Happy New Year everyone!
How are your tummies and bodies? It's been a while since writing, but I'm back!
Every year, this happens: Christmas holidays come, visiting, extra treats, on the road
even more, and then BAM! the New Year comes and my body aches for reprieve,
"Just STOP, for the love of all things, just stop!". And this year, I didn't even go super-crazy - just the two days of Turkey dinner madness at my parents' place and the extra snacks (potato chips at night for a few nights we were there). Still. I feel incredibly
saturated. I feel plugged, heavy, pudge from the inside, less energy, dreary, plugging along. That's what I feel.
During the holidays, I checked back on a documentary I've been meaning to see for a while, but didn't find available in Canada until this time around.
"Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead" by Joe Cross. Very intriguing documentary. Not in the sense that I think juicing is revolutionary or the best thing for everyone, but moreso for the emphasis he places on the misconception of the North American diet. Amidst his quest for overcoming illness and being overweight, Australian Joe Cross goes to the U.S. to juice fast for sixty days. Through the documentary, he interviews Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of the New York Times Best Selling book "Eat To Live" and subsequent book "Super Immunity". He interviews others on their eating habits, their health issues.
My opinion? Any human being is going to lose weight on a juice fast and I do not think it is a healthy way to lose/maintain weight. But what stood out to me is the epidemic of mediocre wellness, the plight for doctors to fix us, for medications to make us feel better, thinking it is just normal, but continually inputting such over-processed crap in to our bodies, taking away the needed space our bodies have for things that are alive, natural and meant to nourish us since the beginning of time. How do you argue with 200,000 years (give or take) of human evolution on this planet? It reminds me of an example on unethical marketing done in the 1970's-1980's and beyond in third world countries, to tell mothers formula was healthier than breastmilk.
Both the documentary and book made me look in the mirror and realize I've been wearing an incredibly distorted (and common) pair of glasses - seeing my own diet and nutrition through a perspective that doesn't really match my intuition at this point in my life.
I grew up eating mostly what I want. But I do recall being quite young, thinking "I wish I could just eat vegetables and fruit". That wouldn't happen though - our family was somewhat typical in our 1980's North American eating habits. My mom made most of our meals homemade and some were Japanese dishes which were quite healthy. But we also had "The Chef" (Boyardee) feeding us, some instant Japanese noodles, the golden arches on weekends, and when I was in highschool, and could afford my own lunches, man were my choices poor!
Cut to: me all grown up. I'm 37. I thought my little family was pretty healthy. At the grocery store, aside from a loaf of bread, everything else are ingredients - rarely a pre-packaged meal. I make our pasta sauce with organic, free-range beef, homegrown tomatoes, and kale. But we are on the road a lot. Anywhere we drive, is on average thirty minutes away which means, after we eat breakfast, get ready for the day, we are on the road, doing our errands, then lunch time. Go back home thirty minutes there and back, or grab a bite? Common sense is to grab a bite for me and my daughter and so we go to our usual places, Cactus Club, sushi, the occasional pasta.
"Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead" had me assess the components of my diet. There are some really healthy things amidst what we eat, but not a lot of it purely. Pasta, the white rice at sushi, the bag of chips snack, a very sweek granola bar, sauces, dips, etc.
Over the past six months, I have looked at the health of myself and those around me that I love. My views on medicine have shifted (whether it be Western medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, naturopathic etc.). I believe that medicine and each branch has huge merit, but I also believe that our wellness is compromised by a blind faith our society seems to have in it -
"if something goes wrong, take a pill, a tincture, it must be in your head, etc".
My realization is: I am plugging in so many 'fillers' in to my body that I have dug myself in to ignorance about the nutrition my body needs and deserves to be well. A vegetable is not a side dish that I forgot to have in some meals. It should be the majority of what I eat.
I was going to do the 15-Day Reboot Your Life program that the "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead" folks put up on their www.rebootyourlife.com website. I am having issue (not able to access the pages) with the 15-day RYL website and the program is not entirely what I want (do not want to do 5 days of just juicing), so I am having to modify as the days go on. My husband is doing a modified program of the Wild Rose Cleanse (with no pills) and the RYL program.
I am not really a 'cleanse' type person, and I think for everyone's sake (I am mean when I am deprived of food), I will keep "moderation" of daily life guilt-free - if events come up, I'm not going to deny whatever is there. But for the next couple of weeks, I am loading up on tons of veggies, and fruit, mostly raw and this will be the majority of my intake. I am juicing as well.
Yup, I'm posting. Each day will be an account of what is going in and any notes of the process. Will it make a difference?... Guess we'll see...
