A Waste Of Milk

When I was growing up, my mom was obsessed with making my sister and I drink milk. In fact, we bookended our day with milk. A cup in the morning, a full glass in the evening.

We were told dairy industry lies, somehow convincing ourselves that milk would “do our body good” and would make us grow bigger and stronger somehow.

Another thing that was characteristic about my childhood was stomach aches. It may have been childhood anxiety (I had quite a bit of it) or it may have been the copious amounts of milk I drank every day.

I got a little break from the milk in middle school when my family lived overseas in Egypt. I felt better then.

When we moved back for high school, things were different. Gone were the days of eating together at the table with a glass of milk pre-poured and waiting for me next to my pop-tart.

I rarely even ate breakfast in high school. Instead, I’d wake up and barely have time for a shower before I was out the door. I usually didn’t even eat my first bite until the predetermined snack time in high school, about 10:30.

So my mom would leave that glass of milk on the bathroom counter. She wanted me to drink it after my shower. But drinking the milk made my stomach hurt and I had finally made the connection. So unbeknownst to her, every single day… I poured that glass of milk directly down the bathroom sink.

I’ve done the math. If there were 8 oz in the glass every day, and 180 school days in a year, and 4 years of high school… then I poured about _45 gallons_of milk down the drain over the course of high school.

It’s amazing how much milk I wasted. And how that milk would’ve been wasted if I had consumed it anyway. A waste of something that is already kind of a waste itself.

This story is a clear illustration of the reasons to re-examine our behavior, our patterns, our beliefs. We all believed drinking milk would reap huge benefits, but it turns out it was just making many of us sick every day.

We’ve since expanded our knowledge, but I guarantee there’s a habit in your life that you believe in with the same conviction that my mother had in the power of milk.