Saturday, June 9, 2007

Why Food Is Our Medicine: The Universe Seeks Balance

Food is Our Medicine

Unfortunately this is no longer a popular choice in lifestyles. We are in the age of fast food and fast lives. No one has the energy or time to spend hours preparing foods like when we grew up. We have bills, we have work, we have traffic, and we have school lunches for our kids (Don't get me started on that one!) I want you to know that I am in no way attacking anyone’s lifestyle. It is what it is. You may think, everyone is doing it so it must be nutritionally okay, but look how overweight of a society we are. Look at our children. We are too tired to do anything else and we are just plain use to the taste of laboratory food. What I teach is INFORMED choices. I do not ask anyone to adhere to my way of life. No matter what you choose, make sure it comes from a place of information. This is also called personal responsibility. In my life, I weigh out every word I say and every choice I am going to make. I do a quick 360° to see what the effects of my actions will be. Then take my informed choice and put it into action because I am ready to take the consequences of my decisions, no matter how unpopular. This is what I teach. If you are making an informed choice, no one can make you bad or wrong for your choices.

I studied Macrobiotics for years. I love the system. It is extreme in our American standard. Although I do not practice the food choices of macrobiotics, I do integrate many of the principals behind the system. Macrobiotics really doesn’t have to do with food; it has more to do with the energetics of the food and the yin and yang balance. What an amazing re-discovery. If you search back into ancient texts and cultural lifestyles, you will see that food really was not ever consumed solely for it's nutrients, but more for it's energy. That is why you hear so much about RAW foods and ALIVE foods for cancer and other disease treatments. Consuming organically grown, live food, will not only have more nutritional value for you than laboratory foods, but also more energetic value. We are energetic beings. Our atoms vibrate at a very fast rate. Look at your hand under the right microscope and you will see that you are indeed vibrating energy.

Humanity has single-handedly depleted the soil, the water, and the air of vital nutrients while replacing nutrients with poisons. What has been done to one element has been done to the others as well. I will use the land for this example. We use fertilizers and hormones on our gardens and flowers to make them big and beautiful, yet this is causing them to suck more nutrients from the land. We no longer compost garden and we rely on an external, false, chemical laden way of re-mineralizing the land. We use pesticides and herbicides. We kill bugs and spray vegetation to prevent animals and other "pests" from attacking. The more the nutrients are lacking in plants, the more pests are attracted to them. This is all very much like what we are doing to our own bodies when we artificially feed it with laboratory food and vitamins from a bottle every day of our lives. Because we are all interconnected, what happens to something on earth has a ripple effect, and affects us all.

I look very much at constitutions of each individual person to determine a healthy program. The majority of us are all Sanpaku; yin dominated. We need yang therapies and yang food to balance us out. Too much yang, and we tip the scales one more time. There are some people that can flourish on a vegetarian lifestyle, but before deciding on the type of food you should eat, your whole lifestyle needs to be evaluated and taken into consideration. What are your environmental influences? What are your lifestyle, relationships, job, workout schedule, and thought patterns? These situations all impact the food you can take into your body to remain within balance. You can take 2 people with the same body constitution but lead completely different lives. The person you expect to live disease-free because they seem to have a care-free life, may be the very person that ends up dying from cancer or an auto accident. They may be the person that is living most out of balance. You've heard the expression, the good die young? It may be that the "good" are living most out of balance. I'm not saying go do "bad" things that will have a detrimental effect on you or someone else. I'm saying that good and bad do not exist in a universe that seeks balance. All things exist and we put judgement on them to make them bad or good. We have to impose such judgements to set safe society standards; this is necessary. But as far as your health goes, don't eat all whole organic foods because you think they are "good" and "good things will heal you". That's the "go to college, get a good job, buy a house, find a spouse, have kids, buy a dog, line all of this with the proverbial picket fense and your life will be a bed of roses" sydrome. Life doesn't work that way, and neither does our health. The majority of people I know that pursue a healthy, holistic life have just as many problems as the people that live by society standards. Because the universe (and the body) are always seeking balance between all forces, what seems healthy, may not be healthy. Every single thing that happens to you in life, from a paper cut to a car accident to a disease is all part of the universe (and your body) seeking balance. The universe does not judge right or wrong, good or bad. It only knowns balance. you want to be vegetarian, make an informed choice about it. Don't do it because several groups of people support it and say you should only eat vegetables. Undergo diagnostic testing with someone that will take all of your life in to consideration. Have mineral testing done to find out what YOU are lacking. Our mineral balance is as unique as our fingerprints. You can have similar or the same health issues as someone else, but be lacking or over abundant in a completely different complex of minerals. Taking what someone else is taking,

Food can be a great medicine. It was created to be synergistic. There is not one enzyme or nutrient that can be isolated into the magic bullet. Nutrition is a synergistic blend of all the factors. A bottle of pills cannot produce something as complex and synergistic as a natural occurring whole food source.