What Should I Eat?
Should I eat borrego tatemado with a café de olla at La Cocina de Doña Esthela? Probably.
Holistic Chinese Medicine has particular views on food that are designed to bring you back into harmony. Basically, if there are signs of heat, we cool you down. If you are stagnant, we get you moving. If you’re maniacally flying away, we ground you. This goes on and on. No matter what part of your nature is out of balance, we sync it back with Nature. The rules of eating in Chinese Medicine are simple and mostly center around, well, the Center. It’s in not eating anything in an extreme fashion that we find balance. Take the middle ground in all things.
This approach works. I’ve seen incredible changes in patients by making dietary changes based on the fundamentals of Chinese Medicine. But—and there’s always a freaking but with you, isn’t there, Jaime—something was missing. I’d give patients a list of foods to eat and I’d sometimes see the expression on their face kind of, well, fall a bit. Not everybody. Some of you have gone for the changes I’ve prescribed with absolute gusto. And that’s exactly the point. Gusto. My simplest prescription for food is now this: eat what makes you happy and we’ll go from there with custom tailored changes.
First and foremost, we are energetic beings. We look as solid as can be, but really we are made of empty space and particles. And really those particles are just called “particles” because scientists call tiny occurrences of energetic movement “particles” when they don’t know what else to call them. I guess you could say we are just that though: occurrences. We don’t exist without constant change and we aren’t even measurable unless we have something else to reference us against. Movement and inter-being are our nature. We are, literally, vibrations.
So it doesn’t matter to me if you eat the long list of foods I prescribe for you if it is making you miserable because the intended therapeutic effect would be undermined by the negative emotions which the rest of your body will begin to resonate with. Conversely, I believe that the therapeutic effect of eating Chick-fil-A would be more positive than that of eating anything that you would consider “healthy” but made you miserable, so long as Chick-fil-A brought you great joy.
Eating meat is a great example of the potential effects of the mental/emotional aspect of eating, and something that is addressed by the root of Chinese Medicine: Taoism. If you go to China and ask a Qi Gong master what to eat for lots of vitality, they will tell you to eat beef. They will likely tell you to eat beef because you’re American. If they thought you could handle it, they would tell you to eat dog penis. They know you can’t handle it. Regardless, meat is the most efficient way for you to assimilate vital energy. The Taoists (and eventually Buddhists) had an exception to this. They knew that for those seeking a path of nonviolence, eating meat would only drain their vital energy and abstaining would actually bring them vital energy through spiritual nourishment.
I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating eating meat. In fact, I spent the better part of three years documenting what I called, “Death For Food”. This journey led me on a path of reconnecting with food and trusting myself to eat what was best for me. I didn’t emerge a vegetarian, but pretty damn close.
There are times I have eaten a vegetarian diet for extended periods and recently was one of those times. Earlier this year I had a bit of a health crisis (I’m fine!) that necessitated a reset. Typically when I say reset, the next thing I’m going to suggest is to temporarily stop eating meat. Meat is highly nourishing but it’s heavy. It can be harder to digest. If it’s industrial meat, it’s full of garbage. Most meat in America is industrial meat. Yeah, even the grass-fed stuff. Only has to eat grass once to have been “grass-fed”!
So for this reset I ate all vegetarian. Additionally: no restaurant food, all organic, and only unrefined sugars like honey. I supplemented with weekly coffee enemas to kickstart the bile flow from my Liver and increased binders such as dietary fiber, diatomaceous earth, zeolite, and charcoal. Water intake had to increase as well to keep everything flowing and cycling.
Eating vegetarian felt great for me on an emotional level. I could feel a certain lightness in myself and it was obvious that toxins were flushing out of my system because I could smell them coming from my pores and urine.
As I would slice into a lion’s mane mushroom steak with turmeric and cilantro, I’d have such a huge smile on my face. My smile would trigger a cascade of signals throughout my body that would then activate my parasympathetic nervous system and say: “Hey everybody, everything is cool, let’s get to rebuilding.”
The main issue I was experiencing was an inflammatory response in my joints that I believe was caused by eating a low fat diet as a kid in the 80s and 90s. Margarine, skim milk, low fat whatever… all this crap is poison and it robs your connective tissues of the nourishment and lubrication they require. At the time though, we thought we were eating healthy. Who knew?
After a few weeks I started to feel great physically. The inflammation was reduced by 80-90% just by eating vegetables and taking some herbs.
The mental/emotional lightness I had felt though from the vegetarian diet started to shift into a higher gear about two months in. I started to feel like I was almost floating away. Burgers were looking really good.
Something had to change again.
So I trusted myself and started eating meat and it felt great. Nothing crazy or overly carnivorous, and I actually brought the vegetarianism with me for most of my meals. I again followed what felt good for me to eat and I felt fantastic.
My inflammation hasn’t come back and I still feel just as good now that I’m eating meat again. Matter of fact, I feel better because I’m not feeling like an astronaut floating untethered off into space.
It made me feel quite content to eat vegetarian when I needed to. And it made me feel quite content to eat meat again when that need came back as well.
I want my patients to trust themselves to eat what makes them feel good. Is McDonald’s really making you feel good? Find out. Eat it and sit with it and see how you feel after. You might actually feel terrible and you just don’t know it because all you’ve ever experienced is feeling terrible.
On the flip side, is having an ice cream cone with your kid really that bad for you? For most of us, probably not. It’s probably just what the doctor ordered.
Eating right for you is about finding joy and balance through your food. I help people with this by encouraging exploring foods that I believe will help them based on the signs and symptoms I am reading from their body.
Should I eat this homemade birthday cake adorned with flowers by my children? Also looking affirmative.
Now, I do have some basics for eating that I share with all my patients:
Visualize your food doing good for you as you prepare it, eat it, and digest it. This will help you to know if it is good for you or not. If it’s good for you, it will be easy for you to visualize it contributing to your health and vitality. You want to get to a point where you are naturally smiling with gratitude as you eat. It’s ok if you are just smiling on the inside. No need to freak everybody out with your ear-to-ear grin as your soup slides down your chin.
Get wise about eating out. If you’re going to eat out, do it for pleasure, not for convenience. Eat at places that make your heart sing. For example, here in San Diego we love Awash (Ethiopian), Steamy Piggy (Taiwanese), Fish Guts (Mexican), Taste of the Himalayas (Nepalese), Wayfarer (American/bakery), The Friendly (American/burgers), and a few other places where the people are nice and the food is out of this world. It’s a special thing that we look forward to. Yes, sometimes In-N-Out sounds awesome and we do that, too. Don’t judge. Especially when I roll out this next bullet point.
Eat clean. This is actually kind of challenging. Even the “organic” food at the grocery isn’t necessarily always as clean as you’d hope and it might be coming from thousands of miles away meaning it’s lost a lot of its life force. If you can do a farmers market, do it. If you can buy direct from a farm, even better. This is especially true for things like meat and dairy. Consider yourself very lucky if you can find a great local dairy with raw milk! I think legally I have to say that raw milk can and will kill you here: RAW MILK CAN AND WILL KILL YOU SO DON’T DRINK IT. More for me.
Part of eating clean but deserves its own space is: don’t eat food made in a factory. I’m talking everything from frozen meals to packaged cookies. This stuff is filled with all sorts of chemicals to keep it from going bad. I had a patient with terrible constipation recently. When I asked what they ate, they told me they primarily ate these packaged cookies. They loved them. I said, these cookies are made to sit on a grocery store shelf. What do you think they do once they are inside of you? Sit. So, eat fresh, real foods that will go bad if you put them on your counter.
I also tell my patients to not follow fads that tell you to never eat bread or pasta again or only drink mushroom coffee. Get yourself a copy of Nourishing Traditions and eat the way my grandparents and great-grandparents ate as immigrants from Germany, France, and other European countries. Start making sourdough. Roll out some pasta. Have a cappuccino and pet a random dog that walks by. Flip off a young kid when their mom isn’t looking. Let all of this bring joy to you.
Don’t eat low fat. I am so happy people are finally warming up to this. Get yourself some high quality butter or ghee and eat it by the tablespoon. We’ve been malnourished in this country for years when it comes to fat! Certain people can’t have fat like this. That is not most people though. If you are one of these people who can’t have fat because of an acute pancreas issue or otherwise, do not start eating tablespoons of butter because I said so.
Don’t skip dessert. There’s a big difference between binging sugary treats and having a nice dessert here and there. Enjoy your life. If you have a condition that necessitates watching blood glucose levels, talk with your personal healthcare professional and see what this means for you.
Eat real salt. The best salt in my opinion is Celtic Sea Salt. This salt has less actual sodium and more trace minerals than other salts.
Drink healthy water and also use it for all your cooking. The best water is spring water. If you can get your water from a real spring that bubbles out of the ground and isn’t polluted, you are living to be 115 and I am coming over to fill up a jug. We live in San Diego so that isn’t an easy option for us and we went with the Radiant Life 14 Biocompatible Water Purification System. This is the water I give you at the end of your treatments. It’s pricey, but really good.
There are, of course, exceptions to these basic suggestions, especially for various health conditions. Obviously talk with your own healthcare professional that you trust to help you make these kinds of decisions. But, yeah, in the end these decisions are all yours.
If you want to work on your diet with a qualified holistic practitioner who will support a full exploration of all the dietary decisions you’re currently making, please get in touch and come in for an appointment.
See you soon.
—Jaime
P.S. Check out this recipe for amazing Lion’s Mane steaks. I’m serious. They’ll knock your socks off. My only modification is to add a little turmeric and finish with some lemon. And be careful how much liquid you press out of them. You want them to press down so that they are about half as tall as they were fresh.. beyond that I feel dries them out too much. Enjoy!