A Day of Silence

Of late, I've been eating mostly organic, mostly raw or in the event I eat non-raw, I eat organic vegan. The diet is devised primarily by Aajonus Vonderplanitz, but Marcus has made a few variations based on his own experience, taste buds, and work with clients.

Those who know me say I look better than ever. I've been working out pretty lustfully too - usually 30-40 minutes of hard cardio (the 600 calorie per hour variety of cardio), and body-builder/fitness-model inspired weight-lifting every day or as my muscles recover (sometimes a 2-3 day cycle of weight-lifting). 

So, the combination of super-healthy eating and working out like Arnold's younger sister has put me on a path toward feeling and potentially looking better than ever.

But four days ago, I ate some non-organic, who-the-fuck-knows-how-it-was prepared food. Now it wasn't prepared via a cart downtown, and it was technically vegetarian, and at a decent restaurant, but it did not do me well. In the past I'd do this once or twice a week, but of late I'll sometimes go a month without ingesting non-organic food.

The next day I felt a little off, by two days passed, I felt as if my body were detoxifying and my inflammation (immune responses) had kicked in almost fully. Achy, swollen/sore throat, and generally feeling yucky.

If I'm living so healthy, why would I feel this awful after only one semi-bad meal?

Part of me thinks this is complete bullocks - I have formatted my daily life around healthy living! My body should be able to handle one bad meal!

But as I check in about it with my higher wisdom, I know that my body is just taking care of me.

No longer am I a practical, economy car. I'm an indy-car, and bad-fuel in an indy car is much more noticeable than low-grade fuel in a Honda accord.

It leads me to another thought, however. If this had happened in the past, my body was probably more occupied with other, more toxic exposures than one little meal. Alcohol, negative thoughts, an over-all less healthy and high-cylinder life-style.

Are we all just functioning at a lower-level than we're meant to? Have we all just grown accustomed to a low-grade level of feeling shitty all the time?!?

I read a book years ago called "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight." In the book, author Thom Hartmann talks about how our predecessors, the nomadic, living-in-harmony-with-the-earth peoples as having more leisure time - up to 80% - because they lived in harmony with the earth, had few possessions, and worked together for what food and shelter they did require. He contrasted that with modern humans, who work up to 80% of our waking hours - all the while attempting to gain more leisure time.

The diet I currently eat is actually most similar to the way people lived and dined when we were nomadic. I eat foods closest to their natural state - organic, raw, or gently cooked and never highly-processed. Natives didn't eat this way based on some philosophy; humans evolved eating this way, it was natural and not given a second thought. And of course, organic used to be just food. Pesticides back in the day were natural peppermint or other clever tribal movement or crop rotations - also not based on philosophy, just based upon tried and true methods of sustainability.

So why the sore throat and aches? Truly I don't know for certain, but in honor of my body telling me I should be gentle with myself, I'm taking a day of silence today - not using and saving my voice for another day when I feel well again. No phone calls, no speaking with my love Marcus, no chatting with the check-out girl at the market. I'm not working today, so it'll be easier, though I must admit, using my voice is such an automatic, default way of communicating, the days not even half through and I've slipped 4 words already. I recommit myself, and trust my body to heal.

Maybe that's why the immune response to the bad food - to remind me of my body's ability to heal; my body's inherent intelligence with releasing unfamiliar and toxic substances...because when you think about it, all of our processed foods are toxic. Our bodies haven't yet evolved to eating hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, or genetically modified foods. How could they? These things have only been around 20-80 years. The human body takes 12,000 years to evolve. Minimum! If scientists don't know for sure how long it takes, I won't pretend to know, but most agree it takes a minimum of 12,000, most likely 50,000 or more.

So today, I'm silent. Don't try to call me. You can text or email, but talking I will be refraining from. I suppose I could also go sit on some moss and smoke some Ayahuasca too if I were really going native.

How my friend Sally became the new First Lady

For about five days now I've been 100% raw primal, which means I've been eating only organic, raw, uncooked food, including organic, grass-fed animal products and fresh pressed vegetable and fruit juices. Overall I've felt fantastic eating this way, and however socially challenging it can be (most restaurants don't serve this type of food, save sushi restaurants and a few raw-vegan restaurants around town), I've managed for almost a week just fine.

Well last night, I had two organic tortillas (not raw) with some organic, raw avocado, tomato, raw cream, raw cheese and salsa.

I feel hung over today! Seriously. (Didn't drink anything last night, for the record. Haven't been drinking much these days.)

I'm kinda bummed. I like eating that cooked, floury stuff sometimes.

GrrrR!

Damn by body confirming what I already know! Which is I should be eating this primal-diet way as much as possible. I guess I'll just have to be more mindful about the gluten stuff (eat potatoes when craving simple carbs instead of gluten-based carbs. Fortunately, potatoes are on this primal diet as long as they're mixed with copious amounts of raw butter or coconut oil – which only makes the potatoes better).

But back to my gluten issues at hand. For anyone out there who knows a little about nutrition, you might conclude I'm gluten-intolerant. That may very well be true though my symptoms aren't nearly as severe as some friends of mine who have more remarkable reactions when they eat foods that contain gluten. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a little info that's part of conventional thought about being gluten-intolerant (henceforth known as glutards as my friends Lisa and Camilla affectionately call themselves). By the way, in searching for this information, I came across the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America. They have a group. Wow. One thing I love about the internet is that you can find a group that likes, doesn't like, tolerates or intolerates whatever you've got going on. Even NAMBLA, which honestly makes me feel sort of ill and is often the butt of jokes, is a real, honest-to-goodness organization. I only mention NAMBLA here because, like the Gluten Intolerance Group, it is too big for just the United States and must include all of North America.

But I digress. Here's an explanation from the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America. The most extreme form of glutardedness is Celiac disease, described here (to clarify, hay fever is to anaphylactic shock, as glutarded is to Celiac disease - they are two sides of a very wide spectrum):

Celiac disease (CD) is also referred to as gluten sensitive enteropathy (GSE), gluten intolerance, or celiac sprue. It is considered to be the most under-diagnosed common disease today, potentially affecting 1 in every 133 people in the USA. It is a chronic, inherited disease, and if untreated can ultimately lead to malnutrition. Gluten intolerance is the result of an immune-mediated response to the ingestion of gluten (from wheat, rye, and barley) that damages the small intestine. Nutrients are then quickly passed through the small intestine, rather than being absorbed. To develop celiac disease (CD) three (3) things must be present: 1) you must inherit the gene, 2) consume gluten, and 3) have the gene triggered. Common triggers may include stress, trauma (surgeries, pregnancy, etc.), and viral infections. Approximately 1 in 20 first-degree relatives could have CD triggered in their lifetime. The disease is permanent and damage to the small intestine will occur every time you consume gluten, regardless if symptoms are present.

To learn more about the recently published multi-center prevalence study of celiac disease visit, www.celiaccenter.org.

But the more primal-diet folks seem to think that the majority of people today have some form of gluten intolerance because human evolution did not include gluten or wheat-based products as we eat them today. Think about it, most processing of wheat to create breads requires machinery or great effort and for the majority of human existence we didn't have this machinery or reason to exert the effort. Additionally, we only started hand or stone-grinding wheat when we started doing agriculture. While we were nomadic, wheat was just a grass and there wasn't enough of it to stone-grind. Translation: effort to grind was not worth the yield of wheat flour nor the effort to prepare bread once we had the flour when we were on-the-move. So even though bread is thousands of years old - potentially 5000-10,000 years old, around when humans started doing agriculture and staying put (according to The Answer Bank), that doesn't mean it's part of our digestive and dietary evolution. Remember, humans have been around for something like 150,000 years (and potentially 2 million including our primal ancestors), so even though 10,000 years of bread-making and eating seems like a long time, it's a blink compared to how long humans have been on earth in some form. It's sort of like a 90-year old person who says they've been eating bread all their life, but really they just started eating it at 80 years old, and forgot that they didn't eat it for the first 79 years of their life because it tastes so damn good. (For the record, I do like the taste of bread.)

Geesh. I'm tired. But believe it or not, I started this blog to talk about how I was affected by eating my gluten-laden tortillas last night. True to form, though, I had to give you a little background.

So besides feeling hung over this morning... Last night, after my first meal in five days that was cooked and happened to have gluten, I had a crazy dream. Let me tell you about it.

I dreampt that I was at some big convention and I was hanging with my friend Sally. Additionally, there was some cute guy who I kept calling the bachelor, though he wasn't from The Bachelor, the show, but it must've crept up from my subconscious because I have several friends who work on the show, and of course it's been in the news. I was supposed to make said bachelor some chicken but I kept forgetting to put it in the oven. So we're at this big convention and I give a talk about the importance of social responsibility (or something – my memory of this talk is a little fuzzy), and my old boss Bill (writer and documentary film director), was there and he thanked me for my words. At another point in the dream we all (in the audience who just received my “talk”) voted and Sally (who lives in Minneapolis and helps teenagers transition from being in the juvenile protection services to being independent and self-sufficient – in other words, she's a social worker fighting the good fight), anyway we all voted and Sally became the new First Lady. (I love Michelle Obama, but for some reason in my dream Barack Obama needed a new first lady. Don't ask me why, I've no idea. It wasn't a set-up or marriage thing, more of a position as First Lady.) The last thing I remember is sitting next to Sally and telling her I'd move to D.C. to be one of her advisers or aids. I also remember thinking (yes, I think while in my dreams) about how cool it is that one of my closest friends is the new First Lady of the United States.

Either I should go into politics, public speaking, or I should be institutionalized.

Or maybe I should give up gluten.

But I must look at the bright side here. At least my gluten-indulgence provided me with a very entertaining and interesting dream.

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