Returning to the Roots of Natural Healing

Try making small dietary changes, introducing more fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Cutting up crunchy bright coloured fruits and vegetables for snacks helps you get the fiber, water and antioxidants to need to stay radiant and energetic.

Eat more regularly throughout the day to assist in improving one's nutrition. Grazing, or eating six small meals as opposed to three large ones is an improvement in raising your metabolism so you can eat more and not gain weight. I always recommend this to my clients. It is important to leave 2 1/2-3 hour between meals however. With children, the Golden Rule is three meals and three snacks for them to obtain all the nutrients they need in a day, according to the DRI's.

Are frozen vegetables healthy, I am often asked.  Not only are frozen vegetables healthy and packed with table-ready nutrients, they are frozen the day after picking, sealing in flavor and vitamins. Try to offer both raw and cooked vegetables as the basis for each meal; eat them fresh or steam them frozen to obtain the most nutrients. 

Season dishes with herbs and spices instead of salt for delicious flavor. Get to know your culinary herbs by experimenting in the bulk food spice section. Ginger and garlic are pungent spices, warming to the body on cold winter days. Add these to soup or make into tea to keep colds at bay. 

Exchanging ground turkey or chicken for hamburger meat helps lower the content of saturated fat in the diet, and is a heart-healthy option too. Try making your burritos, tacos and spaghetti with ground turkey as an alternative. This is a great invisible substitution.

Try to use healthy fats and sugars instead of refined clear polyunsaturated oils and refined white sugar, particularly in baking where it may well be invisible.

This is what I call an "invisible substitution."

How to use an invisible substitute in a recipe:

Substitute the following in a recipe, depending on whether it calls for a granulated or liquid form of sweetener, and a liquid or a solid fat. Determine whether you can substitute one for one. You can always call the nutritionist if you want to modify a recipe. Also, these days there are entire cookbooks developed for the use of these new wholesome sweeteners and fats.

Shop around. Look for ways to use Stevia, one of my favorite natural sweeteners that has 0 calories 0 carbs and 0 on the glycemic index and is an herbal product.

Good fats: olives, extra virgin olive oil, avocado, almond oil, sesame oil, coconut, virgin coconut oil; Udo’s oil, flax oil, borage oil, evening primrose oil, hemp oil, salmon oil. 

Good sweeteners: raw cane sugar, evaporated cane juice, palm sugar, coconut sugar, brown rice syrup, natural maple syrup, dark molasses, raw honey, baking stevia, stevia, pure unsweetened fruit juice, sugar free jam.

Questions to ask yourself?

Will anyone notice this invisible substitution? (Do I need to say you are now eating a healthy food?)

Can it be exchanged one for one, or must the recipe be modified?

Can my kids taste buds grow to accept a sugar or fat alternative?

The analogy of mental health is like a puzzle which needs to be put together, whereupon sometimes pieces are missing and we cannot always see the big picture. 

I was working at the food bank in 2006, Union Gospel Mission, and was teaching a course for the clients on eating by the rainbow. It was called ‘The Rainbow Program’. They included homeless people, people on limited income, and First Nations clients. I was applying what I knew about nutrition to people who couldn’t afford to eat, let alone see a nutritionist. I wondered how they would respond to my recommendation of eating by the rainbow, when all they were really being offered in the next room was a free meal and free white bread to take home.

I had worked previously as an eating disorder counselor and knew that preventing hunger went beyond just eating disorders, but also addressing malnutrition wherever it occurred in society.  Here it was occurring right in front of me, and I had to come up with how to shop on a limited budget and how to prevent diabetes in people that had little or no income.

When people don’t have enough to eat, various illnesses can occur. When people don’t have adequate knowledge of nutrition and how to eat, they can eat poorly, which over a lifetime leads to cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. In fact, when people are malnourished they overeat in an attempt to get the nutrients they need.

There are so many psychological and social aspects once obesity begins that the ingrained patterns of fear around eating, fear of gaining weight, fear of losing weight, fear that food equals fat, mean that the malnutrition goes deeper, and the eating of wrong foods becomes more desperate in an attempt to correct the problem.

Young women and even men today are developing eating disorders at an alarming rate: anorexia, bulimia and compulsive overeating.

But beyond the actual symptomatology, in our society even young children are influenced by the diet culture and develop anorexic thinking, with deeply ingrained fears around food.

Besides developing nutritional deficiencies, children who are malnourished will lack the desire to engage in sports and exercise, have poor concentration, lack incentive, and make poor moral decisions.  

Our society promotes certain stereotypes that can get us on the diet treadmill for the rest of their lives.

Some examples of stereotypes:

People gain weight because they eat too much.

Overweight people need to just get off the couch and exercise more.

If you want to lose weight you should go on a diet.

Try to think like an anorexic, but don’t go too far.

Try the latest diet in this magazine, it worked for my friend.

Low carb is the way to go.

Low carb diets make people meaner than a junk yard dog.

Follow the Canada Food Guide religiously.

Have a shake for 2 meals, then eat a normal dinner.

Thus we see the diet roller-coaster. We go back and forth all day with these logistics in our heads. We may change our minds on what is true from one day to the next. We may see a dozen professionals with different advice, different supplements, and different rules about food. We diet and then eat. We graze and then rigidly eat three meals a day. We apply our minds over the wild horse of hunger. We feel starved and overeat out of the ice cream bucket. We stop for fast food, and settle for junk food. We buy vitamins to make up the difference.

There is food everywhere, but hunger is our enemy. It is something to be controlled and subdued. Anorexic people are to be envied.

But reality sets in eventually.

The truth is, as soon as someone starts to fear gaining weight, or thinks they are overweight these cultural stereotypes start to take hold. The typical result is that an overweight person may try to eat as little as possible all day, then eventually hunger overcomes them and they break down and eat most of their calories in one meal. This is the kind of unhealthy eating pattern that can lead to an eating disorder, or create within the person a constant fight with food and with their weight.

Instead of eating at scheduled times when we would normally become hungry throughout the day, some people develop the unhealthy pattern of fighting their hunger signals because all food equals fat.

Without nutrition education, and appropriate social cues as to when and how much to eat, how do we really know what foods contribute to weight gain and which ones don’t. Do we have to count every calorie we eat, and burn them off every day at the gym.

At some point to heal our anorexic minds, and our diet and body-conscious society we have to build a bond of trust.

We have to learn to trust our bodies, even when it seems they are giving us symptoms and messages that contribute to our problems.

How do we learn to build a bond of trust with our bodies so we can restore their balance?

The same way a counselor works to build a bond of trust with an anorexic person, for them to begin to heal.

The same way we have to work to build a bond of trust with children in order to educate them and teach them.

Holistic nutrition teaches you what to do to prevent depression and disease from happening to you. It incorporates information about whole foods and makes it easy to understand. It teaches you how to cook so you save money, eat healthy and lose weight while accomplishing your goals.

When we shop in the grocery store we have many choices. When we make intelligent choices we save money, feel better, and have smart kids. Buying foods that are high in sugar and food colourings is not in our best interest; we can use The Rainbow Program and switch them for brightly coloured fruits and vegetables instead.

Brightly coloured foods appeal to the mind, and we need the colour wavelengths from coloured food to be balanced. We actually need to eat red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple foods every day, not forgetting brown, black white, clear and pink. These different colours stimulate different organs and hormones and provide different biochemicals that our bodies need to run properly and protect us from metabolic depression.

Whole Foods

When we eat natural food: food grown in mineralized soil, and eat it in its natural state, we grow big and strong. Whole foods are foods that are eaten the way we find them in nature, without added processing. They contain the fewest chemicals and are all different shapes and all different colours.

Whole foods supply the vitamins and minerals we need each day. When we eat them it is more work for our body, so our metabolism goes up. This helps us to digest other foods, such as animal products. This also helps us burn fat and lose weight, so we don’t become overweight. It is very difficult to become overweight on a diet of whole foods, first, because they are high in water, and second, because they take up more room, leaving less room for unhealthy foods such as pop and chips.

Cooking Whole Foods

Whole foods have to soaked, peeled, or cut before eating, so they take some preparation. Soup is an ideal way to consume vegetables, beans and lentils and rice, and it will last if you freeze it.

Using a pressure cooker or a slow cooker is also a good way to prepare whole foods. Vegetables may be put in a frying pan with some olive oil and saute-sealed, as well as chicken breast or ground turkey and herbs and spices. Herbs may be selected raw or dried. Dried herbs are available in the bulk foods section. Spices may be ground in a coffee grinder.

When we use herbs for cooking or in tea we increase the mineral content of our foods. They taste better and are more nutritious. Ginger and garlic are both pungent, particularly warming in winter months, and can be added to saute-sealed vegetables and soup.

The Rainbow Program to Mediate Against Depression

Well designed for the school system, to prevent eating disorders and behavioral/cognitive problems, this program encourages children to select one food each day from every color group. The Rainbow Program was created to help with the maintenance of weight throughout the life cycle without dieting. It also assists in the prevention of eating disorders and depression, hormone imbalance, and behavioral disorders using colour wavelengths.