Phasers

About 20% of my clients are “phasers.” Not the Star Trek weapon, but people whose healthy eating phases wildly (even though they “know everything” about nutrition, and might even be professionals—chiropractors, nutritionists, etc.). They eat super clean for a couple months or weeks and then they eat nasty for just as long.

If this is your pattern, there are plenty of things you can do in the domain of ACTION—foundations to build, habits to put into place, all sorts of little “tricks of the trade.” But the real change in this phasing-pattern comes PSYCHOLOGICALLY. I observe that there are essentially three keys to inner-transformation. Applied to this issue—phasing with healthy eating—they go like this:

1) Intention—Access the clear intention to SEE what’s really going on with you, psychologically, with your on-again-off-again eating. Really WANT IT.

2) Not Knowing—Dare the humility of really NOT KNOWING why you play out this pattern. If you’ve done a bunch of therapy or read some self-helpish books, you probably have a lot of theories as to why you vacillate with your eating, but if you REALLY knew, the pattern would shift. So free-fall into “I don’t have a CLUE what I’m up to with this pattern!” As Zen Master Seung Sahn Said, “Only don’t know.” (It’s the title of one of his books, too.) This disposition is porous and open and available to see and learn new things about why you do what you do.

3) Consciousness—Those two—Intention and Not Knowing—lead inexhorably to becoming CONSCIOUS of what your pattern is all about, what you’re “playing out” and so on. There are LEVELS of seeing. You can see something in your psychology in an abstract, intellectual way for YEARS without REALLY seeing it at all. But when you see some inner pattern in a deep, direct, visceral way, that pattern absolutely will shift (or your realtionship TO it will shift, with the same end result—powerful change).

What To Do About Unhealthy People Around You

It’s common for a person who’s just started eating healthy to try to make their kids or spouses eat healthy, too. This is a profoundly bad idea. Doomed to failure.

It’s a little like with the airplane masks on an airplane. The instructions are: Secure your own mask before helping your kids on with their’s (you won’t help them very effectively if you’re unconscious). Same with healthy eating. First get yourself firmly, rock-solidly grounded in rejuvenative eating. Live it, for real. Get to the point where you’re shining with vibrant energy and glowing with deep cellular vitality. They’ll see your radiant eyes and skin, they’ll notice your increased energy, your clear mind. You’ll even smell better! Even little kids (actually, especially little kids) will pick it up energetically.

And when do you finally begin preaching, “educating,” and reforming your housemates? Well never, actually. You’ll only help them discover the power of regenerative eating by attraction and example. That’s it.

I know it takes preternaturally healthy boundaries to do this (for more on this, check out al-anon literature and meetings!), but ATTRACTION really is the only thing that works. If it’s in their “karma” or “destiny” or whatever, they’ll be drawn. But the more you seem self-righteous or judgemental or ANYTHING weird or unhappy or complicated about their eating, the more you create a power struggle—polarized resistance, defiance and so on. In other words, eat and let eat.

(Of course, if your child is young enough that it works to just tell them what to eat, and your spouse agrees with you, and you’re good at making healthy stuff yummy to a child’s palate, then there’s no issue there.)

Potent Quotes from Cheri Huber

I think that, for anyone in the amazing process of transforming how they eat, the wisdom of Cheri Huber is indispensable.

“Most people hold an unshakable belief that the primary reason they are ‘good’ is that they punish themselves when they are ‘bad.’…The process of self-hate is so much a part of the average person that we don’t even recognize it. We think we’re just doing the things that will insure we’ll be good. It’s normal, we say. Everybody does it. Or should.”

“Any time a voice is talking to you that is not talking with love and compassion, DON’T BELIEVE IT!…If the voice is not loving, don’t listen to it, don’t follow it, don’t believe it. NO EXCEPTIONS! Even if it says it’s ‘for your own good,’ it is not. It’s for its own good, not yours. This is the same as when parents talk to you in a hateful tone of voice ‘for your own good.’ It’s for their good. It makes them feel better. It does not make you better. (And it does not make you behave ‘better’.)”

Green Smoothies (or sometimes red or brown or blue)!

In a post a while back I listed the ingredients I used in a special “mood” smoothie. Since then, I’ve had a few requests for a “normal,” everyday smoothie. Here it is:

1) Fruit as a base. Can be a young coconut (water and meat) and/or a banana and/or an orange. Any fruit, really. Grapes, apple, frozen organic berries (yes, freezing ‘em wipes out a bunch of the enzymes, but still pretty healthy), pineapple, mango, whatever. Plus I always add Goji berries, no matter what other fruit is in there. I peel and toss in a whole lemon pretty often, too.

2) Dark leafy greens. I rotate kale, spinach, collards, dandelion greens, and sometimes weirder, freakier greens (escarole, etc.).

3) A handful of raw, organic nuts and/or seeds. For nuts: walnuts, pecans (Taoists are big on pecans!), almonds, pine nuts, Brazil nuts. For seeds: chia (soaked overnight, about 2 tablespoons), hemp, sunflower, pumpkin.

4) Water.

5) If I'm NOT using a young coconut, I'll add a couple tablespoons of raw coconut oil (Tropical Traditions).

6) An avocado (peeled, seeded). Add this last, cuz' it thickens the thing so much, and so quickly, that it makes blending tougher.

7) Cinnamon, mon (a rasta comment)

DIRECTIONS
Start with a small amount of greens and gradually build, minimizing the fruit little by little until you find that line where it still tastes good but is not a sugar bomb. Don’t worry. That line will move (toward more and more veggies) as you get healthier and healthier. The big, big super crazy health is in the greens, so you want as many of those bad boys as are palatable. Keep edging it up.

In a hurry, that’s enough. That’s a perfectly fine, basic, respectable smoothie. However, mine have gotten a little fancier over the years. Here’s what ELSE might go into mine (bearing in mind they’re different every day), in ADDITION to the above.

MARKS FANCY PANTS EXTRAS
1) Fresh ginger, an inch or so.

2) Burdock root (about 4 inches)

3) Stinging nettle decoction for my liquid. Packed with massive, disease-crushing minerals. Put 1 cup in a 1 quart mason jar, fill with boiling water before bed, let it steep, covered, over night (got this from Patrick Timpone on One Radio).

4) Other veggies. Whatever’s around. Broccoli, bell peppers, green beans, carrot, whatever. Plus I always add celery. (Bernard Jensen revealed how the organic sodium in the celery helps the organic calcium from the greens stay “in solution” in the body so the cells can actually use it.). Oh, and very commonly I add some beet.

5) Occasionally I’ll add some raw egg yolks.

6) Maca. About 2 tablespoons.

7) All sorts of PRL’s beautiful, insanely-pure superfoodish supplement-ish things. These are always changing, but lately it’s been: dark cherry concentrate, pomegranate concentrate, colostrum, tocotrienals.

There you have it, folks. Enjoy!

Tao of Diet Transformation

A client gave me the book The Tao of Pooh for a gift a while ago, and a few lines seemed so appropriate to the process of overhauling how we eat. Well actually, the whole book does. But I might get in legal trouble if I transcribe the entire book here. Plus it would make for a rather long post. Plus, too much work. Pooh ("the most effortless bear") would never do such a thing.

"...when you try too hard, it doesn't work...The surest way to become Tense, Awkward, and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard—one that thinks too much...This mind tries too hard, wears itself out, and ends up weak and sloppy [and, I might add, directing you too binge on Cheetoes]."

By the way, on an unrelated note, here's a really smart interview with John Robbins:

http://www.garynull.com/Documents/spectrum/interview_with_john_robbins.htm

Use the Zealots!

When regular people want to start eating healthy, and they pick up a nutrition book, they often find themselves with a book by a health fanatic. Such books are very common. Most of us, when confronted by a nutritonal zealot, ditch the book and look for saner fare. Natural enough. We feel the rigidity, the unsettling fervor, and we naturally recoil. But I think it’s wise to come at it differently. Like my chiro pal Michael Nokken counseled me long ago: “Learn from the zealots!”

Consider it, most of the big advances we’ve gotten in any field came from people who were zealots—a little nutty about what they were into. Who else is going to spend every waking minute of their lives doing all the work and the research and the experimentation? You and I are too busy, y’know, having lives and stuff. The martial art world would not have been revolutionized if not for the extreme explorations of Bruce Lee or the Gracie brothers. Check out Mozart’s life or Balanchine’s or Balzac’s. I don’t know much about Einstein’s life, but I’ll bet he was pretty “fanatical” too (if his haircare habits are any indication).



The point is that we can USE the findings and knowledge of zealots without, ourselves, actually BECOMING a zealot. We can, as the 12 steppers say, “Take what we like and leave the rest.” Raw foodists, macrobiotics people and Ayurveda folks can all sound pretty flakey and “out there.” But so what!? That doesn’t necessarily mean their information is unsound. Dig through their dogma and ideology and excavate their research, carefully weigh the arguments and evidence they present on their own merit (no matter how goofily (or scarily) they convey it) and do some experimentation in your own private laboratory—your own body. Soon you may find yourself feeling an affectionate humor toward the health zealots of the world. And even receiving the fruits of their albeit extreme labors with gratitude.

Break it down to get it done and eat clean!

One of the oldest secrets is to achieving things is this: When you’re trying to accomplish a task, break it down into small, component parts. Old or not though, not many people apply it to transforming their eating. Instead, for most of us, building a new lifestyle around food just seems like one, big, daunting task.

So let’s take just one part of that task—finding new foods (and yes, that is actually only ONE part!)—and break that down. From now on, instead of thinking, “Oh God, I’ve got to start discovering new healthy things to eat,” I want you start thinking in terms of these four, concrete action steps. To wit:

1) Get a couple of decent cookbooks. This can be library, on-line (used or new), or a bookstore. Or, the next time you’re over at your super-healthy friend’s house, you can slip a mickey in his kale juice and then load up your arms with his books. Yes, there are zillions of healthy recipes on-line, but since you might not know yet how to assess healthy versus only SEEMING healthy, it could be safest to go with a book that’s well known to be reliable. I recommend getting raw food recipe books, not because I teach 100% raw food diet (I don’t), but because most people could use way, way MORE raw plant foods in their diet.

A couple of good ones:

http://www.amazon.com/Raw-Food-Made-Easy-People/dp/1570671753/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235348672&sr=1-1
Super convenient and tasty recipes.









http://www.amazon.com/LifeFood-Recipe-Book-Living-Force/dp/1556434596/ref=pd_sim_b_62
This one has some of the yummiest recipes I’ve ever found!

http://www.amazon.com/Eat-Smart-Raw-Kate-Wood/dp/0757002617/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235349336&sr=1-1
Also a nice, useable little book.


2) Make a date in your planner or Blackberry or stone tablets to spend a half hour or so looking through that/those cookbooks searching out yummy sounding recipes. Clever sneaky hint to get yourself to actually DO it: Tie this activity in with some enjoyable activity: Laying at the beach, sitting in a bath or in front of a cozy fire.

3) Schedule in your shopping trip. Fun hint: Make THIS activity fun by getting sloppy staggering drunk before you go. (Kidding!!!)








4) The last step to schedule in is, of course, time in the kitchen, making stuff. Two ways to make this less of a chore: First, listen to cool stuff (on your iPod or whatever). You can even listen to inspirational and educational health podcasts and so on. Here’s a link to a site with tons of free interview podcasts. I recommend Gabriel Cousens, Lindsey Duncan, Patricia Bragg, Robert Marshall, Douglas Graham, Andreas Moritz and Annie Jubb.

http://www.oneradionetwork.com/health_-_podcasts/

The other way to get yourself to work (play) in the kitchen is, gasp, put a TV in there and rent a fun show or movie to watch while you chop and stuff. Hey, whatever works!