Eat These Words

     I don’t tend to read books about food, eating and dieting. But when I have, I usually began by bracing myself. I know I will have to learn a whole new way of being, and conform to this system if I want to experience success, and re-learn which foods I should eat and which I absolutely am not allowed. There is an inevitable loss of dignity and adult self-sufficiency as I am told all that I have been doing wrong. I wonder again if I will be able to whip myself into a whirlwind frenzy of hope blended with enough self-hatred, so that I might try again a new system, revolutionize myself, and become a whole new, slender person. If I just do what I am told, then I may be able to do it.

     Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being by Marc David is a voice of calm and clear reason in the relatively new genre of holistic books about intuitive eating. The author provides a lucid counterpoint to nearly every bit of popular assumption and black-or-white thinking regarding eating that people tend to take for granted. He points out the inevitability of a changing diet with the passage of seasons, years, ages of life, and explains how the body goes through periods of building up and letting go. Desires and longings for food are also affected by mood, relationships, nostalgia and inner attitude. By shedding light on the variability of the human experience of eating, he clarifies how one single diet is in itself a myth, that a one-size-fits-all diet for every person is itself a trap.

     Simply acknowledging this is unique. When most popular thinking about food tries to make food choices ever more concrete, tries to make restricted food certain and immoveable, and nearly criminalize certain diet choices, one can read this book and simply take in a deep breath of fresh air. Slow down, and gather some perspective. Truly, bask in a depth of wisdom.

     Marc David goes on to gently clarify the fascism (my word) of diet programs, that accepting a diet is the same as accepting the author’s entire worldview. The possibility that the reader has their own wants, needs and personal wisdom never comes into question. To follow a diet, one gives up their own interior knowing, swallowing whole a completely foreign way of thinking.

     David states that food itself is neutral, and that moralizing about it results in both lending a restricted food a shine of irresistibility and it represses the individual’s personal process of gathering information about food; it shuts down the act of making self-propelled choices based on a human being’s inner growth and knowing.

     The author reveals also what fast eating means, hunched eating, eating without breathing. I especially appreciated his reading of “one-minute eaters” who

“…find it hard to take time to enjoy themselves, have difficulty receiving nurturance from others or listening to the promptings of their own hearts.”

     As I tend to eat very quickly, particularly shocking for me was his characterization of eaters who swallow things whole, that they “want their hungers in life satisfied but are unwilling to take the necessary steps.” Ouch.
As a teacher of mine says: “How you do one thing is how you do all things.”

How we eat is how we approach the world.

     Just when I was wondering how exactly I could attempt to align myself with healthier eating without simultaneously giving sweet, addictive foods that extra sparkle of eat-me-ness, David uses one chapter to explain a five step exercise for slowing down and being present during a meal. It is immanently doable. It takes only presence, it takes listening. It takes receiving the food.

     This is a good book with profound integrity, and I am glad I read it. When I thought there wasn’t anything left that anyone could teach me about my own addictive eating behavior, David’s truth-telling exposed my blind spots. His is an especially common-sense work regarding the inner experience of eating.

My Superhero is Chocolate

Something has happened to chocolate. Or rather there has been a polar shift in the chocolate world, and everything has gone nitro, amped-up, blissed-out...chocolate-wise. Chocolate and cocoa in its raw form have become the new wonder foods, even though we’ve already loved them forever. It’s as if a hologram from the future has been superimposed over the chocolate we all know and love, and revealed a radical, new superhero chocolate, and its secret power is LOVE.

It has become the topic of museum exhibitions in Chicago. This hotel club blog lists chocolate museums around the world, the chocolate wrappers online museum links to a wide range of chocolate museums, while Christine visits two European chocolate museums that couldn’t be more different. It’s the same with chocolate. No two types are the same, and the flavors have an incredible range of varieties.

What’s happened is, people found out why cacao beans are a super food. First there was the Naked Chocolate book by Shazzie and David Wolfe that got everything going.
Shazzie is one of my favorite raw food’s people. She knows it’s all about the love, not just the food, and says so. Here, she shows how to make a rich, loaded-with-superfood, raw food, chocolate-based fudge-like dessert: “Go Go Goju.”



And one listen to Daniel Sklaar of New York's Fine and Raw as he makes a raw cacao confection, and you’ll begin to understand how cocoa-superfood desserts are such a rich amalgam of world cultures: his accent blends something Germanic, with New Zealand and New York City.



Mark “Chocolate” Canizaro has one of the best chocolate sites going. Here is his pretty long list of the “best” chocolate bars — check here to see how chocolate can be assessed with a wine-like connoisseurship. Canizaro correctly identifies Green & Black’s as being transcendental.

Canizaro was given the option by his parents to choose his middle name, and he chose Chocolate. Really! He runs chocolate-tasting tours in Seattle, explains why fair trade is so important, and how to distinguish organic chocolate, and puts paid to the myth that chocolate contains caffeine.

Sacred chocolate’s site is luscious and dreamy, I can’t stop looking at it, and they have collated a good fount of scientific information, including the mental, physical and spiritual effects of cocoa. You can even get custom or private label sacred chocolate from them. Their Sacred Fire truffle layers pepper, vanilla and cinnamon with five different chilis.

“Sacred Chocolate® is hand made with much love, gratitude, and high “phi-bration" in a small custom-designed, certified organic, vegan, kosher, halal, carbon-balanced factory in San Rafael, California.”

Finally, of all the new raw/organic/untoasted/pure chocolate companies now sprung up within the last five years, I was drawn to Lulu’s. It seems the perfect archetype for why so many nature-loving eco-entrepreneurs have gone into the chocolate business. Because cocoa carries an energy signature of otherworldly enchantment.

Lulu asks:

“What is a spagyric? A very old form of alchemy producing an amazingly potent plant medicine by working with all three essential levels of the plant: physical, energetic, and subtle. Spagyrics are also created by following planetary cycles, bringing you a purified and energized expression of Nature's green healing intelligence.”

This is what drives Lulu’s to put maca root, orchid flower, rose essence and California cedar, cardamom and tulsi into their jarred chocolate products, and offer pure cacao essence to use as a perfume. Also along superhero lines, Lulu’s is creating the dream with others in an intentional community in Hawaii.

How I Lost 60 Pounds Without even Trying - Fridays part 3

5. I walked around constantly. Of course, civic life in Europe is scaled to the human rather than the car, so everything you need for everyday life is within walking distance. Every time I ever went anywhere, it was by my own leg power. Also, we lived three stories up in a building from 1900, so I also had a significant climb a couple times every day.

I walked my child to school, I walked back home. I walked up the block to the library, I walked into the market square to buy something at Woolworth's, I walked back home. I walked into town to the ATM, I walked over to the coffee shop, I walked to get my groceries, and walked back home, and carried my groceries up the three flights of stairs. I walked out to my car, drove to the train station, parked, walked in, up and down stairs to the correct platform, off the train and walked through town. I walked to concerts and to the movies and back home again, even at night.

The more I walked, the more flexible and strong I became. It became so normal I wouldn't have dreamed of using the car to drive to the grocery store. Because I bought a little bit every day, I seldom needed to make a huge, multi-bag trip. Walking was just a part of life.

Tune in for more ways to learn how one loses 60 pounds without even trying, just by living the European lifestyle, next Friday...

Daily Ambushed by Joy

Read Emily Green's L.A. Times profile of Dale Pendell, (parked at Erowid) poet and entheogens expert, who writes about plant energies:

About writing: "The idea was that through immersion in each plant, something would come across in my style that would create a signature for the plant," he says.

I found this at Nick Herbert's Quantum Tantra.

How I Lost 60 Pounds Without even Trying - Fridays

3. I never ate a second helping.
At the first meal I ate with my in-laws after getting off the plane, I helped myself to another heaping portion. It tasted good and there was some left in the dish, so, why not? But there is something about having a very neat and self-righteous elderly father-in-law raise an eyebrow as you scoop into the vanilla pudding for a second time, that makes you never want to do it again. Ever. It was perhaps the first time that anyone so tidy and sure of himself ever reacted so naturally and critically to my overeating. As if there were limits and I should know what they were, and why didn't I? The meal was abundant, I had eaten plenty. There was dessert, and I had my share of that, too. My father-in-law wasn't interested in making sure I could exercise my unfettered liberty. His subtle judgment held a mirror up to my behavior, and I became aware of myself...overeating.

4. I ate out in restaurants a great deal less.
Restaurants in Europe can be expensive -- not necessarily the meals, but all the extras, like drinks. And, the service is structured so that you will be spending more than an hour for the experience. Either sitting there waiting to be brought the menu, waiting for your food which can take up to half an hour, actually eating it, or waiting for your server to come back and bring the bill...all told, it adds up to a long-term commitment of time and money. Again, it is undignified and weird there to rush through life's little pleasures. So, we went from eating out perhaps once or twice a week (either sit-down or fast food) in America to eating out once every four months and having take-away or fast food twice a month at the most.

Tune in for more ways to learn how one loses 60 pounds without even trying, just by living the European lifestyle, next friday...

The Sounds of a Meal

Cynthia Anderson-Bauer, encountering the sacred at a community meal in Kerala, India:
"The sounds of a kitchen, of a meal, served for all, that brings people of all walks of life together as equals: that is surely the sound of something holy."

Sacred Chow in Sag Harbor

On Rev. Donna Schaper's book: Sacred Chow: Some Holy Ways to Eat...

“We’re really in the middle of a sea change and how Americans look at food,” says Rev. Schaper, senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square in New York City. “It came to me that the religious aspect of food hadn’t been thoroughly explored. The entire heart of our spirituality is the simple meal that is more than it appears … the heart of our faith is the meal.”

Please Mr. Postman

I just discovered the digital-spiritual imagery of Stevee Postman, from Portland, Oregon, creator of the Cosmic Tribe Tarot. Here is a mini-set called Uproot: the Vegi-Shaman six pack. 

Love these collage images of vegetal people, all male faces, dancing carrots...in mystical situations with fairy-vegetable beings glowing lotuses, waves of bliss. Please, please look at the larger images on his site!

"Below and above unite with here and now, activating a garden of enlightened awareness alive with cosmic flavor & excellent fragrance. A visual feast that will nourish and inspirit with the nectar of creativity."