How Being Healthy Can Be So Unhealthy

Modern culture has taught us well to obsess about our looks. We knowingly apply toxic chemical products to our hair and skin for the sake of appearance and deal more and more with eating disorders.

Whether consciously or not, we often sacrifice our physical or emotional health for the sake of our appearance.

While it is fun and important to feel beautiful in our bodies, we often are driven to do so by stress rather than self-love. This is an inevitable result of a culture that has little focus or education around how to nourish the spirit.

Hyper concentration on the finite body is based on our fears. We fear that we are not good enough or attractive enough. We fear that we won’t be liked or accepted.

There is no way out of this obsessive suffering without shifting our attention internally from finite to the eternal-self, the love that exists in us all. Self-awareness leads to non-violence, both mental and physical, against ourselves and others.

The Journey Will Inform the Destination.
However the journey looks is the way the destination will look. If we hate ourselves into exercise and diet, it will end with more hatred. Even if we lose the weight, we will either gain it back or keep hating ourselves fearing its return. The Biggest Loser educates us how to shame ourselves into weight loss. While I am in awe of the strength that each participant emanates, I suspect that unless each found further guidance in self-love, he or she will live forever in shame of their bodies regardless of the number on the scale.

There are two types of people who heal themselves of their health challenges: Those who do it from love and those who do it from fear.

If we are working on self-acceptance, why are we spending all our energy on external results? This leaves little room for focus on the process of self-acceptance.

In my early 20’s I discovered the practices of meditation and yoga that revealed to me a whole new world of mysticism and self-revelation. Up until that time I had been very self-conscious of my body. The movement of my long limbs always felt very awkward and somewhat lifeless. The more time I spent exploring this internal world, the more I started to connect to my body as a sacred space. As a container for my spirit, there was much to honor and be grateful for.

Unknowingly I started to walk differently, I started to be noticed more, and I felt comfortable being seen. By connecting to something greater within myself and in seeing it in others, I felt worthy to take up space in the world. My muscles naturally started to tone and my stride became more confident.

I realized that the state of my body had everything to do with my mind. The subconscious need to “blend in” is what had prevented my body from shifting its shape.

Weight or any other health challenge is the way we express our deeper challenges in the world. In our healing process we are learning lessons that can be very powerful to our growth. These very challenges are the signs pointing us towards our personal development.

Learning to heal involves learning to love ourselves into healing.

It's Not What You Eat, But How Much You Digest...

How we digest is often an overlooked factor in our attention towards healthy eating.  Despite a well-balanced diet, if we are having trouble digesting our food, we may actually be malnourished.

We may be eating “the right things” but not absorbing  them. Have you ever found yourself more tired after a meal than before it? If digestion is weak, our body will have to draw energy away from other systems to use towards digestion, leaving us feeling tired or fog brained.

The digestive enzymes needed for the initial breakdownof  food particles are contained in our saliva. By chewing our food properly we are able to assimilate the nutrients form our foods better.

Other digestive enzymes are present in living foods (foods that have not been processed and would spoil if left out.) These enzymes have been thoroughly destroyed in almost all processed foods, despite being marketed as healthy. Eating a diet high in processed foods puts a huge strain on the pancreas that now needs to manufacture the enzymes lost in processing in order to enable digestion. Since the pancreas is also involved in the regulation of stress hormones, a diet high in processed foods directly lowers our resistance to stress.

It is a good idea to minimize eating and drinking anything pasteurized, as by definition, pasteurization heats the food to the point where everything that was alive in the food is now dead. These days, most store-bought juices, most milk and dairy, and most cans of vegetables are pasteurized, so check labels and buy unpasteurized when possible. While raw milk is not readily available, cheeses made from raw milk are becoming more popular. Look for local brands of orange juice that are unpasteurized and be sure to include fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet.

During spring, be sure to not overcook your food. Lightly steam vegetables and remove from the heat before the color changes from bright to dull. When eating animal products such as red meat, enjoy pasture-fed, non-medicated meat. During spring it is best to reduce our normal intake of animal proteins.

In order to improve digestion and assimilation, we need to eat more foods rich in enzymes. Adding raw foods to each meal helps, as well as consuming fermented foods. Lacto-fermentation is an ancient method to preserve food (prior to the invention of refrigeration,) and the fermentation process greatly increases the vitamin content and enzymes needed for digestion. Consuming fermented vegetables, dairy, grains and meat also promotes healthy flora in the intestine, which also aids in the assimilation of the food. Many common foods are fermented, such as cheese, yogurt, buttermilk, tempeh, sauerkraut, pickles, pickled ginger that comes with sushi, miso, kefir, and corned beef. (When eating fermented dairy, look for unpasteurized raw milk products.)

If you are interested in reading more on the topic, Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions cookbook is a great resource for your library.

Becoming a Urban Composter

It's been over a decade since I began studying the relationship of nutrition to the mind and body. As with all things, it continues to be a process. There are many aspects in my present routines that I was either not aware of or not ready for a few years ago.

Connecting to a natural way of eating has made me more environmentally respectful. I recycle, drive a hybrid, reuse plastic bags, carry around my reusable shopping bags, and look for biodegradable products as much as possible.

And yet, just as with the process of nutrition, there are things I have been willing to overlook.

Living in the city, I never bothered with composting. I mistakenly figured that as long as I was using organic materials, they would all decompose, even in a landfill.

Landfills provide ideal conditions for the production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. It is 72 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. It is created when organic materials (such as yard waste, household waste, food waste, and paper) decompose under anaerobic conditions (i.e., in the absence of oxygen.) Food that is mixed in with non-decomposable trash is estimated to make up about 40% of the trash in landfills and is the biggest offender in creating landfill methane.

Locally, our cities only pick up vegetative waste from our yard. Cities such as San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Boulder all have programs in place that allow residents to place food scraps curbside to be turned into compost.

By properly composting their kitchen waste, rather than having it transported to a landfill site, individuals can ensure that, as the waste decomposes, it forms carbon dioxide, rather than methane, and so has less of a greenhouse gas impact.

Cambridge offers its residents the option to drop off food scraps for compost at the recycling center.
 Cooking as often as I do, in the last couple of months I have been freezing my vegetable scraps and taking a monthly trip to the recycling center.

Living in the city, I grow my vegetables in boxes as I don’t have much of a backyard. I’ve always wondered where I would put a compost bin?!

The most popular urban solution seems to be red worm composting. I now keep a sealed container with red worms into which I toss my food scraps instead of into the trash. The worms feed off the scraps and all my received junk mail and turn it into compost. Hassle free.

If you are thinking you’d never bring a box of worms home, I thought the same. But these little ones are a private bunch and keep to themselves buried under the scraps. I actually find myself wanting to see them when I open the container. Its like having 1001 pets! I have 1000 worms and 1 cat.

Since I stopped throwing out food waste (first freezing and taking it to the compost center and now using worms,) in an entire month I have had nothing but one small kitchen-sized trash bin to put out on the curb.


Resources: 

Cambridge Recycling Center
Building a worm compost bin: the cliff notes

The commercial made compost bin I purchased (This way I never have to deal with cleaning the bin or sorting the soil from worms)  
Everything you need to know about red worm composting 
Red Worm Purchase (it is not recommended to get less than 1000 to start)

* Some cities run non-profits where compost is picked up from your home. Here is an example of Somerville’s SoilCycle Program

* Most cities have inexpensive home composting systems for sale. Find out more on your city’s official website.