Tips for Nutritional Healing

These are just a few of the incredible discoveries I made through the ton of research I did for my 6-week cleanse earlier this year. 

Foods to enjoy daily:

• At the top of the list are cruciferous veggies.  Eat as much as you can, but at least one serving raw and one cooked every day.  The health benefits are amazing!
• Eat your greens - the darker the better!  Shoot for 8 servings a day.  This has been shown to decrease risk of cancer and a whole host of other ailments.
• Raw oats, sprouted nuts, and low-sugar fruits. Combined they truly are the breakfast of champions.
• Hot lemon water in the morning 
• Drink lots of water and green tea throughout the day

Healthy food substitutes:

• Instead of chips, try rice or raw crackers with supergreens mix or raw nut cheese
• Instead of a candy bar, try carob-almond milk or raw walnut-cacao dreamy bars
• Instead of a cookie, try an apple with raw almond butter, or bake some healthy cookies like these sesame-oat-cranberry cookies
• Instead of that afternoon mocha or latte, try a decaf, sugar-free chai
• Instead of ice cream, try easy kiwi sorbet

“The doctor of the future will no longer treat the human frame with drugs, but rather will cure and prevent disease with nutrition.” - Thomas Edison

Some of the key tips I want to share are about how to reduce your dependence on the 3 worst enemies of the standard American diet - Salt, Sugar, and Fat.  This trinity isn't wholly bad, but the quantities many of us ingest definitely are detrimental to our health and longevity.  Read Michael Moss' book Salt, Sugar, Fat to learn more.

Salt:

• The key here is to take control of your eating.  Cut out, or way back, on the processed foods; and start cooking at home.
• When cooking at home, try adding salt only at the end.  If the food still tastes a bit bland, jazz it up with lemon, garlic, chilies, or other spices.  And don't leave the salt shaker on the table.
• At the grocery store, look for unsalted or low-salt varieties
• Always taste your food before you salt

Sugar:

• This one's critical - Eat less sugar!  Lightly sweeten with alternatives like dates, orange juice, honey, brown rice syrup, or sucanat. Here's a great list.
• Don't go "low fat", this usually means more sugar.
• Eat fruit as a dessert
• Cut out sweet drinks
• When cooking at home, reduce the amount of sugar in a recipe.  And try using other complex flavors instead of just going sweet - coconut, fruit, nuts, spices.
• Switch to sourdough bread, instead of standard loaves made with honey and sugar.
• At the grocery store, read labels.  There's much more sugar than you might expect in salad dressing, ketchup, and many other condiments.

Fat:

• Again, the key here is to take control of your eating.  Cut out, or way back, on the processed and fast foods; and start cooking at home.
• Avoid all trans fats
• Don't go "low fat".  This usually means more sugar, salt, processing, or all of the above.
• Fall in love with olive oil.  Olive oil is great for you, and delicious in sweet and savory dishes.  Here's a full list of good and bad fats.

Healthy changes to your way of thinking:

• Don't eat foods that are out of season.  Not sure, check out this handy guide.
• Eliminate all processed foods, GMO foods, artificial ingredients and preservatives
• Eat whole foods 
• Eat all the vegetables you want - the darker in color the better
• Lower your intake of carbs + potatoes
• Try going veg or flexitarian.  Here are a couple good cookbooks by chef Peter Berley to get you started - veg + flex)
• Cut back on the coffee + alcohol

“If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it”   - Common sense

Tea Time #2

I love taking the time to enjoy a cup of tea.  There's something inherently calming about imbibing a warm cup of herbal essence.  Even more enjoyable, is when the tea in question has a meaningful bit of wisdom or inspiration attached to it, as do the Good Earth varieties.  Today's quote is:

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  - Paul Gauguin

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French Post-Impressionist painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer.  He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement, and his experimentation was indicative of the Synthetist style of modern art. He also paved the way to the appreciation of primitivism. Gauguin styled himself and his art as "savage." Although he began his artistic career with the Impressionists in Paris, during the late 1880's he fled farther and farther from urban civilization in search of an edenic paradise where he could create pure, "primitive" art. Yet his self-imposed exile to the South Seas was not so much an escape from Paris as a bid to become the new leader of the Parisian avant-garde. Gauguin's rejection of his European family, society, and the Paris art world for a life apart, in the land of the "Other," has come to serve as a romantic example of the artist-as-wandering-mystic.

 

You Are What You Eat

A saying so cliched we've come to ignore the wisdom in it.

I was so impressed by the changes I felt after my cleanse at the beginning of the year, that I've decided to do a 2-week cleanse biannually.  One of the most pronounced changes was in my perception of food.  Not just something to stuff in my mouth when I'm hungry, or to enjoy simply for the taste, but the conviction that food is medicine. 

Americans are bombarded with information about "healthy eating," but we suffer from higher rates of obesity and chronic disease than ever before. We are told one year to avoid fat and the next to avoid carbohydrates. It's enough to make anyone distrust nutritional advice altogether, particularly anything that claims that "food is medicine."

If we're honest with ourselves, we don't really need much advice because we already know what we should do: eat a variety of foods, especially whole grains, fruits, and vegetables; minimize or eliminate processed foods; and be mindful of how much we eat. And, do some physical activity each day. If we know all this, then why do we have all the complicated nutritional advice, contradictory research studies, and endless health diets? In part because they give the food companies a way to sell more products. And for us, it is often easier to read about what we should do, then actually change our eating patterns. As a result, our standard American diet is ruining our health.

As a nation, we're doing less cooking and increasingly eating more processed foods that have little to no nutritional benefit.  We're also eating less variety of foods. Ironically, while 17,000 new products are introduced each year, two-thirds of our calories come from just four foods: corn, soy, wheat, and rice.  It's easy to fall into the pattern of eating fast, convenient, prepared food, especially in our often frenetic lives. But we are not nurturing ourselves by doing so. 

A John's Hopkins study found that only 10% of Americans eat the recommended "five a day" of fruits and vegetables. At least 50% don't eat any vegetables. Shocking statistics given that the people surveyed considered themselves nutrition "savvy". (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 2007).

Diet and exercise have long been two important ingredients to staying health and living longer, but now there is a belief in using food as medicine. Foods may appear healthy because the sugar content is zero or it's “low carb.” But real health cannot be found in synthetic foods which falsely promise health by focusing merely on numbers.  We need real food to thrive. Depriving our bodies of basic nutrition is more an attempt to fool our systems, not heal them!

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food"  - Hippocrates

Eating well is not just about putting good food into your body, but also about enjoying the experience. People complain that healthy food doesn't taste good.  This has a lot to do with the fact that we've become accustomed to the excess of salt, sugar and fat in our daily diets.  Every year, the average American eats 33 pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and 70 pounds of sugar (about 22 teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. (excerpted from Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss)

The good news is that taste in a food can be changed. People often dislike certain foods because they’re not used to them. Once you’re used to a food, it can taste great . And when you know that that food is actually good for you, and is healing your body from the inside out, it can taste magical. Here's a great A-Z list of healing foods.

There are so many benefits of a healthy diet, but the primary one is that you only have one body. Does it make sense to harm the most precious thing that you have? Don’t wait until you have no choice but to become healthier. Adopt a healthy lifestyle that makes you look and feel better. A healthy lifestyle shouldn’t be something for the short term - it's a “lifestyle”. Head to your local farmer's market this week - it's never too late to start being healthy.

"To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear."  - Buddha 

Lessons from the Wild #10

hum·ble (adjective)

1.  not proud or arrogant; modest
2.  having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, etc.
3.  low in rank, importance, status, quality, etc.
4.  courteously respectful
5.  low in height, level, etc.

Is humility practical?  How do we practice the virtue of humility in such a competitive world?

How can anyone achieve success without ambition and a competitive spirit? Who doesn't feel elated and proud after accomplishing something great?

On the surface, humility appears to be a foreign concept in our modern world.

We can all agree that humility is an admirable quality in others, because we feel comfortable around people who are humble. But when it comes to ourselves, we may consider humility a hindrance to success and a by-product of failure. Perhaps, humility seems to make sense only when we feel defeated. Then, we can at least claim that we've learned the important virtue of humility, until we are ready to get back on our feet to fight yet another battle. Though it seems rational, this line of reasoning actually prevents us from achieving a deeper understanding of the virtue of humility.

Real humility means having a healthy perspective of one’s own abilities (suffering neither egotism nor low self esteem) as well as one’s own limitations and a value for the importance and abilities of others.

In most religions, humility is a sign of respect for a higher power -

• Christianity provides the classic religious statement of humility, "Blessed be the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5).
• In Islam (which itself means surrender), humility is a primary virtue.
• Taoism focuses believers' thoughts on the awesome beauty and wonder of Nature. As you ponder the magnificence of Nature, you learn to respect our place relative to the stars and the seasons - a humbling experience.
• Buddhism teaches that, through humility, one can release anger and learn to live a life free from attachments and suffering.

For me, wandering through a vast and majestic landscape is incredibly humbling.  It's where I feel most a part of something larger than myself, and where I also feel most vulnerable.

I've recently been reading an interesting biography of Howard Zahniser, an early American environmental activist and primary author of the Wilderness Act of 1964.  Zahniser was a gifted writer and eloquently wrote about the importance of nature, and wilderness:

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

In preserving Wilderness we are essentially preserving an endangered experience, and an endangered idea — the idea that self-willed landscape has value and should exist.

Wilderness offers the opportunity to experience a relationship between humans and nature that is increasingly rare in our modern world, a relationship in which humans do not dominate, manipulate, or control nature but instead immerse ourselves as a member in the larger community of life. 

“Without the gadgets, the inventions, the contrivances whereby men have seemed to establish among themselves an independence of nature, without these distractions, to know wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness, and responsibility.”  - Howard Zahniser

Keeping the idea of Wilderness alive requires our participation in a special relationship with these landscapes that is very different from the utilitarian, commodity-oriented manner in which modern society generally interacts with nature. Preserving the idea of Wilderness requires humans to exercise humility and restraint, not dominance over the land and its natural processes. The opportunity to experience this kind of relationship with nature is an increasingly rare experience in our modern world. Designated Wilderness is the only landscape where this form of interaction between humans and the rest of nature is written into law.

“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”  - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Embrace the virtue of humility and all it can offer:

• By remaining humble, you are receptive to opportunities to improve.
• Humility is a virtue for inner well-being. Frustrations and losses don’t have the same impact if you don’t get your ego involved. If you combine humility with motivation, you have the ability to drive towards successes without letting the failures knock you out of balance.

“By seeing the seed of failure in every success, we remain humble. By seeing the seed of success in every failure we remain hopeful.” - Unknown

Lessons from the Wild #9

Leave-no-trace camping is an increasingly popular, and necessary, approach to travel in wilderness areas. As the term suggests, the goal is for the camper to have as little impact as possible on the location they are visiting. One of its mottos is "Take nothing but pictures. Leave nothing but footprints."

The principles of "Leave No Trace" were developed in response to concerns that the increasing number of human visitors to previously uninhabited (or lightly inhabited) wilderness areas would destroy the very characteristics that make them attractive, and irreparably harm native species. While each individual visitor might have an insignificant impact, the cumulative effect of thousands, and even millions of visitors to a site over the years would be profound. Rather than removing humanity altogether from these environments, leave-no-trace camping seeks to minimize the changes we make just by visiting. It's also a courtesy to the people who'll be visiting the same place the next day, or the next year, giving them a chance to experience the area the same way you did.  

Here's a great list of 29 Leave No Trace principles to keep in mind.  

Because I do so much backcountry camping, and like to go cross-country (where there are no established trails) the approach is almost the opposite. Rather than trying to concentrate your impact (such as on a single trail) the idea is to disperse it as much as possible. Try to avoid following trails others have left, because that tends to make them larger and more damaging. Several people walking single-file etches your shared trail more deeply, but each member of your party can instead tread more lightly on their own path. Walk on the most durable ground you can: rock instead of dirt, dead grasses instead of live plants, dry soil instead of muddy. 

Once you start practicing Leave No Trace, you'll wonder why it took you so long to get the hang of it.  Wilderness is a rare and precious thing, and it's up to us to be its stewards.  Unfortunately, many people are still clueless about these principles.  So why not help out and take it a step further?

Negative Trace is about actually removing trash or undoing damage that others have caused. It can be as easy as bending over and picking up a stray trail bar wrapper. Some people also refer to this ethic as "Erase The Trace".  Those of us that get so much enjoyment from spending time in nature should take time to give back. Land managers are often short on trail maintainers and wilderness rangers, so why not help maintain your favorite areas? A little preventative maintenance can make a big difference.

Lessons from the Wild #8

By now, you've probably gained a sense of the importance Nature has in my life.  As it should.  In all of ours.  We were born from nature, and we rely on it for the very essence of life.  Every time I have the privilege to be immersed in it, I never fail to gain some new insight.

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."  - Albert Einstein

My most recent immersion was a 9-day section of the High Sierra Route - a much more adventurous alternative to the popular John Muir Trail across the Eastern Sierras of California.  My aim was to do something more challenging... to get off the beaten path... challenge myself.  And I did.  I traveled almost exclusively cross-country - without a trail - crossing six 12,000' passes, and summiting two 14,000' peaks.  There were many lessons I learned along the way, but chief among them was the importance of finding your own path.   

Humans seek. It's what we do. We seek enlightenment, self-improvement, physical perfection, a shorter commute...  Nature is such a strong force in the world that no matter where we live or what our lifestyle, there is always a bit of the natural world creeping in. Even the concrete jungles of major cities are still home to a number of "greenspaces" where the inspiration of nature can be felt. 

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”   - Gary Snyder  

If you haven't already realized what life changing effects nature can have, you probably haven't spent much time in natural surroundings.  Or if you have, you haven't really taken the time to gain the awareness of what nature does. Nature is a connection to your soul. It's how you spend time getting to know yourself - your true self.

In modern life, while nature is still present, there is a tangible disconnect for people. This is especially true for those of us who live in suburban, or urban environments. We have pills for every ailment, GPS units to navigate, and we get our "food" from the supermarket.  Our advances in technology and convenience aren't necessarily bad things, but we need to keep things in perspective and not forget about our past. Our connection to nature should always be cherished and remembered.  There are many benefits to "getting back to nature". Research has shown that a connection to nature decreases stress and stimulates healing, and it makes people nicer!

As society continues to become more isolating, a growing number of people are uncertain about what to do with their lives - how to add value to it, provide meaning for it, or to simply find some measure of happiness in it.  Spending time in nature can bring clarity.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”                 - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring 

Everyone has heard that life is a journey and not a destination. As we journey through life, we can do so with a path in mind. The path doesn't have to be specific at first, or necessarily ever. It could be one we deliberately set, or one with no deliberate intent. A path is as much an expression of our individuality or uniqueness as it is a direction, purpose, or intent.  Finding the right path means getting to know ourselves first. We can have more than one path going at any given time, so long as they aren't in conflict.

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."   - Henry David Thoreau

The key is to become an intuitive navigator.  Be aware.  Look closely and see the signs, as subtle as they may be.  Respect your own individuality.  Not everyone will see things the same, and you may not have chosen the best path, but there are lessons to be learned on the journey all the same. 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”   - Ernest Hemingway

Lessons from the Wild #7

flex·i·ble (adjective)

1. capable of being bent, usually without breaking; easily bent: a flexible ruler.
2. susceptible of modification or adaptation; adaptable: a flexible schedule.
3. willing or disposed to yield; pliable: a flexible personality.

 

 

Resistance to change is found at the heart of all conflicts, both internal and external.  Yet in nature things seem to evolve without any attachment to what was.  Nature has many lessons to teach us, and one of them is about flexibility in the midst of change.  The basic principle of the universe we live in is evolution – change with growth.  So if change and growth are in harmony with nature, it explains why resistance is painful.  When it come to growth, flexibility is a much better strategy than resistance.

 

"Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it."  - Lao Tzu 

We are often faced with situations where things don’t turn out quite the way we want. The best way to survive these unwanted variations is to be flexible. Adapt to the change. Be creative. A flexible person will be conscious enough to know when they need to be rigid, but a rigid person will probably not be conscious enough to know when they need to be flexible. 

 

Learn to know when a situation requires flexibility. Once again, nature is a great teacher.

 

At work - Be like a hummingbird.  Hummingbirds build nests with specific material to allow them to be both flexible and stable, which allows the nest to expand as the babies grow.  They  also need to be strong enough to weather storms.  Likewise, a leader has to pay attention to building and leading an organization that is flexible enough to “go with the flow” when needed and stable enough to withstand the storms that come their way.

 

At home - Be like a tree.  Trees combines both strength and flexibility.  Because trees bend with the wind, instead of trying to resist it, they can weather a storm without breaking. So too, we don’t need to get bent out of shape about conflict or change. Use the situation as an opportunity to learn, and grow.

 

Remember to be one with the nature of change. Be flexible. Don’t stick to something that doesn’t work.   

 

“Planning is helpful. If you don’t know what you want, you’ll seldom get it. But, no matter how well you plan, you will fare better if you expect the unexpected. The unexpected, by nature, comes unseen, unthought, unenvisioned. All you can do is plan to go unplanned, prepare to be unprepared, make going with the flow part of your agenda, for the most successful among us envision, plan, and prepare, but cast all aside as needed, while those who are unable to go with the flow often suffer, if they survive.”   - David W. Jones, Moses and Mickey Mouse: How to Find Holy Ground in the Magic Kingdom and Other Unusual Places