There are several principals I’ve adopted over the years, from the ancient philosophies of macrobiotics and Ayurveda, which have helped me to maintain a disease-free body with a healthy blood pH, better moods, and great digestion. These principals revolve around the ratio of 80:20. I encourage you to try some of them on for size, and see if you experience any pleasant surprises like your weight normalizing, or chronic symptoms disappearing for good!
The first 80/20 principal is this; if you’re feeling well and healthy and in balance, let 80% of your diet be whole foods, and the other 20% be an emotionally soothing deviation. Food has strong emotional effects, and also serves as a wonderful social bonding medium. In a stressful time, we may need to just go out to eat or have a sweet treat at a party, for the sake of preserving our sanity. When you do deviate from your whole foods diet, see it as an experience that feeds your soul, not as an unhealthy mistake. This is important to remember because the emotions you experience while eating are almost as important as what you’re eating. Just say to yourself, “everything I eat turns to health and beauty”, and if you truly believe it, it’ll be way more likely to be so…I love quantum physics! (more…)
My dear friend Don and I laughed harder than we had in weeks while we were driving together recently. Don was telling me how tired he’s been feeling lately; that when he wakes up in the morning, he feels about 80% as tired as when he laid down to go to sleep! I shook my head. We were stopped at a light behind a heavily bumper stickered car. Don said, “They should make a bumper sticker that says, ‘I wonder if Jesus was this tired too’.” And we laughed, even though we realized something was seriously wrong.
The Symptoms
A few months later, I was on the phone with a girlfriend, and she was telling me about her symptoms of adrenal fatigue. It was a bit scary when I realized that Don had been waking up feeling tired, I’d been getting tired around 1PM and needed either a nap or caffeine or sugar to make it through the rest of the day, and we both had been experiencing pounding hearts when lying down to nap or sleep. The other symptoms of adrenal fatigue are; loss of head hair, feeling rundown or overwhelmed, craving salty and sweet snacks, feeling more awake and energetic after 6PM than you do all day, slow to start in the morning, gastric ulcers, afternoon headaches, feeling full or bloated, blurred vision, unstable behavior, becoming shaky or light-headed if meals are missed or delayed, cannot stay asleep or cannot fall asleep, and dizziness when moving from sitting to standing or lying to standing.
I’ll never forget how amazed I was, when I first learned that our body temperature can be controlled with food. It was a hot summer day, and I was at a friend’s house (a friend who had been studying Macrobiotics for many years). He said that the day before at his house had been so hot, that he and his wife just stayed in the shade and ate only melon during the hottest part of the day. ‘What?’, I thought. ‘Melons help you feel cool?’…Yes! Every kind of melon is hydrating to the body and has a very cooling thermal effect. In fact, most of the foods which grow at the hottest times of year, tend to cool our bodies down.
