What Are You Hungry For? (8 page)

Power Points

•  An ideal diet follows three themes: purity, energy, and balance.

•  Purity is about removing toxins and returning to nature.

•  Energy is about more than fueling your body—a higher kind of energy comes from the joy of eating.

•  Balance is about your body adapting to the life you want to live.

In my own life, I found a way to live the story I wanted to live. We’ve already covered one theme,
light,
that became central for me. It still is. I don’t just eat lighter. I aim to lighten my burden of stress and avoid adding to anyone else’s burden. For thirty years I’ve delved into what the word
enlightenment
means and how to achieve it. It’s wonderful how themes can change a story in so many dimensions. They affect everything: mind, body, emotions, and spirit.

I hope you’ve experienced the benefits of lightness, beginning with adding more salads, more fruits and vegetables, and smaller portions.
But the total benefit doesn’t arrive until you begin to treat a theme holistically. By adding three new themes in this chapter, we can move closer to an ideal diet, and, far more important, you will have a deeper sense of the story you want to live. The new themes are:

Purity

Energy

Balance

These are familiar terms, and one of the encouraging trends in American eating is that people are putting more value on a diet that contains pure—that is, natural—foods. But there’s also a backlash effect that discourages compliance. “This is how I should eat” lowers motivation more often than it raises it. “This is how I enjoy eating” needs no finger-wagging; we go there automatically. My goal is to help you prefer a diet that is pure, energetic, and balanced because you enjoy it more than any other kind.

The preceding passage summarizes the overall goal of
purity
as a theme in your life. The opposite of
pure
is
impure, toxic, polluted, adulterated,
and so on. There is much to say about eliminating
toxic feelings and relationships. Every theme works best when you apply it holistically. Here we focus mainly on food as a starting point.

Do:

Don’t:

At the beginning I told you my story about going “all pure,” which would have been considered extreme a decade ago. Now more than ever I feel that it’s the normal American diet that is extreme. Purity in all of our food and water is a basic demand that everyone should make. If you have the intention of a completely pure diet, a mountain of medical evidence exists to back you up.

You don’t need any refined white sugar to satisfy the desire for
sweetness—honey, maple syrup, and other natural sweeteners are part of whole foods and therefore much better for you. You don’t need alcohol for stimulation, because its toxic effects cannot be ignored. In terms of weight alone, alcohol interferes with insulin levels by giving your body a sudden jolt of the simplest sugar in nature, which is what alcohol basically is. You don’t need additives and preservatives when their long-term effect on the body isn’t known, and with new ones being added all the time. You don’t need flavor enhancers since all they do is dull your natural sensitivity to taste.

Set yourself the goal of a completely pure diet, and then go for it with enthusiasm. Don’t change your life out of anxiety.
Purity
is a positive theme that is meant to increase your sense of joyful living.

You can make your diet purer right this minute with a simple step: Get rid of whatever is stale and old. If your nose tells you that something’s not fresh, throw it out. The chemistry of going stale is complex, but in the larger picture, do you want
stale
to be a theme in your life?
Fresh, pure,
and
natural
are such desirable words that advertisers use them constantly for products that are far from fresh, pure, and natural (for example, the “fresh” taste of artificial whipped cream filled with processed fats, additives, and artificial ingredients).

More and more, preventive medicine has been concentrating on the damaging effects of oxidation, the same process that causes iron to rust, wine to go bad, and a cut apple to turn brown. In the body the process is much more complicated, but major actors are free-floating oxygen atoms, known as
free radicals,
that attach themselves to tissues with damaging effects. Some free radicals come from the environment (in air pollution and cigarette smoke, for example), but they are chiefly produced by the body. The collateral damage of free radical formation is responsible for illness and aging. Many of the most common illnesses of our society are linked to free radical damage, including the following:

Cancer

Heart disease

Stroke

Diabetes

Arthritis

Osteoporosis

Inflammatory bowel disease

Glaucoma

Retinal degeneration

Alzheimer’s disease

Other damaging effects are visible in the mirror. Wrinkling skin, graying hair, and stiffening joints are also the result of free radicals. In relation to overweight, if you are eating too much food, and it includes old, stale food and leftovers, you are aggravating the damage. I am not promoting a fear of free radicals, because their action in the body is complicated and not completely understood (for example, free radicals increase dramatically at the site of wounds and cuts, rushing in as part of the healing process).

Fresh foods aren’t oxidized, and even better, some foods contain antioxidants that may counter the damaging effects of free radicals. One of the reasons that nuts and naturally processed vegetable oils are beneficial is that they are a prime source of vitamin E, one of the best antioxidants (its benefits are lost, however, if your stored almonds or olive oil have gotten old and stale). All told, there are things you can do that increase free radical production and other things that can limit it. The following factors increase free radical formation:

Smoking

Environmental pollution

Alcohol

Radiation, including excessive sunlight exposure

Barbecued and smoked meats

Aged and fermented foods, including cheeses

Chemotherapy drugs

High intake of saturated and hydrogenated fats (hydrogenated fats, most commonly vegetable shortening, are made solid through chemical processing)

Stress and stress hormones

The body has a system for deactivating free radicals, and there are ways that you can help the process, including the following:

Eat more antioxidant-rich foods—fresh fruits and vegetables, grains, nuts, and beans

Use antioxidant-rich herbs and spices liberally—dill, coriander, rosemary, sage, thyme, mint, fennel, ginger, and garlic

Take antioxidant vitamins—A, C, and E

Eliminate tobacco, excessive alcohol, and nonessential drugs

Reduce your stress

Meditate

Being overweight doesn’t tend to move people in the right direction for preventing these disorders. It’s well documented that obesity is linked to consuming far too much fat, empty calories in sugar, all kinds of processed food, and meals at fast-food chains. If you make choices that favor
purity,
you will begin to turn this around.

But what about noncompliance, the inability to follow good advice? The answer is to make
purity
part of your plan for fulfillment.

“Pure” fulfillment:
Imagine that you are considering what to order for lunch, and your eye lands on “Mexican combination plate with beef enchiladas and refried beans.” You’re hungry, and your mouth starts to water at the prospect. Eating beef enchiladas would be
satisfying, and if you deny yourself, your brain registers it as deprivation. You need to find a new choice that feels just as fulfilling. In this situation, some people will sigh and say, “I want to be good. Just bring me a salad,” which is sensible and nutritious, but it’s hard to consider a salad as fulfilling as a fatty enchilada when that’s what you’re in the mood for.

So here’s a new way to think about it, using the theme of
purity.
The enchiladas are made of beef, which was almost certainly raised with hormones to speed muscle production. The cheese is full of saturated fats, and if the meat was seared on a grill over a flame, the smoke from charred drippings is a known carcinogen. These things don’t fit the life you want to lead. Now make a small shift to fish tacos. The fish will contain omega-3 oils and be digested much more easily; the cabbage or lettuce on top has vitamin C and antioxidants. You will still be getting a spicy Mexican meal (the hot chilies are good for pulmonary function, clearing the passageways in your lungs), and the calories are much lower. Even if you keep the cheese, fish tacos add to your theme of
purity.
Deciding to order them brings a small victory that adds positively to your whole story.

(Note: Medical science also helps out here. Your blood is composed of blood cells that float in a clear, straw-colored liquid known as plasma. After you eat a plate of beef enchiladas or a cheeseburger, your plasma gets clouded for up to 6 hours afterward—it’s quite a startling sight to see the difference when someone’s plasma is extracted after they’ve eaten such a meal. The cloudiness is from molecules of animal fat that remain solid at body temperature. They easily get deposited in the microscopic cracks in the walls of your arteries, building up deposits of plaque like dirty snowflakes filling a crack in the sidewalk.)

Now you have something delicious to eat that won’t feel like deprivation, because you’ve added a new kind of fulfillment—a higher kind—based on your power to write the story you want for yourself.
If you win two or three victories like this every day, your story will be moving in the right direction, and so will your body.

The next time you are choosing what to eat, run your choice through a mental filter, using the best information available to you (from labels, the Internet, etc.).

This kind of rundown becomes quite easy and quick once you’re used to it. Now challenge yourself to find the most delicious food that passes your mental quiz.

When you get into the spirit of it, this action step turns into an enjoyable challenge. You know that
you are eating the food that fits the story you want to live.
Don’t choose something you don’t really want—disappointment and deprivation aren’t allowed. The whole point is to add to your fulfillment, not subtract from it. As a bonus to your emotional satisfaction, your body will almost always feel better an hour after you have had pure food than if you ate fatty or processed food.