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How I began on a journey of health – and it didn’t start with coconut flour!

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When we started on a journey of changing from a processed/junk-eating lifestyle, we started out merely by replacing bought soda with bought juice. Then we went to baking a cake now and then from scratch (not a “healthy” recipe with rapadura or coconut flour or honey or raw cacao or cashew butter – just a recipe from scratch with flour and eggs and butter!), and cooking more dinners from basic ingredients, eg fresh milk, pasta, flour, fresh veg, fresh meats. We would never have lasted long on a health kick alone; what a bore! It had to grow out of a newfound interest in ingredients.

For many years as a teenager I had eaten countless baked beans from cans, two minute noodles, instant potato, packet sauces and pasta dishes, and rice. When I moved out of home I had never even touched raw meat with my bare hands before. There were many vegetables I had never even held in my hands before, let alone prepare, cook or eat. It was fascinating and enjoyable in a primal sense to handle and get to know the raw ingredients of the meals we were learning how to cook.

We switched to whole milk as we both had previously only had skim milk and when we found out how it’s processed we wanted the real thing, which thankfully we can buy here non-homogenised. We had to get used to what seemed like a fatty feeling in the mouth after drinking whole milk rather than skim. But soon enough we came to love the taste and feel of creamy milk. We didn’t have much money so we bought cheap meats and I learned how to make stews and casseroles.

I tried making bread (I started by making a sweet Boston bun with sugar and currants in it and a sugary lemon topping – not exactly “healthy” by the latest rapadura/coconut flour/God knows what next standards!!) but it was delicious because it was better than anything you can buy in a shop, and also, I fell in love with the feel of dough and the smell of a loaf crusting in the oven. Which led, many years later, to the motivation to try other breads, and later again, to making sourdough – which I make now from time to time – when I want to and get the time and motivation.

So I have since learned how to make sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha, and baked goods made from all manner of clever and interesting ingredients, as well as dishes using all sorts of lesser-known parts of animals and unusual vegetables or fruits. But I didn’t start out like that, and I don’t think that doing all of those things is vital to health.

I’m a believer that health comes partially from the sheer enjoyment of food and from touching, seeing, smelling, tasting the intrinsic beauty of ingredients themselves, and I think that by forcing yourself through willpower onto a new way of eating which you only think cerebrally to be good for you, regardless of your body’s cravings or what your heart is telling you, it is actually likely to do more harm than good.

When you have to force yourself to eat “healthily”, it will not last and at very least you will end up “cheating” now and then and feeling associated guilt – and your enjoyment of food will decrease, not increase, as you can start to associate food with the stressful experience of not enjoying preparing and eating it. Stress is bad for your body as well as your mind. Some people will tell you how wheat is bad for your gut. Well, whether that is true or not, please also remember, stress itself is bad for your gut.

I would recommend that anyone beginning on a journey of becoming more healthy, starts simply with the substitution of real foods for previously-eaten processed foods. Learn how to make a real cheeseburger with good-quality bread, real mince meat and spices, real lettuce and real cheese. Learn how to make a soup from chicken stock and fresh vegetables. Learn how to make a cake from eggs and flour and butter. Drink whole milk. Enjoy lots of real butter on your bread. Make a simple roast and make a gravy from the drippings rather than from a packet.

Enjoy the cooking and enjoy the food. Don’t try anything too unusual or complicated yet if you don’t feel like it. Don’t deliberately make yourself miserable in the name of health. The nourishment of food is not only for your body, it is also for your soul.

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How to break the cycle of constant availability

Written by on · Say what's on your mind!

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.

~ Annie Dillard (b. 1945), U.S. author. The Writing Life, ch. 2 (1989)

  

Today’s world is one of connectivity.  The word would mean little to those my grandmother’s age, yet to those of us 40 and under, it means wireless internet networks, base stations, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, wifi hotspots, GPS, tagging, Instagram, instant messaging…  And all this connectivity has the effect of making us constantly available to others.

 

Yet plenty of what flies around in cyperspace is actually just faffing.  Very addictive or compulsive faffing – fun even – but let’s face it.  A lot of the time we spend being “connected” is actually just for the purpose of mucking around.  Even the times when it’s not mucking around – when it’s something worthwhile or potentially worthwhile – it’s still taking us away from the here and the now, and many people are starting to get weary of that.

 

More and more people are trying (often unsuccessfully) to disengage from constant availability for varying periods of time.  People who are creative need the headspace of being alone or at least uninterrupted.  Many parents are concerned that the amount of time that they end up spending being connected online is distracting them from the here and now of their kids’ childhoods.  Or they worry about what it’s teaching their kids about priorities, or seeing their kids do the same thing and worrying about this.  Many people are even worrying if there is something wrong with *them*, because of how addictive connectedness can be.

 

Some people go hiking or camping or holidaying to get away, but then again with GPS coverage world-over and mobile phone coverage nearly everywhere, even this won’t work unless you leave your phone at home, and in some cases it’s obviously better to have an emergency way to contact the outside world, if you are going on an extended trip in the wilderness for instance – and how often can one do this anyway?  Once or twice a year if you’re super keen?  Even for the keenest hikers and holidayers, it’s no longer enough to break the cycle.

 

But take heart – you don’t have to disappear into the wild just to get away from the constant and insidious stess of connectivity.  Here’s a list of ten ways that you can practise being unavailable.  Not all of them even involve internet technology.  My personal belief is that the feeling of being obliged to respond and engage online simply flows on from a general sense of obligation in most people, to respond when spoken to.  And actually, there’s no rule in the universe that says that you have to be available to others.  (Women, especially, remember this!)  Your life is your own.  Try some of the following ideas and revel in your power to be unavailable!

 

1. Train yourself to not always answer the phone -

(what’s the worst thing that can happen?)…

 

2. Rmove yourself from as many social media networks as possible,

or make yourself invisible.

 

3. Turn on invisibility,

(the thing that tells others you’re online or not!) and chat functions from Gmail, Yahoo, Skype, MSN, Facebook etc.

 

4. Set all privacy settings in online accounts to the highest possible privacy -

do you really need to hear from every single person you ever went to school with?  Do your “friends of friends” really need to hear about your life online?  Become a bit of a social media hermit; don’t worry, your true friends will still be able to keep in touch!

 

5. Don’t always answer your front door.

This is a hard one, but it’s worth learning how to do.  Internet you can switch off; phones you can switch off, but your door remains there – and people can knock on it.  Your door is a piece of technology too, albeit an old-fashioned one – and one that was invented, in part, for privacy!  You have no moral obligation to answer your front door.  Ever.  Of course, most of the time you will.  Sometimes it will be a friend or family member dropping by, and maybe rarely, once in a blue moon, it might be a long-lost friend or someone needing your help… but realistically it’s usually going to be mail delivery, Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Red Cross – or someone pretending to be the Red Cross…!  Even the police can’t come in without showing you a warrant, so don’t worry about the door being kicked down.  It’s unlikely to cause you to miss any opportunities in life, if you just don’t answer the front door sometimes. Try it, even if just once. There’s an unusual sense of power in doing it.  It’s a very simple way to regain a little bit of power that constant availability strips from us.  Just don’t answer your front door sometimes.  Try it!

 

6. Turn off your mobile phone for a whole day occasionally,

and every night always – at the very least, switch to “flight” or “offline” mode.  It’s better to not sleep next to a connected phone, anyway, (it’s possible they interfere with our own brain waves and sleep patterns) and switching it off for a day or more at a time is very freeing, after the first initial hour of irrational worrying that you might miss something.

 

7. Practice deactivating Facebook for a week at a time;

you can do it from the Security page of your Settings.  Reactivating can be undone by simply logging in again, and you lose nothing at all – all your stuff and groups and friends and whatever comes back – but while you’re gone, you won’t be taggable and people won’t be able to post stuff to your wall, and when you return you’ll find that any threads you were involved in have now quietened down.  Don’t worry when Facebook kicks up a stink about how everyone will miss you and won’t be able to contact you.  You know better.  They just want you to stick around so you can keeping looking at their ads.  Nobody will be notified when you deactivate, and – although this is hard to take – when you come back feeling like a prodigal, most of your “friends” won’t even have noticed you were gone!  ;)   You’re strong; your ego can take it! Deactivate once in a while; it will feel good, I promise.

 

8. Unsubscribe to everything in your email box that you can.

Especially store newsletters.  If you must get newsletters for online stores and the like, set up a Gmail account specifically for online newsletters, and when you sign up to things which you suspect are going to send you advertising, or sale notifications, sign up using this email address instead.  Now note your password somewhere safe, then log out, forget about it and get on with your life… next time you need something and want to find a good deal, go into your “ads” email account and check the last week or so of emails for sales on the item you actually wanted.  This might even save you money, as well as saving you time and decluttering your main inbox.

 

9. Make a general habit of saying Maybe.

You don’t have to say Yes every time to everything – really.  Your life is your own.  Don’t get into this yes mentality.  It’s exhausting and leads most people to being roped into gatherings, activites, work and responsibilities they didn’t really want.  You don’t have to say No to things straight away, either. Practice being noncommital.  There’re nothing immoral about that.  Say “Maybe but I can’t commit at this stage”, and let them follow it up with you at a later date, when it’s closer to the date or when it has become more pressing.  Chances are, a lot of things you said “Maybe” to have fizzled before they even became realities, or someone else has stepped in to do the task you had hesitated about doing, probably because you are already too busy, overcommited, or weren’t really that interested anyway.

 

10. Don’t reply to instant messages or text messages right away.

Replying immediately trains others to expect your constant availability.  Let them wait a bit; if someone really needs you, they’ll follow up with a call or try contacting you again – they’ll find a way if they really need you NOW.  But how often does life really present that kind of emergency?  Practise being slow with replying to messages.  Nothing bad will happen to you and you’ll probably find that your responses are better when you give yourself time to think first.  And sometimes messages don’t even need a reply – they’re just fluff.  Choose how you spend your time on social media and text messaging – it’s not a bad thing, just choose what you do with it, rather than letting it choose (and overwhelm) you.

 

 

You were not born to be at the beck and call of others.  Your life is your own.  Communication technology in this day and age can be a blessing or a curse; we get to choose which.  We are in charge of our own lives.

 

For as Annie Dillard wrote so wisely: “Spend the afternoon – you can’t take it with you.”

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Juicing Q&A with Matt Stone – health, juicing and metabolism

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Juicing is considered so synonymous with healthy living that an image of a glass of juice could almost single-handedly symbolise the entire health-pursuing sentiment today.  But… is juicing really healthy?  Really really?  Always?  Some people will feel strongly about this topic, some so strongly that they even believe that drinking nothing but juice for days, even weeks at a time will make them healthier.  And generally the more raw, green and foul-tasting the juice, the more healthy it is assumed to be.  Now personally, although I spent many years making raw juices of all kinds, and also spent some time making and drinking raw green smoothies (those days are OVER!), I have always had some nagging concerns about certain juicing trends such as juice feasting and I often wondered whether all “juice use” is created equal.

I asked Matt Stone from 180DegreeHealth to answer a few questions I had about juicing, because I knew he’d have some interesting things to say.  I love the way Matt looks at health and nutrition while avoiding loyalty to any particular diet, health guru or trend.  His practical, personable and at times very funny book, Diet Recovery, has made my life considerably less stressful and more enjoyable, and has helped me kick a long-term habit of nutritional perfectionism.  That’s saying a a lot, coming from an information-greedy perfectionist!

Knowing that Matt often looks at nutrition issues from an unusually unbiased perspective, I put the following juice-related questions to him.  Of course, no one person has all the answers, and Matt would be one of the first people to encourage you to think for yourself and work out what kind of eating feels right to you – but you will surely find some food for thought (juice for thought?) in the following few Q&A.

 

Me: Fibre – juicing takes it out.  Big deal?  Yes or no?

Matt: Most proclaimed health experts will have a firm opinion on this.  I do not.  Dietary fiber is historically glorified because some African Natives studied by Denis Burkitt, Hugh Trowell, Kenneth Heaton, and Peter Cleave many decades ago were found to be in phenomenal health on extremely high fiber diets.  Meanwhile, in neighboring areas where typical low-fiber Western diets were consumed, typical Western problems like tooth decay, diabetes, heart disease, and constipation were frequently observed. 

 

Scientifically-speaking, I have generally advocated fiber consumption because it ferments into short chain saturated fatty acids (SCFA’s) in the gut, and those short chain fats have numerous well-known health benefits – benefits that more than adequately explain why a diet high in fiber would protect against a wide array of metabolic diseases. 

 

But that is theory and that is general.  In the real world with real people, fiber can be healthful or extremely problematic.  My specialty is working with people to rehabilitate low metabolic rates, and lots of fiber going into the digestive tract of someone with a low metabolism can cause big trouble in little China – fueling bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine (a feature of irritable bowel syndrome, psychological disturbances, and others), and decreasing appetite and overall calorie absorption just to name a couple biggies. 

 

So while it’s “healthy” to eat a high-fiber diet, and avoid stripping all the fiber out of your food via juicing, individual circumstances require greater customization.  With sick people, I typically find myself recommending low fiber diets, with concentrated sources of calories and nutrition – including juices, fresh and otherwise. 

 

Me: All that extra water – if people REALLY wanted to drink raw juice, should they drink less plain water to make up for the extra water intake?

Matt: I don’t drink much plain water at all, and generally discourage drinking plain water except with food (when it’s packaged with carbohydrates and electrolyte minerals).  Although it’s a long story and deep rabbit hole, the quick and dirty is that water is very unlike our extracellular fluids, which are rich in all kinds of minerals and sugars, most notably sodium and glucose.  Our body fluids are a lot more like milk or juice than they are water.  Any time you take in fluids with a concentration that is weaker than the fluids in your body, you are going to dilute the concentration of those fluids.  That can be a good thing, or a bad thing.  In my experience, most people with chronic illnesses have body fluids that are depleted of sodium and glucose, and further depletion can really wipe them out and make them feel miserable.  So yes, plain water consumption is certainly something you would reduce when you increase your intake of other fluids like juice, milk, even broth.  Juice is a water substitute, and is probably superior to water because of all the essentials it contains other than the water. 

 

Your urine is the best indicator of how many fluids you should take in.  Never pee clear!  That is a strange modern fad that physiology and even veterinary medicine both strongly refute.  If your pets pee clear take them to the vet immediately!  Overdrinking is literally the most frequent mistake I see health conscious people make.  Juice is only healthy if you drink the right amount of it.  Drink enough to trigger frequent, clear urination (an easy thing to do if someone has convinced you it will fix all that ails ya) and you will do great harm to yourself.      

 

Me: Is the whole thing worth the bother at all? The juicing people say yes for health. But what if someone just wants to have an average diet?

Matt: It depends.  I really, really like juice.  I think it tastes great.  It is nutritious.  It can make up for a lot of the nutritional debts we incur eating modern foods.  And there probably are a few benefits in consuming it fresh and raw vs. pasteurized, old, and bottled.  So it is probably worth the effort.  But most people I come across that are fanatical about their health enough to juice a bunch of fruits and vegetables do so many crazy other things, and go to such extremes, that any health benefits one might gain are lost.  Juicing should be a small, and well-dosed supplement to an otherwise solid health regime.   

 

Me: Some raw juice tastes nice and some tastes foul. (I gravitate towards nice tasting things – who doesn’t?)  What are the best things to juice? 

Matt: Our society still seems to be dictated primarily by the idea of self-sacrifice for personal gain.  You often see people gravitate towards drinking a lot of nasty stuff like kale juice, spinach juice, wheatgrass, and other disgusting crap.  There’s a lot more in plants than vitamins and minerals.  Some minerals, like iron, are thought to be quite harmful in excess – and greens are notorious for being really high in iron.  Kale and other cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and bok choy are full of goitrogens that do serious metabolic damage.  Spinach is full of oxalic acid that gives people trouble as well.  People drink a ton of stuff like carrot juice too, overdosing on beta carotene which is also anti-metabolic in excess.  Our natural taste receptors steer us away from these types of things to protect us, not to sabotage us. 

I recommend juicing a few vegetables like celery, carrots, beets, lettuces, and cucumbers.  But primarily I lean towards juicing things like fresh apples, pineapple, oranges, grapefruits, grapes, melons, and other nice things.  Excess sweetness can be a problem for some, I agree.  I do tend to dilute my sweet juices by at least half with water, and add at least a few grams of salt per liter/quart.  This approximates the best-performing rehydration formulas, which typically have about 15 grams of carbohydrates per liter and 3 grams of various salts.  Real juice has a much better spectrum of minerals, including magnesium and other vital elements lost in sweat, and vitamins, phytonutrients, and other beneficial things.      

 

Me: What does juicing do to the metabolism?

Matt: It depends of course on what type of juices we are talking about here, the quantities consumed, and the person consuming them.  If your metabolism is really low, for example, your threshold for fluids of any kind is extremely small at first.  Juices, especially low-calorie vegetable juices, are highly counterproductive and will typically make a person with a low metabolism extremely cold, crashing out their mood and energy levels very hard to boot. 

On the other hand, drinking very sweet and salty juice in small quantities (just a few sips every 30-60 minutes) and frequently throughout the day can be a tremendous metabolism-booster, suppressing the production of glucocorticoids.

 

Of course, as mentioned, if you drink a bunch of raw kale and cabbage juice, you might as well be on Weight Watchers.  You’re committing thyroid suicide.  

 

Me: Juice feasting is the practice of detoxing by consuming nothing but juice for one to X number of days. Detox is a fair enough concept. Many women like to do this before they become pregnant, for instance. Can it damage metabolism to juice feast?

Matt: Juice feasting is a horrible idea, triggering a massive cascade of stress hormones, obliterating your metabolism, and probably doing very little in terms of “detoxing” your body.  It’s more likely to get rid of your sex drive, mood stability, muscle mass, bone density, and your hair than it is heavy metals or something along those lines.  I used to advocate the practice, and practices similar to it because of my infatuation with how I felt immediately after my first few juice feasts.  But how we feel can often lead us astray, as extreme stress is quite invigorating – even euphoric (see Methamphetamine!).  What people naively believe are “success stories” will continue to circulate about such practices, and there may very well be a time and place and ailment in which juice fasting is appropriate.  But a typical person’s odds of gaining some real, permanent benefit from extreme measures like this are extremely small.  The word “risky” is not a strong enough word to describe fasting of any kind.  I know plenty of people that are still trying, after years of effort, to get back to the level of health they had before doing a fast.     

 

Me:  Thanks heaps Matt, for spending the time with us to share your insights on juice and metabolism, juicing and health in general.  You’ve brought up some excellent points and a your signature mix of common sense and radical ideas!  For those of you who haven’t encountered Matt Stone’s work before, I encourage you to check out his stuff here at 180 Degree Health if you are after some practical and unbiased advice to help you in your journey for good nutrition and health.  

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