Re-Inventing Yourself

As we move into Autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere, now is usually the time we move from extroversion to introversion, from energy expanding outward to a more contemplative way of being in the world. I like to think of this transition as a time to think about the intentions we want to set for our winter cocoon so that when we split that shell and climb out in the Spring, our new wings are fully formed for the next season of expansion. Now is a great time to think about what aspects of yourself you are ready to shed like a maple leaf. What doesn't serve you anymore? What can you let go of so you can reach for something that pulls you forward in a positive way?

Often in my discussions with clients I find that there is a tendency to hold on with a death grip to the past, to those things that we know aren't good for us and yet are too afraid to let go of. Sometimes those things are habits of thought ("I'm not good at ____" or "I always/never _____"), sometimes habits of the body (having coffee instead of breakfast, inactivity, addictions), and sometimes they are things we carry for others (guilt, shame, "shoulds" handed down from family and culture). Often I find that we allow our habits to govern our lives, we think it's easier that way. The problem is that although many of these habits were developed in response to an original need (and we responded the best we could in that situation), those habits have outlived their usefulness and are now leading us down a path that causes more problems than it solves.

To externalize this idea, take a look at most political struggles, especially around environmental issues. One of the common responses to the question of "Isn't there another way to do this that could be more beneficial and less damaging?" is a response from the habit which says "Why should we change? We've ALWAYS done it this way! What worked for my father and grandfather is good enough for me!" The trouble with this response is that it isn't a response, it's a habitual reaction. It is identical to what I hear in sessions with clients: "I've always eaten this way and it's been fine" or "I've never liked vegetables and plain water". When you hear those words "always" and "never" echoing in your head, stop and ask yourself who's talking. Is it the adult you with your best interests in mind? Or, is it the old habit that doesn't want to be told it's been fired?

I encourage you to take some time as the leaves change and the weather cools to take stock of your habits. Are there any that no longer serve your highest good? Are there any that actually endanger your long-term health? Is there just one that you can envision changing into a beautiful red maple leaf falling from a healthy tree and becoming nourishing soil at your feet? Peel off the old and make room for the new REAL you...

Harvest

August is here. Finally. And how. I'm not sure about where you're living, but here in the San Francisco Bay Area it's been living up to John Muir's complaints until yesterday when we blew through heat records. Yesterday my car thermometer registered 107F in Mill Valley which has been fogged in and regularly in the 60s most of the summer. The happy news is that this heat wave means my tomato plants are finally producing! Well, at least the ones that the deer haven't bonsai'd. There's just nothing like a vine ripened tomato you've been fussing over all summer. Having been spoiled by my green-thumb mother who had 1/4 acre gardens during my childhood, I just can't bring myself to buy tasteless, hard, pale commercial tomatoes. They're more like packing material than food.

You know, I find myself saying things like that about so many commercial foods. Think about it, when have you ever bought produce that was actually full of flavor from the local Safeway or Albertsons or A&P? They're starting to get a clue and offering organic versions which are slightly better, but so many of the organic producers are trying to create shippable products that can be picked too early and with a density that doesn't fit all fruits and veggies. Even the produce that is supposed to be dense, like a carrot, remains tasteless when compared to one pulled from your back yard, or from a local farm stand.

Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to a trip to a farmers' market or roadside stand in the next few weeks. Even if you can't find an organic offering, get some fruits and vegetables that are ripened in the field. The taste will blow you away if you're used to everything tasting the same. You don't have to prepare them in any fancy way. Let the flavors of the produce speak for themselves. Have a little butter on your corn or green beans. Have sliced tomatoes with a little fresh basil, sea sale and olive oil. Try a green salad topped with as many different colors as you can find and then just a quick squeeze of lime, olive oil, salt and pepper.

Great food doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to start with great REAL ingredients.

Get Moving!

I find it interesting that so many of my clients, friends and family end up having this conversation with me. Sometimes it comes up directly as is often the case with my clients. Other times, it's this circumspect navigation around to the topic. What it comes down to is that in this American culture of "busyness" we have conveniently convinced ourselves that there just isn't enough time to get any exercise in the day. We have to pick up and drop off kids, we have to commute to work and back, we have to do the laundry, we have to do the taxes, you name it, there's a reason. The reasons all sound like good ones. They are all things that need doing in this adult world, and not all of them fun either. Still, I challenge everyone on this point.

I think part of the issue is that we have also been convinced by marketers, researchers and magazine articles that "exercise" is something separate from your life. Something you have to take time out to do. Something that requires a whole separate wardrobe or gear or machines or memberships. What we forget is that we have these bodies 24/7 until we're 6 feet under. They move us through space, hold us upright in line at the bank, carry that laundry to the machines in the garage, and swing our children or grandchildren up for a piggy back ride. These bodies are designed to move and bend and lift and walk. Most importantly, walk. It's one of the few things that makes us special as a species, and yet as a culture we are doing our level best to avoid it at all costs. We have invented all sorts of ways to avoid walking: elevators, escalators, cars, moving sidewalks and golf carts to name a few.

Here is my challenge to you: from the standpoint of moving, act as if you live in 1810 rather than 2010 as often as you can. See where you can opt to take the stairs or leave the car at home and walk. If you must drive, see if you can park once and walk to all your errands with the car in a central location, or at least park the car as far as possible from the front door of the business you're visiting.

For the techies out there like me, invest in a pedometer and track your progress. Spend the first week just logging what you normally do. Then challenge yourself to add 100 steps each day until you get up to at least a mile. You'll be surprised at how quickly it actually happens! Most people start out thinking they'll never be able to and end up walking 5 miles or more a day just by increasing the steps they take in living life.

It doesn't take purchasing a gym membership, $100 shoes, or a $1000 bicycle. It also doesn't take blocking out 2 hours each day to get to the gym, change, get all sweaty in an hour-long workout, shower, and get back to your life. Of course those planned workouts will accelerate the process of getting and staying healthy, but THE most important thing is just to move. Move more. Eat less. Get REAL.

Medicinal Effects of Foods - Part 4

OK - here goes: SWEETENERS

I have to take a deeeeeep breath here because this is a huge topic of interest and concern for my clients. This is one of those places where politics, money, marketing, health, science, habits, and the force of denial come crashing into each other. In my experience, artificial sweeteners are in the top 3 of the most controversial and heatedly debated food topics today, the other two being dairy and soy (followed closely by GMOs and pesticides).

For starters, people don't want to believe that food is political. We KNOW this on one level, but we don't want to know it at another. If you've worked with me for even a short amount of time you've likely heard me say that denial is a force stronger than gravity. Our denial is like burying our heads in the sand or refusing to see what is actually right in front of us. Denial allows marketing agents to play on our fears and our habits that keep us from making changes that will cost their clients money. Denial allows back room dealings between politicians and the industrial food industry to remain relatively hush hush because we really don't want to know that Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in getting the drug aspartame pushed into our food supply; or that huge industry efforts were made to silence scientist Dr Mary Enig when she started to speak out about the health dangers of trans-fats; or that the beef industry waged a terrifyingly large law suit against Oprah for saying she wouldn't eat conventional beef on national TV. Denial allows us to walk into our average grocery store and assume that whatever is being sold on the shelves must be safe to consume. So first off I'm going to ask my readers to put denial aside for a few minutes and read on.

Here in the industrialized world we have been operating for decades on the belief that we can have better lives through scientific manipulation of our environment, our foods, our cleaning products, our water... actually nearly everything. At the sustenance level, we have gotten it into our heads that we are smarter than Mother Nature and we can create better foods than the ones our bodies developed utilizing over eons. With an exceptionally limited understanding of how the human body and all of it's systems work, we think we can create substances that will provide our bodies with exactly what they need as well as feed the habits of desire without consequences. So, we end up with things like "no calorie sweeteners" in the form of aspartame or sucralose, and "fat substitutes" like olestra. The trouble begins when you start looking a bit more closely at how the body utilizes these "Frankenfoods". For this post, I'm going to limit this glimpse to artificial sweeteners. Here are just a few simple verifiable facts:

Fact: Aspartame (aka NutraSweet, Equal, AminoSweet, and Candarel) breaks down in the human body into 2 amino acids, and methanol. Methanol, also known as "wood alcohol", is broken down in the body to formaldehyde. Yup, you read that right. Formaldehyde, the same stuff that those frogs were floating in before you dissected them in high school biology class.

Fact: Formaldehyde is a carcinogen and neurotoxin. There is no safe level of human exposure to formaldehyde (which is why those frogs are no longer preserved in it for biology classes).

Fact: Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle Laboratories before taking office in the Reagan administration. After his appointment, he vowed to get aspartame approved for use in the American food supply. It had been denied for the previous 16 years due to significant health concerns.

Fact: Sucralose is a laboratory-made chlorinated hydrocarbon with the same base as DDT made by using phosgene which is a neurotoxin used in World War I as a choking gas. Phosgene is also used to make plastics and pesticides.

Fact: Chlorine is a highly reactive substance in the body and one of the most active pro-oxidants in the human system. Chlorine gas was used against troops extensively in World War II.

Fact: The company that makes sucralose (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) is in the midst of a lawsuit for false advertising and misleading the public into believing it's actually just sugar that has had its calories magically removed.

Fact: The long term use of no-calorie artificial sweeteners will actually cause weight gain and worsen diabetes.

Fact: Sucralose can cause shrinkage of the thymus gland, enlargement of the liver and kidneys, decreased red blood cell count, blood sugar disregulation, reduced fetal and placental weights, and miscarriage.

Fact: There are over 92 significant side effects of aspartame ingestion including: migraine, seizures, blindness, tinnitus, dizziness, confusion, severe depression, anxiety, aggression, heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, bloody diarrhea, birth defects and brain damage.

Heard enough yet? I could go on and on, but it gets me really riled up so I'm stopping here. Your body knows what to do with sugar. It's 10 calories per teaspoon.

Get smart. Get healthy. Get REAL.

Medicinal Effects of Foods - Part 3

I have many clients who come to see me worried about weight gain and what has become known in our culture as "emotional eating". These clients want to stop using eating as a way to medicate themselves. The thing is, everything we put in our systems has biochemical effects. Keep in mind that thoughts and emotions are "things" from a biological standpoint. They are real biochemical processes with ingredients and metabolic outcomes that can be tracked. The simplest form of medication that we've learned over the millennia is the use of food and drink to change the way neurotransmitters in the gut and brain behave. Because eating is something we must do, changing the way we relate to food as medicine is important. You can easily see why it would be important to quit smoking and you can make efforts to do so. But a person can't just quit eating. This is why it's so difficult to tease apart.

Let's start here: You can't take food and emotions apart. Because emotions and thoughts are built from the basic ingredients we take in. When looking at "emotional eating" it is important to really understand this statement. The foods (and other substances) you ingest become you. There are whole supermarkets full of "food products" that have little or no connection with what could be conceived of as Real Food. Just as real food becomes the biochemical building blocks of your muscles, your organs, your immune system, your thoughts and your emotions, so too do all the new-fangled chemicals that have entered our food supply in the last 100 years. It is vital that you start asking yourself "Is this what I want to build myself out of today?"

For most of us, sugar is our biggest weakness and the thing that has the biggest negative impact. Sugar is pro-inflammatory, depresses the immune system, contributes to mood instability, creates an acidic internal environment, worsens PMS symptoms, and hastens aging, just to name a few. But we love the stuff! Why? It makes perfect sense from a biochemical standpoint. The same bank of lights in the brain that gets turned on by serotonin (the neurotransmitter that makes us feel happy) also gets amped up by sugar. When we feel down, depressed, stressed, unhappy or need an escape, flooding the system with sugar can help to temporarily change our internal environment. The trouble is that sugar is like jet fuel: it burns hot and fast. Once the body has overcome the flood of sugar, the natural levels in the bloodstream are even lower than where they were before the sugar rush. A signal from the brain says "hey, running out of juice up here, need more of that feel good stuff!" and off we go to find another fix. The trick here is to short circuit the response and reach for foods that increase natural serotonin rather than settle for the quick fix that only temporarily bandaids the situation. In this case, reach for protein. The best choices would be eggs, turkey, elk, pork, crab, shrimp, and salmon (vegetarian options include 200 kcal portions of spirulina, spinach, and watercress) because they are high in tryptophan which is what the body uses to create serotonin.

There are whole manifestos available on the detrimental effects of food additives and toxic residues out there so I won't go into a dissertation here. (If you are interested in a few good references check out "Aspartame Disease" by H. J. Roberts; "Excitotoxins: the taste that kills" by Russell Blaylock; "Diet for a Poisoned Planet" by David Steinman; and "Sweet Deception" by Joseph Mercola). Suffice it to say, each of these toxins has an impact. If you are susceptible, the way they are incorporated into your system will have worse effects. For example, there are case studies showing that you can actually fool your doctor into believing you have multiple sclerosis by ingesting just the right amount of aspartame (aka Nutrasweet). Aspartame is actually a drug, not a food, and we are misusing it in America. Artificial sweeteners are the worst offenders largely because they have become so common in foods. I urge you to get these toxins out of your diet, and especially out of the food supply for children. We are already seeing dire consequences of long term use, and I hate to see what's in store for our teens who are gulping down gallons of diet sodas.

Take control of the sweet portion of your food supply and you will solve big groups of issues including the craving for the sweet taste itself. It takes about 2-4 weeks. That's all. But you have to be vigilant. If you need help, enlist a good nutritionist to walk you through the process. Making changes to the way you look at, think about, shop for, prepare, and eat food is extremely difficult. It's not as easy as "just do it". There are so many reasons WHY we eat and in order to get a handle on some of the biggies, it's ok to ask for help. Sugar and sweet cravings are biggies. It's not just about willpower so stop beating yourself up. It's about biochemistry and learning to create the internal environment you want.

Get Smart. Get Fresh. Get Real.

Medicinal Effects of Foods - Part 2

Ever done an "unintentional cleanse"? You know, that one-strawberry-too-many warning gurgle? That I-love-tomatoes-so-much-I-can't-stop-eating-them oops-gotta-go? It's that time of year here on the West Coast when the fresh fruits and veggies start rolling in by the bushel and I get a little too excited about some of them, especially those strawberries... So why do they do that? What's the deal with the "flush"?

As mentioned in Part 1, depending on amount, what we ingest can be sustenance, pharmacological or toxic. That innocent strawberry actually contains a number of toxins that it creates to help ensure that at least some of it's seeds have a chance to grow to new plants. If the strawberry can't protect itself against slugs and earwigs and snails in some way, then it's chances of survival as a species are slim. Some of those toxins are at doses too low to be problematic for the human body. But interestingly enough, something we think of as benign can become a toxin that overwhelms the body's ability to process it: fructose.

Fructose is one of the most common naturally occurring sugars in our food supply. It has benefits in relatively small doses as a fuel source for the metabolically active tissues of the body. It takes a bit longer to be broken down though and the system in charge of this process is easily overwhelmed. When the amount of fructose to be broken down builds up faster than the body can process it, a shift occurs which ultimately is like the internal disassembly crew throwing up their hands and giving up then pressing the emergency eject button on the contents of the gut to get rid of the excess -- and off you run to the potty.

Other foods that can have this effect usually have either a relatively high amount of fructose, or are high in soluble fiber. The two big categories of fiber are soluble and insoluble. The first acts in the gut like a sponge, soaking up excess fats, pulling in toxins to be removed, and pulling out excess water. The second acts like a scrubby as it passes through the intestines giving you a good cleaning out as it moves along. The soluble fiber's ability to absorb water is the culprit when it comes to causing an episode of diarrhea. Because it pulls water into the gut, high amounts of soluble fiber can create a very stool watery consistency. The intestines don't work well when the contents are too loose, so again, the emergency eject button gets pushed and off you skip to the loo again. Often people I work with have the opposite issue of constipation which generally can be dramatically improved by increasing both water and soluble fiber intake, both of which are sorely lacking in the "standard American diet" (aka SAD).

The other main ingredient that can have laxative effects on the gut is caffeine. Many people around the world have trained their guts to need a daily dose of caffeine in order to get moving. The reason for this is that caffeine is a powerful stimulant for peristalsis and acts as a diuretic. There are two main types of movements that the intestinal muscles produce, peristalsis and mass movements. Peristalsis is like a kneading action that pushes a blob of food back and forth against the intestinal lining exposing the contents to as many areas available for nutrient absorption as possible. Then, kind of like musical chairs, there is a signal and all the food blops move downstream a ways in a "mass movement" to be kneaded again. If you have a lot of caffeine, you increase the rate of kneading and you increase the amount of water that is taken out of circulation, some of which empties into the gut. This increase in fluid and movement can also cause that regular stop at the restroom about 20 minutes after your morning cuppa mud.

Of course, each of these effects can be employed on purpose to relieve relatively minor constipation. They can also be little reminders that you are over-indulging. I'm just happy to be in the midst of strawberry cleanse season! Be sure your strawberries are organic though, especially now with the new carcinogenic pesticides being approved for conventional strawberry crops... sigh... Eat REAL...

Medicinal Effects of Foods - Part 1

As one of my dear friends and colleagues Jonathan Treasure says, the same substances can be food, medicine, or poison depending on amounts. This is a very important point that I try to make with my clients (and family and friends!). Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean there aren't potentially life threatening consequences in large amounts. Take alcohol as an easy example. It is a natural substance which in small quantities can be medicinal and in larger quantities becomes toxic (if you've never had a hangover, just watch the nature programs that show elephants and monkeys getting drunk on fermenting fruits). At high enough doses, alcohol becomes a poison that can kill you by causing total nervous system depression thereby shutting off vital communication that keeps the heart beating and the lungs breathing. As I mentioned in a previous post, what I find fascinating is when normally bright and intelligent people say to me "well it's natural and I was feeling better so I thought I'd take twice the dose to feel twice as good"... yeah... Hemlock is natural too...

It is important to understand that the vast majority of the medications we take were derived from the natural world, at least at the beginning. Aspirin is derived originally from the bark of the white willow which is high in salicylic acid. Scientists started to create this acid in the laboratory cheaply and now it's available over the counter as aspirin. One of the problems is that salicylic acid causes internal bleeding both by damaging the gastric and gut mucosa (which you can't feel until the damage is severe), and by inhibiting platelet formation which is essential for proper clotting. And yes, even that 81mg "baby aspirin" causes these problems. There are ways to protect the mucosa from these detrimental effects, one of which is to pre and post medicate with l-glutamine powder or capsules.

Interestingly, there are common foods that are high in salicylic acid. Those with greater than 1 milligram per 100 grams (or about 3.5 ounces) include: green peppers, olives, mushrooms, tomatoes, radishes, apricots, blueberries, blackberries, cantaloupe, dates, raisins, guava, almonds and peanuts. Spices that also contain greater than 1 mg per 100g are: cumin, curry, dill, garam masala, oregano, hot paprika, rosemary, thyme, turmeric, and mustard. This is when your spice cabinet becomes your medicine cabinet! The salicylic acid content is in large part the reason why these foods and spices are anti-inflammatory. However, eaten alone, they can aggravate gastric symptoms in susceptible people.

So this is another good reason to combine foods when creating meals. When consumed with foods that contain l-glutamine (a common amino acid) and foods that provide good sources of minerals, salicylic acid is easier for the body to handle because of the healing effects of the l-glutamine and buffering effect of minerals. Good food sources for l-glutamine include: eggs, pork, dairy products, wheat germ and oats. Good sources of magnesium (which is the active ingredient in most antacids by the way) are barley, buckwheat, oats, almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, black beans, white beans and navy beans.

Starting to sound like another plug for eating REAL FOOD? You betcha!