Healthy Eating

There is a great article by Peggy Hall in the Fall 2000 Issue of Clean Eating magazine that explores the power of ending the food battle and befriending it instead. It is a message being paralleled in the Psychology of Eating teletraining with Marc David that I am currently taking, and is supported by my personal life experience.

Peggy relates what happened to her diet of deprivation, processed diet foods, and diet coke when she joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Morocco. Diet coke was only available at the US Embassy snack bar, six hours away from the small town where she was assigned and low fat, processed foods were non-existent. With no other choice, she decided to accept her situation and began eating the locally available food - real homemade food. She ate bread, fruit, yogurt, soups, cookies, and delicious tangines (meat and veggie stews). Putting aside her fear of losing control and gaining weight, she ate what she wanted when she wanted - effective waiving the white flag and ending the food battle.

An amazing thing happened - she lost weight and felt great. She was forced into a situation that allowed her to develop a healthy, pleasurable relationship with real food. She stopped struggling, stopped dieting, started enjoying real food and lost weight!

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“Far more indispensable than food for the physical body is spiritual nourishment for the soul. One can do without food for a considerable time, but a man of the spirit cannot exist for a single second without spiritual nourishment.”
~ Gandhi

Is there a recipe for healthy eating?

The quality of what you eat is important to your overall health and wellness. But is there something that is even more important? The folks at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition think so. Advocates of a holistic approach to nutrition, they postulate that what you eat is secondary to the quality of your life - your relationships, your career, your physical activity, and your spirituality - considered primary food in their unique recipe for healthy eating.

No matter how much attention and care you give to your diet and what you eat, optimal health and wellness will evade you if your sources of primary food are deficient. Focus on what really feeds and nourishes you and you are sure to thrive, even if your ‘diet’ isn’t perfect. This is a key ingredient in their recipe for healthy eating.

It’s the news I’ve been waiting to hear after years of trying to determine the ‘right way to eat’ from all the experts and authorities who appear locked in a violent battle of conflicting nutritional information. When you look around you realize that the science of nutrition has done little to alleviate the modern woes that surround us - obesity, chronic disease, and deep seated unhappiness.

It’s because what we eat can never replace our desire for quality relationships, rewarding work, enjoyable physical activity, and spiritual connection with food. And yet we try to fill all that is missing in our lives with food. In the process we become sicker, fatter, and unhappier.

Once we recognize the importance of primary food in our recipe for healthy eating and begin focusing on improving these critical areas of our lives our issues with the food we eat take their appropriate secondary position and become manageable. We are able to lose the weight and eat better with much less struggle. It seems too good to be true, but it’s not. We are on the path to living healthy, happy, rewarding lives. We have found a recipe for healthy eating we can live with that will support us. Will there be bumps in the road? Yes, but given our increasing awareness of food’s rightful position of importance we will feel equipped to handle them.

If you are you interested in learning more about holistic nutrition or working with a counselor The Institute of Integrative Nutrition has a graduate directory to assist you. I worked with Darshana Weill of Fruition Health by telephone for several months. One of the first graduates of the IIN program, she is a gifted holistic health counselor who helped me fine-tune my nutritional concerns.

IIN graduate, Dani Spies, has a beautiful informative website full of healthy recipes. You can purchase the book, Integrative Nutrition: The Future of Nutrition by IIN Director, Joshua Rosenthal at amazon.com. It’s an informative book full of powerful exercises designed to help you healthfully transform your relationship with food. I highly recommend it.

More on Healthy Eating:

Twelve Simple Steps for Eating Well

Is My Clutter Making Me Fat?

Reconnect with Food through Yoga

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I am immensely enjoying Food Network Healthy Appetite host Ellie Krieger’s cookbook, The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life. I couldn’t justify buying another cookbook given the size of my collection but it called to me from the bookstore shelves and reeled me in with its more than 200 great sounding recipes.

Just like her show, The Food You Crave, is devoted to helping you make luscious recipes that are healthier. I love her approach to cooking –real ingredients prepared simply enough for everyday, yet interesting enough for entertaining. She proves that healthy food can be delicious–bursting with flavor, color, and aroma — and deeply satisfying.

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal called, Putting an end to Mindless Munching. According to the article, Mindful Eating, the art of slowing down and paying attention to what you are eating, is being studied at several academic medical centers and the National Institutes of Health as a way to combat eating disorders and the results are promising. [click to continue…]

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Does our clutter make us fat? Simplification and organization expert Peter Walsh thinks so. This is the topic of his book, Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More.

He makes a strong case for the link between excess stuff and excess body weight. “As a society we keep getting fatter and fatter and our stuff keeps getting bigger and bigger from the size of our burgers and fries to the size of our houses and cars. We keep filling ourselves up inside and out with more and more stuff.”

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My sister and I recently attended The Conscious Gourmet Cooking Retreat in Sedona, a five day program advertised as a ‘Culinary Retreat for the body, mind, and soul.’ It’s designed to provide you with a foundation in health-supportive cooking and theory, based on The Natural Gourmet Institute’s Core Program which was historically offered only in New York City.

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I just finished a wonderful ‘non-diet’ book called The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss by Marc David that combines the best of The French Women Don’t Get Fat philosophy with the latest research on body biochemistry and the powerful mind-body connection. It’s complete nutrition for the body, mind and soul.

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Friday night I joined twelve women in a Reconnect with Food Candlelight Yoga Workshop led by dietician and yoga teacher, Beverly Price. The session began with a one hour yoga class where poses were held for what seemed to me an interminable amount of time and concluded with a one hour sharing circle complete with talking stick and a mindful eating exercise. It was a great introductory exploration of using yoga and “mindful awareness” to gain a deeper understanding of self-acceptance and self-awareness, especially as it relates to food and eating issues.

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I have just finished Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and all I can say is wow. It’s his follow up to his bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that attempts to answer the question “What should I eat?”

He sums it up in his eater’s manifesto with seven simple words: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

And then goes on to give background on how and why he developed this food philosophy:

• We should reject science and industry in determining what and how we should eat.
• Science is limited in understanding something as richly complex and multifaceted as food.
• Much of the ’scientific wisdom’ we have been fed over the past several decades is being proved wrong.
• Most of the stuff in grocery stores today is not food, but overly processed, artificially flavored, dyed and chemically infused ‘food like products.’
• The Western diet now consists of “lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything–except vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.”
• We are overfed and undernourished for the first time in history.
• We have become an unhealthy population preoccupied with nutrition and diet and the idea of eating healthily.
• Four of the top ten causes of death today are chronic diseases with well-established links to diet: coronary heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.
• We have become alienated and confused and no longer think in terms of eating meat, grains and veggies, but their chemical components: proteins, fats, carbohydrates, saturated fats, omega 3s, trans-fats, etc.

He strongly believes, “It’s time to return to tradition, common sense and intuition, our senses, and the wisdom of mom and grandma. We can learn a lot more about eating from history, culture and tradition than science because whole foods are proving to provide much more than just the sum of their parts.”

The rise of the organic movement, and local agricultural renaissance underway across the country allows us to opt out of the conventional food system. Eaters now have real choices. Once again we have real food to eat. And all I can say is hurray for that.

He further defines his seven word eating food philosophy with the following guidelines:

• Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
• Avoid food products containing ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or that include high fructose corn syrup.
• Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
• Get out of the supermarket and instead visit as much as possible farmers markets, CSAs, farm stands, etc.
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves–they are full of phytonutrients.
• Eat small amounts of meat, treating it more as a flavoring or condiment for the plants.
• You are what you eat and what you eats eats too–think grass fed meats and free range organic poultry.
• Eat wild foods when you can.
• Take supplements. People who take supplements tend to be healthier overall.
• Eat like the French or the Italians of the Japanese, or the Indians or the Greeks…a traditional diet of real foods. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
• Don’t look for the magic bullet. Eat a wide variety of foods.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner if you want.
• Pay more and eat less. Eat food of a higher quality and in less quantity.
• Eat meals at the table not at the desk or in front of television.
• Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.
• Try not to eat alone.
• Eat slowly and enjoy your food–it should be pleasurable.
• Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.

And there you have it. A simple nourished way to eat. Thank you Michael Pollan, for helping return us to our senses.

I can hardly wait to get to the farmer’s market!

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