Given that my field of expertise can be such a wide and all-encompassing umbrella, it is often hard for me to decide which narrower topics within this field to pick to drill down into deeper for your convenience.
From food and agriculture to green building and building biology, from home management to business management, from personal health and life questions to nature conservation, from philosophy and science to green technology…a lot of ground to cover. That’s why I’d like to ask you to think of and write down anything and everything that currently bugs you and challenges you on your path as it relates to happy, healthy, green, sustainable and profitable ways of living and doing business, of relating to the natural world.
It doesn’t matter how small and trivial or how huge and transcendent, if you have a burning question (or two, or three, or more), you’ll want to drop me a line, and I will set to work to come up with some actionable solutions, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of more than 20 years in the trenches plus ongoing research.
So….. invest in yourself by sending in your bug list! You can do this publicly by commenting on the blog, or if you prefer privately via the contact form.
Currently we are bombarded every day with news about eating disorders, obesity epdemics, contaminated food supplies, and other indications that all is not well with how we relate to food and eating, especially in the United States. At the same time, we have had for decades an army of “experts” equally bombarding us with their prescriptions for specific diets, exercise regimes, supplement pills, one-size-fits-all food regulations, etc. Can you see the irony in this picture?
Problem: much of the available advice is rife with contradiction, controversy, and conflict of interest. How do you make sense of this overload of confusion being poured out? How do you choose from the myriad of diet and food access options to arrive at a nutritional pattern that will sustain the unique human being that you are at your ideal body weight and optimal wellness?
In order to help you successfully find your way through the nutritional quagmire, I have drawn up a very simple set of blueprints. No matter what your background, genetic makeup, or personal preferences, you can use this as a guideline for discovering what kind of eating habits are the most beneficial to YOU. Somewhere deep down, your body KNOWS exactly what’s good for it, and what’s not. Unfortunately, access to this knowing has been socialized and conditioned right out of most people. However, with a very small amount of dedicated effort every day, it is possible to reconnect to this amazing resource inside of you.
I’m going to start by outlining a basic boundary within which you can safely experiment to your heart’s content. It is a very short list of hazardous things to avoid when food shopping, much shorter than the typical avoidance list out there with most diets. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be easy, because these few items on the list have become extremely common ingredients in most of the processed foodstuffs you can buy today. If you’re new to this, take it easy, practice one point at a time until you feel comfortable enough with it to move on to the next one.
Avoid all GM (genetically modified) crops. In practice this means anything that contains corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, sugar beets, or a substance derived from any of these, UNLESS specified as “certified organic” or “guaranteed GMO free”. Beware of “vegetable oil”, vegetable protein”, “vegetable broth” – usually telltale signs of soy, and “sugar” without any further qualifications is now likely to be from GM sugar beets.
Avoid monosodium glutamate, the popular “flavor enhancer”. Watch out, due to the bad rap this additive has been getting, it often hides behind names such as “nutritional yeast”, “Torula yeast”, and “hydrolyzed vegetable protein”.
Avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup. It’s what sweetens many things nowadays, from sodas to ketchup.
Avoid all artificial sweeteners.
By now it will be clear that this part of the exercise requires a good bit of label reading at shopping time, especially in the beginning. The good news is, you can skip that part of the label you may have been trained to read in the past. That’s right. Skip the calorie count. Skip the carbs, protein, and RDA counts. Go straight to the list of ingredients. If you see anything there that was mentioned above, or anything you don’t know how to pronounce, put it back on the shelf.
Another great food assessment technique is this: while you’re turning the item over in your hand, imagine taking a trip with it in a time capsule to go and visit your great-grandmother 100 years ago. Does she recognize the thing you have in your hand as food? If yes, you’re good, if no, put it back and try something else.
Now that the hard part is out of the way, let’s have a look at the really fun part. As you go through your day, whenever you’re hungry, eat whatever you have in the house that you feel like eating. But only if you find you really are hungry. That means that whenever you feel the urge to eat, first check yourself to see why you feel the urge to eat. If it is because of boredom, nervousness, sadness, or any other reason that is not tummy-rumbling hunger, don’t eat yet, go do something active: take a walk, start decluttering a room in your house, call or write a relative or friend and express your appreciation for that person, do a business task you’ve been putting off doing…anything that will keep you actively occupied for a little while.
Keep going until you feel real hunger in your body. Then prepare and eat whatever you fancy. Eat slowly and savor every bite. Take your time to really enjoy your meal, without anything else to distract you. When you start feeling full, stop. Sit back for a little yet to let the food settle in your stomach. From here on, it’s basically “rinse and repeat”, throughout the day, throughout the week. If you find that an urge to eat without being hungry more often than not coincides with a certain behavior, it may be sending you an important message as to whether or not that behavior is a good fit with your unique, authentic life path.
After the first few weeks of doing this, you will have opened up a vital line of communication with that part of your body that knows best what is good for it. Your body will have started telling you its secrets because you are bothering to listen to it. No matter what kind of eating habit ultimately emerges from this process, whether you become a vegetarian or vegan, or a carnivore, whether you end up eating one big meal a day or frequent small meals throughout, or the middle-of-the road 3 square meals, it will be the eating habit that is right for you. And since the emphasis is on awareness and acceptance of what is rather than forcing changes according to some contrived external ideal, it is very likely to become an enjoyable and empowering journey towards radiant health and happiness.
