont think that kind of moderation is bad. I too am interested in raising healthy kids, but i would also like for them to have a normal childhood; playing and eating candy and having a coca-cola every now and then. Extremes i feel would only cause children to go nuts eating junk food the minute they went to college because they had been deprived as a child. I feel that your method and my method can both raise healthy kids, i just think that you can sometimes enjoy the best of both worlds.

I agree with you. When you are the master and not the slave, things like the occasional soda are benign. TV is more of a cultural problem than an individual problem for me. We own a TV which we use to watch DVDs, and we live in a community where being outside and engaged in the world is more fun than sitting in a dark room watching other people's lives.

But when we lived in a normal suburban house on a normal suburban street and felt somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, the TV was a much more enticing and dominating presence.

Let's understand what TV is: the mechanism by which corporations feed us their version of culture. It conditions us to be consumers before citizens, passive observers instead of actors, and devotees of trivia rather than substance.

There's some interesting research on how parents get their kids to eat healthy, by a Penn State professor named Leann Birch. She found that the parents who had the biggest problems were the ones who had the "undesirable" food in the house, ate it themselves, and tried to keep it away from their kids.

Our home is junk-food and soda free. Our kids understand that coke is not a substance the human body is meant to consume. It's a much easier stance, for us, than "It's bad for you so only have it once in a while."

The other problem with junk food is that it's engineered to be addictive, and to taste better than natural food. It overwhelms our taste buds the same way cocaine overwhelms the pleasure center of the brain. Coke and candy are not as immediately damaging to the body as cocaine, but they are addictive and they make it hard for us to enjoy healthier foods because they mess up our calibration.

For more information, check out The Pleasure Trap by Goldhamer and Lisle.

I appreciate your desire to give your kids a normal childhood. I hear this a lot from parents who can't understand why I don't give my kids ice cream.

I'm not so interested in normal - I'm interested in happy, healthy, conscious, engaged. When I look at the planet, I see us hurtling toward mindless destruction of our environment and of ourselves. I want to make sure when I'm old and my grandkids ask me, "What did you do when there was still a chance to stop global warming?" that I'll have a good answer. And part of that answer will include raising kids who question the "normal" consumption going on around them.

Interesting Howie. I have enjoyed reading your posts. I hope that one day I have healthy happy kids and that this country as a whole starts to find a happy medium between my practices and yours in order to make child obesity drop and have healthy and happy children. Have a pleasant weekend.