Food for Your Best Life

A few years ago now as I was walking around my old neighbourhood, a deeply profound thought struck me:

The closer anything is to its natural state the better it is for us.

Food has become an issue for me. Not because I’m concerned about my weight particularly, though I am overweight according to my Body Mass Index (BMI) and have been for years. For those who don’t know, your BMI is a measure of body fat based on your weight in relation to your height, you can easily Google BMI calculators to work it out.

My issue is more about how I’m feeling; I can just tell the food I’m eating doesn’t resonate with me anymore. As I’ve gone on this journey to a more authentic me, the food I used to enjoy is less and less appealing. After I eat I feel bloated and sluggish, and generally yuck.

A while back I showed my kids a fun video about the digestive system and how our bodies function at optimal health when our internal environment is slightly alkaline. It’s a basic truth I’d learned about our physiology years ago.

We then watched a video about acid and alkaline (or base) foods. We made two big charts, one for acids, one for alkalines, and cut out heaps of pictures of the foods that we eat before sticking them to their relevant chart. 

That was a visual wake up call, with about 80-90% of what we eat being acid inducing food. It’s almost the exact opposite of what a healthy balance would look like. Not surprisingly, if I were to eat a variety of whole foods in their natural state, the balance would be totally reversed and support my natural physiology.

I then bought a book that appealed for some recipe ideas, called Vegge Mama, since my kids eat practically no vegetables and my partner and I are just sick of the ‘same old’ meals. The authors, Doreen Virtue and Jenny Ross, share their food stories at the beginning; Doreen’s father has been a vegetarian since childhood and her mother was a food counselor; Jenny doesn’t say what her childhood diet was like, just that a health crisis about 20 years ago led her to a plant-based raw food diet and then to becoming a raw food chef.

The foods look good, but it’s overwhelming. There are a whole bunch of ingredients I’ve never heard of and, by the time I tried to figure out if that is because it’s an American word for something I do know (like cilantro instead of coriander, or zucchini instead of courgette) or whether it’s just something new to me entirely, my willpower to do something different had waned.

My childhood diet was typical West of Scotland fare. Dinner was meat, potatoes and two veg; breakfast and lunch were usually some form of wheat with some form of dairy; and these were supplemented with snacks of seasonal fruit, bread (with butter and jam) and – if we were lucky – home baking consisting of some combination of refined flour and sugar. Treats were anything fried, , sugar (cooked, baked and boiled in its many guises) and a can of diet Irn Bru (a lurid orange-coloured fizzy concoction sworn to get rid of a hangover).

Cholesterol became a thing in the 1980’s, and so we ditched the more natural butter in favour of foul margarine. Then McDonald’s came on the scene, followed by a whole raft of other fast food choices to complement the kebab shops and Chinese and Indian take-out restaurants.

As life has progressed, many of these elements have remained in my diet. When I became an adult and moved away from home, I learned how to cook many more pasta and rice dishes to add variety to the potato and veg kind. But I soon discovered that very little of these foods are actually helping my body, most of what I’ve eaten for most of my life is highly processed or mono-farmed; far from its optimal natural state.

That is annoying, I feel myself taking a deep sigh as I’m not really a lover of cooking. It’s a means to an end for me, and not something I wanted to have to entirely relearn, changing all my shopping and cooking habits feels like a huge deal.

Hence there are only three times in my life I’ve ‘been on a diet’. The first was when I became housebound for months in my early twenties, undiagnosed with a debilitating lethargy. This was in the days before the internet, so I was reliant on bemused doctors, magazines and library books.

My research, such that it was, led me to the early discussions about Candida Albicans and yeast overgrowth, and I embarked on an anti-candida diet. That was no mean feat in those days, especially given the social context (it was seen as highly controversial and ‘alternative’), and ingredients were hard to come by.

Eventually I was diagnosed with panic disorder and generalized anxiety, so my focus shifted more to ‘mind over matter’, but I had learned a lot about food groups and their effect on human physiology in the process.

The second and third diets that I have ever embarked on were both in an attempt to conceive. After four failed pregnancies, by the time I reached my late thirties I had again begun to look more broadly at my health. Much of what I read reminded me of what I’d learned back in my early twenties. In the intervening years, candida overgrowth (synonymous with internal inflammation in the mucous membranes and resulting health issues) had become a more widely recognised and less contentious issue.

I was drawn to a book by Dee McCaffrey about flourless and sugarless living, and was astounded by her knowledge and experience around this issue. Recently I was reminded of it again when I saw an online course being offered by Susan Peirce Thompson, who has spent years studying the psychology and neuroscience behind addiction when it comes to these foods. Refined sugar and flour are as addictive as cocaine and heroin and block our body’s natural ability to know when it is full.

So it was no surprise to me when a naturopath looked me in the eye and told me “no self respecting fetus wants to come into a gloopy environment”. He may not have used those exact words, but I heard what he was saying and I got it. Both times I switched to a more natural alkalizing diet and I was pregnant within a month, and both resulted in healthy babies.

Of course, in the months and years that followed, with breastfeeding and a family and house to look after as well as a full time senior corporate role to hold down, I reverted back to my old habits. This is an aspect that Susan Peirce Thompson deals with head on – willpower. Her philosophy is to draw a line and make no exceptions for unhealthy food choices, as you would for anything else addictive.

I understand this and the science behind it, and in situations that are ‘acute’ or pressing, I have proven myself capable. Whereas right now, this dis-ease with my health is more chronic, making it feel less pressing.

I know that is not cool, I know that ignoring all the small signs and symptoms only leads to larger issues down the line.

The question is how to tackle it. I know anything that feels like ‘effort’ can negate whatever I am trying to achieve. So how do I go about creating more healthy habits in a way that feels easier?

From a metaphysical perspective, I’ve found discussions about food and energy from the likes of Anthony William and Teal Swan extremely interesting.  Many intuitives often ‘see’ the energy that flows in and around us, including our food, whereas most of us generally only feel it.

The concept of eating food that is alive and full of life energy seems so much more appealing than food that is, for want of a better word, dead.

While I’d easily find food full of kilojoules in a supermarket, I would struggle to find anything with much life energy. Teal’s run down of foods that are worst for us (in order, everything from sugar substitutes and pesticides to dairy and meat) resonated with everything else I’ve heard and read; you can hear this on her You Tube channel.

Vladimir Megre’s Ringing Cedar series also has some fantastic information about our optimal diet and lifestyle, and how to go about tackling it.

I know my ideal end goal is to eat fresh foods I pick from my garden, foods grown with love and in a more healthy (for the plant and therefore me) companion-plant mix. Not the best news when neither cooking nor gardening is really my thing, the kids are fairly picky eaters and my partner is bound and determined to stick with gluten and meat.

So it was of some relief to be reminded, when listening to one of Teal’s videos, that as I follow my path of authenticity I’ll be naturally inspired towards the types of foods that are healthier for me. All I need do is work my way into this incrementally.

That hit home. The ‘all or nothing’ is too much for me right now, too big a leap to make in one swoop. I have to break this down. I decided that each week, when I order the shopping, I’d choose one new recipe to prepare. That way we can try new things, incorporating the ones we like into my new repertoire, which can slowly build up over the coming months and years.

My rule of thumb is that it has to be natural, tasty and easy.

Simultaneously the garden has become my domain. My partner, who has tended to take a lead in the past, is just too busy this Spring to plant up and look after the vegetables (yes it’s Spring here in the Southern hemisphere). So the kids and I have chosen some of the basics and will use some of our time at the weekends to start growing what we need.

While I’m hoping that will inspire them to make more healthy food choices, I recognise this is about what I’m feeling the intuitive nudge to address. Right now they seem more enamored with everything I’ve come to dislike. I trust, in time, they will follow their own intuition around this issue. In the meantime they will find more healthful choices available to them around the home.

Whether you feel a critical need to urgently look at your food choices, or whether this is something that has been grumbling along in the background, only you can determine. The key thing though is to get your head around it. To work out what beliefs you have that are fear based, versus what your body is telling you about your diet.

You won’t choose lettuce and carrots for dinner and suddenly find the path of enlightenment. However the reverse can be true, so trust your inner knowing on this issue. Listen to your body and you’ll discover the foods that will support you in living your best life.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.