Creating Good Snacks - Energy Bar Experiments Part 1

The way that my body is at the moment, it works better for me to eat small amounts frequently than to eat a 'square meal:' no matter what the latter consists of, I don't feel good if I try to do that. But we're out and about and 'on the go' quite a lot, so what to take?

It's a funny irony for the girl who used to live on fruit that if I tried to eat just an apple by itself as a snack, I'd be in really bad shape afterwards (although an orange would be worse)! (And obviously, at this time, all fruit is out.) Even as a fruitarian I wouldn't have felt good after a single apple, though, but back then my dogma was that I shouldn't snack at all, and that if I ate at all it would be several pieces of fruit, not just one. Cumbersome to carry around it was, too! And I was hungrier more of the time then.

I had a bias for so long about 'eating food in its natural state.' I didn't want to have to make snacks: I wanted to take (a) piece(s) of fruit and/or nuts and eat them just 'the way nature intended.' Well, nuts are great, especially when they've been soaked, but by themselves I don't always feel completely satisfied by nuts alone. My current hypothesis is that this is because 'in their natural state' they are overbalanced toward 'fat' and away from 'protein' for how I need to get in balance. Just a hypothesis, and no judgment implied about how things are for anyone else.
So nut/seed based energy bars would need some protein powder and/or extra fiber so that they are more filling but not too heavy by themselves. The pulp from making nut milk would be a good 'extender' in this context, and it is mostly fiber. Hemp protein/fiber powder would work too. I like a bit of spirulina/chlorella. Maca… Lots of cinnamon and ginger! And I adore cardamom, especially with coconut oil…

So, for the past several weeks I've been on a quest of experimentation to create an 'energy bar' that is filling without being highly caloric, and tasty without containing any sugar. Having it hold together without the use of dried fruits is the special challenge, of course.

I had one special idea for making this work that I'm going to share in the next post about this subject, which I thought was really promising. And since then, the experiment has continued to evolve and I have learned several more tricks that I'll be glad to share!

Please stay tuned.

Book Reports to Look Out For

Please stay tuned! There is so much that I want to share in the near future. Between being busy with work and dedicating more of my energy to rest/recovery/die-off stuff than usual, I have been having some wonderful and intriguing books keep me company and I want to share thoughts about them.

Another serendipity has been that I should be reading a book about why we 'should' eat cooked foods because we are evolutionarily adapted to them at the time that I spontaneously went back to raw foods. I want to write about Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham at some length in another couple of posts: one, to summarize and discuss his very plausible and well-researched data and two, to look more closely at his treatment of raw foods and modern raw foodism, as well as his conclusions about humanity's future, and to show why I actually found his arguments and data supportive of my preference to eat raw food rather than undermining of it (which was not what I expected when I set out).

I have also been reading a much more heart-based book called 'Your Body Believes Every Word You Say.' It is so liberating for me to allow myself to be helped by a very non-academic but still well-researched, experientially-based book. I have been aware of negative self-talk for a long time, and this healing period is the perfect time to get the extra help that this book provides in shining the light of awareness on the habit. More on this soon also.

Please stay tuned!

Gratitude and Praise for the Healing Process and Foods

I am so grateful for the opportunity that this health challenge is providing me. For perhaps the first time in my life, I am being gentle with myself. It is frustrating, when my head is feeling so much clearer and there are so many writing projects I want to blaze ahead on, but I'm needing to sleep more and finding myself rather low in energy. And yet I am honoring those needs and encouraging myself to be patient.

The other night after dinner, I said that it was just a marvelous thing that I could eat such delicious food during the time of a cleanse, and know that a lot of what was making it delicious was also contributing to my healing process. I made a version of the cauliflower curry that I often used to make: chopped up cauliflower premarinated in lemon juice and sea salt, to which I mix in chopped scallions (just a few) and some sprouted lentils and fenugreek seeds. Then I made a curry sauce - a few soaked sun dried tomatoes, about 1/4c hempseeds, a couple tablespoons tahini, a bit of finely chopped celery heart, a cayenne pepper, some black pepper, curry powder, ginger, garlic, lemon juice and a little water as needed (plenty salt on the cauliflower already) - all blended together. I used to make this with chopped up apple and carrot pieces, and some raisins or gojis or dried cranberries in there too, but obviously those are out for me at the moment.

It was so good! Felt good also to pull out the hand blender and make the sauce (I've been having salad with avocado and either spirulina or chlorella night after night and lunch after lunch).

Makes me inspired to write some posts about some of my culinary creations, raw especially but other for others also, and also to write about how I manage food prep in this tiny cabin with no high-powered blender or real dehydrator or running water. I'd love to write about those things, so stay tuned!

Filling in the Background II: Varieties of Healing and What I'm Doing about it

Potted dietary background

I've always had trouble with my guts. Starving myself for years and then being fruitarian for years probably didn't help the pre-existing situation either. I really wanted to believe in the Garden of Eden-type, happy bonobo-type myth, that eating fruit and avoiding fat was doing the best thing for myself. And when I quit eating quite so much fruit, I was working bees and eating quite a lot of honey. In fact, it was my perception that eating honey enabled me to digest fat, which led me away from sweet fruit as I tried to build muscle.

When I met Phil and took on his 'exercise tons and eat anything' philosophy, I didn't go much in for the higher-sugar end of things there either (most of it either had gluten, which I'm allergic to, or trans fats, which I have dogma about) : in fact, pretty soon I quit even eating honey and was already eating less fruit. Aside from honey (which is refined by the bees) and a tiny amount in very dark chocolate, I basically haven't eaten 'refined' sugar for close to ten years.

All kinds of sick

But until this past week or so when I felt so much better, I had been feeling progressively worse. Thyroid low but not calamitous. Adrenals low but not calamitous. Very unstable blood sugar. Chronically sluggish elimination, even when eating large amounts of fiber, drinking loads of water and taking 15 grams(!) per day of vitamin C. Exhausted all the time, to such an extent that I could no longer even begin to push myself to come close to Phil's activity level (which no one does anyway, but oh I had been trying).

What I'd been doing that helped me to feel so much better was eating primarily raw foods and very low-sugar foods (apples and carrots were about it), with plenty of algae (chlorella, spirulina). I'd also decaffeinated myself (i.e. stopped drinking tea and eating cacao). And, as Phil pointed out, it was a really good thing that I was feeling better already when I went into the Doctor's office last week to get back the latest test findings.

A Tea-Party in my Guts

As it turned out, there were some definite 'results' and a definite mandate/challenge/project for me to take on there. Fungee among-me: two different yeastie-beastie-species proliferating and misbehaving themselves and generally having a great big tea party in my guts! Almost a cliched 21st century problem, but my diet history is hardly that of the cliched grain-and-refined-sugar-junkie. I even did a very strict almost-zero-carb diet for three months last summer. So, 'why me?' - and that's the subject for a whole other post.

Well, there it is. I'm preferring not to think of it as a 'disease diagnosis' but as an imbalance that needs attention. And now it makes sense that I was feeling better eating as I was, but having little spells of feeling sick or headachy: die-off.

Action Plan

And so, with immediate effect, I have cut out those apples and carrots, and also mushrooms, apple cider vinegar, kombucha and kombucha vinegar, cacao, carob. I'm essentially undertaking to do Phase I of Gabriel Cousens' Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine

I was already eating something pretty close to that, but it's surprising how different it feels without the daily apple and carrot, and without those sour condiments. (I may add those back in at the sooner end of things, apple cider vinegar at least, since some say that it helps control yeast.) I've been spacy again, weak, depressed, irritable, and very hungry at times. But for now, whenever I think of eating something I first ask, 'Is it feeding me or is it feeding the yeast?' and decide on that basis. And surrender and accept that with die-off happening I'm going to feel lousy sometimes.

*Edit a few days later: I found this page with an updated summary of the phase charts in which some fermented food is allowed in Phase 1. Which makes sense to me. And one of the things I appreciate about Cousens is that he keeps checking and testing and doesn't stick with his original statement if he sees reason to change it. But I'll stick with lemon juice for the first two or three weeks and then try using apple cider vinegar and making cultured foods again.

I'm also going to do some colon cleansing. And after a week of that, I am going to take diflucan. These test results were very helpful, in that they also showed which drugs and which herbal remedies the two yeast parties are susceptible or resistant to. The bad news is that they are in complementary distribution with regard to the herbs' efficacy: herbs that one is susceptible to, the other is resistant to. None of the herbs are very effective against either species. But both species are susceptible to diflucan. I've been taking milk thistle for some time already to support my liver (which diflucan can be challenging for), and since this tea party in my guts has worn its welcome so far out, I am going to try the strong stuff.

Powerful Positive Thoughts

The other arm of my efforts to bring about balance that I regard as essential is to do with how I think about it. I am cultivating an optimistic attitude: I can do this, and I am going to feel better! There is light at the end of the tunnel. Just encouraging myself in these feelings is going to be tremendously healing for me: it's so long that I've been at least half-sick and viewing myself as a non-valid person.

And of course, especially when I get hungry and the old anorexia thoughts beckon and beguile and absorb me (as they did far too much when I did three months of no-sugar last summer), I need to beware of falling into black and white thinking again! That may be the most important challenge of all: that this current imbalance mandates a very strict diet, but that my whole health mandates not returning to black and white thinking.

Filling in the Background I - Life's Lessons/'Food for Though'/Repeated Mistakes

I've mentioned feeling ill for a long time and recently better. I've mentioned a sojourn away from rawfoodism and recently back to it. I've mentioned Phil, my wonderful husband, and my relatively recent relocation to Alaska, with all the contrasts it offers my previous outlooks. But really, I'm just getting into my stride here and I've left way too many blanks.

I want to share of myself in a revelatory manner, but I want it to be both interesting and thought-provoking and especially to be helpful. I want these stories and musings to be metaphors that 'ferry,' into someone else's being, to make connections. And, for myself, I want to garner those connections and also to continue to unfold my life's purpose. The past couple of years have been a period of intense exploration for me. Much of this was fueled by lust for breadth of experience, and desire to deepen my connection with life and love, plus a salutary expansion away from years of black-and-white. But some of it has also been the result of my over-willingness to take on someone else's viewpoint at the expense of my own. This may have the philosophical value of substituting my 'haeresis' for someone else's to help me toward suspending judgment, but in practical terms it has not always allowed me to be my best and healthiest.

After all this exploration and also the dipping into other people's lenses for viewing the world, I feel like I am more ready than I ever have been to stop repeating mistakes, to listen to my own inner guidance, to recognize the choices in each moment that will allow me to be my best, and to be of service for the highest and best good.

It is an awkward feeling, to recognize that you have allowed yourself to repeat a mistake that you had made before. And then you vow 'never again,' you say you know, this time, that you don't need to go there. And then the wheel turns and some of the furniture gets moved and you don't notice the danger, and all of a sudden there you are again.

If I can avoid the trap of falling into black-and-white thinking again, I will feel like I have learned one of my life's lessons. But another one that I fervently want to fail to fall into again is the trap of taking on another person's views about food and attempting to apply it to myself. If I admire a person, I won't necessarily emulate what I admire in them simply by imitating their habits and fuel.

'Food for thought' for me here, since I'm so conscious of the metaphorical significance of these lessons and everything else, and since I do think about food so much: one of the things that I love about Phil is that generally he isn't 'black and white.' But he does have some strong ideas about how food affects us (that it does somewhat, but not fundamentally: that if you exercise enough, you can eat what you like) and those ideas do not work in my body. His belief system also includes getting the right diagnosis and the right drugs, and then being able to carry on exercising and eating whatever you like. It seems to work for him! It does not work for me. As much as I always intend to 'suspend judgment,' for practical purposes I have to act as my body and its beliefs and limitations dictate (and that's a whole other post-subject, the balance between knowing limitations and creating a reality that transcends them).

And for me, the most hopeful thing in this is that if I can own this, it becomes a small thing. I never asked anyone to change how they ate on my account. I tried to change on someone else's account, thinking it would be better for the relationship and more economical. Now that I accept that that was a mistake - and a mistake I'd made before, and move on, it needn't have much impact on our loving connection. (Tell me all the red flags that come up here!)

"A Calorie is not a Calorie"

Dr Mercola wrote the above sentence in a recent article, and it really got me thinking about how context, convention and background knowledge play such a large part in our understanding and parsing of a sentence, over and above simple semantics and logic.

On the face of it, 'A calorie is not a calorie' is at best a meaningless sentence: a somewhat nonsensical contradiction. 'a is not a' is not an informative utterance straight off. And yet, not only did I understand what Dr Mercola was saying (although it tripped my wordstalk radar like this): I also agreed with him that the underlying proposition is true.

How it gets to mean what it does

How does this work? Well, I think that Dr Mercola used an elliptical allusion here. He was relying on the assumption that his readership is familiar with the cliched expression among dieters: 'a calorie is a calorie,' and that they understood that this expression (itself at least tautological on the face of it) means that when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter whether you are eating cream puffs or broccoli: 100 calories of either one boils down to the same contribution (or detriment) to your weight loss efforts. And then, he denies the truth of that expression.

So, for his apparently nonsensical sentence to make sense, real-world knowledge about another sentence is required. And that cliched sentence is itself an abstraction. What it claims, in an elliptical fashion, is that all calories, from regardless what source, are equivalent and interchangeable. The abstraction is something like this:
We start with the statement 'cream puffs are (the same as) broccoli:' - obviously false, right? But then, we zero in on one single attribute common to both: the calories that they contain, and claim equivalence in that regard. Kind of like the old 'pound of feathers is the same as a pound of lead.' And so 'a calorie is a calorie' is short for saying 'a calorie (in a cream puff) is (the same as) a calorie (in broccoli).

So much real world knowledge and so much knowledge of logic lies in the background of Dr Mercola's negation of that sentence, then! (I do think, however, that 'All calories are not equal' would have been a more elegant way for him to have said it. But then I wouldn't have gotten to play like this!)

...and why I agree with it

As for the truth of this bizarre-looking sentence, then, well, c'mon now! If you believe that all calories are equivalent, try eating mountain ash bark like the moose do up here this time of year. It's full of carbohydrate calories, but lacking a ruminant's stomachs, you're not going to get much benefit out of it. Besides, calories from different macronutrient sources are digested in completely different places in the body, requiring different amounts of energy to process them, different pH environments, and they carry different levels of micronutrients - and antinutrients - with them, which also makes them non-equivalent. On the experiential level, even people who are not especially in touch with their bodies; even people who do not believe that food is medicine or has a great effect on us, recognize that different foods affect them in different ways. Unfortunately, sentences like 'a calorie is a calorie' justify the recognition of many people that, on first thought, they'd rather eat cream puffs than broccoli: allow them to think that if they measure out caloric equivalents, it really will come to the same thing, and prevent them from moving on to the second thought, that broccoli really is so much more satisfying than cream puffs.

As much as I work to suspend judgment and avoid dogma, I find myself agreeing so strongly with Dr Mercola (having adumbrated his obscure sentence!) and feel that the cliche he is negating is dangerous and irresponsible.

What is Wrong with having Inspirations and Touchstone Texts?

I often see people decrying and denouncing canonical texts, traditions and old stuff that offers guidance on how to live your life in general. Ironically, the people who do this are often encouraging you to pay attention to them and accept their guidance. Although I am as wary as anyone about the dangers of organized religion and of 'guruism' in any path in life, and as independent-minded, I find myself wanting to say a few things in defense of inspirations, canonical sayings/poems/language shared by a community, and muses in general.

My potential bias

Examining myself ahead of this, I should declare that my bias is somewhat toward the 'old' material; that I am more likely to be wary of a contemporary figure's offers of enlightenment and perhaps also more likely to become enamored of some ancient figure.

Hence - Heraclitus. Subtitled 'the obscure,' his writings only extant to us in fragments, although many argue that he only composed 'fragments' - aphorisms, koans - as I said in my very first post here, he has been my 'muse' since I was about 18 years old. In times of despair, I have dreamt of him coming to me with reassurance (in his own words, too). One or another of his sayings helps me to shape my thinking about something almost every day. I have written many poems inspired by his fragments (one back-burner project is to complete a cycle of them).

So much by way of digression, to declare where my biases are likely to lie.

The usefulness and beauty of shared phrases

It seems that it is too easy for us humans to fall into herd instinct - hence the dangers of guruism or dogmatism despite many people's avowed desire to form their own conclusions and have their own experiences. Funnily enough, the most dogmatic and guruist people are often those who are most insistent on their independence of thought! (Some of the most fundamentalist religious people I have known have been atheists.)
I think it is important to note, here, that many religious texts themselves prohibit 'idol worship,' which really means any form of blind faith. With the possible exceptions of Mormonism and Islam, I cannot think of any 'organized religions' that began life with the intention of organizing and controlling the lives of their believers in the ways that they have ended up doing.

There is a deeper dichotomy here: an 'ulterior harmony' that allows for inspiration with eyes open. The underlying connection is that, as unique as we all are, as independent as we all want to be, we are also interconnected, interdependent, mutually completing. We cannot have a pure, unmediated experience without touching and being touched by other entities that are also having their own experience. Or, 'no man is an island,' and there I am, appealing to a recognized quotation.

The existence of a canon of phrases/words/songs/quotations that are universally recognized help us to understand our situation and also to feel empathy across place and time with others who have understood it. When you hear the phrase 'garbage in, garbage out' and remember that Jesus is quoted as saying that a man is not judged by what goes into his mouth so much as by what comes out of it, you recognize that this dichotomy, the question of cause and effect versus alchemical transmutation, has been experienced and addressed by others - a feeling of fellowship.

I practice suspending judgment about what diet (way of life) and what kind of activity allows each of us to be at our best, and notice how different the things that delight and nourish and teach each of us are. Then I remember the fragment of Sappho's poetry, saying that some say cavalry is best, or ships on the sea, but that she says that it is whatever you love in a given moment, I see that that wisdom, to recognize that a person is nourished by wherever their heart is, has been explored long before my time.

Inspiration to 'keep the torch burning'

Then too, the fact that I am so enriched by my engagement with the beautiful and haunting words of inspiration, empathy and wisdom from long ago also continues to inspire me to write, to make a signal to the underlying connection that holds us together, to inspire myself and hopefully to share with others also.

So, just because a saying is old, don't discount it. Just because it's a young guy giving the advice, don't discount it. Just because someone has become a guru, it doesn't immediately mean that you should assume that what they have to say is insidious and to be shunned. I am grateful for inspiration!

Still Kicking - On Presentation, Audience, and a Promise

Still kicking here - kicking stronger and happier still, in fact. I've been very focused on some translation work, which is why I haven't written for a few days, but there is lots that I want to share here soon.

I had some conflicting feedback from my Mum and brother the other day: Mum suggested I make much shorted posts, while my brother said that he prefers longer posts. I am in two minds about this myself: I understand that being a person who read the Iliad in Greek makes me something of a dinosaur - this is not the era of the long attention span! And I do very much intend what I write to be read! On the other hand, I think that if something is worth reading, even if it is long a person will take the time to read it.

So, here is my promise, and my challenge to myself. I will go back and adorn those longer articles with subheadings and other visual cues so that there is some sort of contour/relief (pun intended) for the eye, so that there is a logical parcelling up that can be taken in at a glance. Hopefully it won't look so monolithic and intimidating that way :) And my challenge to myself is that I will also teach myself how to take photos and include them in my blog for other visual relief. My Mum pointed out that that photo of me, taken 6 months ago by my sister-in-law with her iPhone, does not do me justice either, and whilst I am not a very visual person myself and might even prefer a thousand words to a picture, pictures are fun and can convey some things my words cannot.

There we have it!

Kicking Stronger and Happier - Back to Raw Foods it is!

After all these months of feeling like a dead battery that could not hold a charge no matter what, of constant weariness and indigestion and hopelessness, this past week I am feeling so good I could jump for joy! There is a bubbling of extra energy, happy, calm, loving, that transcends the murkiness of subarctic winter, transcends even the magical lengthening of the days and my loving connection with Phil. And even in the few hours of nausea/indigestion/insomnia/'detox'/other less-than-wonderful sensations that I've experienced over the past few days, there is an overwhelming sense that things are going to be ok now. I have been wanting to intend this belief for so long, and now, I welcome it!

Of course we are far too complex organisms for there to be a direct cause-and-effect, but my gradual and increasing recidivism into Raw Live Food seems to present a direct correlation - the longer I've been doing it, the better I've been feeling. Furthermore, this time around I'm _not_ doing any version of Natural Hygiene (getting away from that was probably a major part of why I stopped being a rawfoodist in the first place - away away-oh from the black-and-white)! No no, this time I am not renouncing, giving up, pushing myself into a smaller and smaller corner: this time, I am high-grading!

It feels as though the more I have been doing this, and also the more different 'superfoods' I have added in, the better I've felt and this week it seems to have reached a kind of 'escape velocity.' I welcome it.

Cart before the horse again, lots of past history condensed into allusions, and I'm just coming down from a translating vortex, time at the library and computer battery almost exhausted (but not me!), so I promise to fill in many of the blanks presupposed in what I just said very soon and explain more.

But for now, I had to exalt for a moment, and send my gratitude out to the universe in all the ways I know. To invoke another blank that I will fill later, a post yet to be written, as an all-encompassing metaphor, this is unsurpassable. I don't think I have had the experience before of having something bodily come about just 'naturally,' just 'because I was drawn to it:' I have always been pushing and pulling myself places. Simply allowing this to come into focus has been such a joy.

Healing Progress!

I'm going to put the cart before the horse and write about some of the healing that I have been noticing recently. There are several posts that I have not yet written that are going to be presupposed by what follows (not least an explanation of what healing it is that I'm in need of!), but I want to set this down and share it, since I'm already noticing some things.

The most important and exciting observation is that my body is responding to homeopathy now! My homeopath mother had never understood why homeopathy never seemed to do anything for me, and I found it frustrating too, since the whole system, the way that it works at the energetic level and takes into account the whole person as opposed to merely a set of symptoms, is so appealing to me. After many years away from any regular healthcare supervision, last fall I had a blood test, which showed, amongst other things, that I was deficient in just about every amino acid. For my mother, who is also a nutritionist, this explained the unresponsiveness. As she put it, 'Homeopathy works on the energetic level, but it needs the presence of nutrients to transmit the information.'

Since that time, I have been taking high-quality digestive enzymes, probiotics and various anti-bacterial herbs and, despite the obvious need for protein, have found myself being very sparing with animal protein (because of concerns about anti-nutrient factors/toxins that may prevent the absorption and also because of my inclination). I've completely stopped having dairy in any form (no yogurt either, except what I've made myself with nut or coconut milk), and have been trying to get a variety of protein. Remembering how good it was for me to eat avocados in Hawaii, I've started buying avocados regularly (demoting my 'can't eat them because they're not grown here' parameter). Been eating chlorella (spirulina is on the way). I've gone back to soaking my nuts and seeds, and never eating them roasted. I've also been sprouting seeds and beans/lentils, and making nut milks (a delight for me, and a significant demotion of the 'don't use electricity to make something that's just for me' parameter).

The enzymes etc and 'caution with protein' steps have been in force for almost six months now, but the positive differences have only started to be noticeable more recently: since the addition of nuts/seeds/avocados/nut milks/sprouts, I would say. Maybe it took that long for the enzymes etc to work, or maybe the avocados etc have been a significant boost. Either way, I noticed homeopathy working in the past two or three weeks, first when I tried the 'constipation remedy' to help with my elimination issues and try to back off from the vitamin C megadoses I've been using, and had good success with that. Then, I had severe menstrual cramps (a _completely_ new and outlandish thing for me that's a part of this current health challenge), remembered homeopathy (which my mum says is a sign in itself), looked in the kit, found the 'menses' remedy, took it together with aconite, and had literally almost instant relief! I made my raspberry-leaf/licorice/ginger tea too, and my feeling is that they both helped.

Aside from the relief from discomfort, it was wonderfully gratifying to take remedies and have them work, as opposed to being left skeptical as to the whole healing system or else skeptical as to the right functioning of my own body! And if my mother was right, that homeopathy was ineffective for me because of lack of nutrients to carry the information, the fact that it has recently been efficacious is an exciting indication that there are some nutrient messengers present in my body now!

I recently started adding garlic vinegar (apple cider vinegar which has had chopped garlic macerated in it for several days) to my salads. I can't tolerate raw garlic, but the vinegar has worked for me in the past. I also started taking the milk thistle and gentle-cleansing-herbs blend twice a day on an empty stomach instead of once with breakfast.

The first time I had the garlic vinegar on my salad, I had gas and a stomach ache afterwards, and thought that maybe it stimulated my appetite a little, the way raw garlic and onions sometimes can. Yesterday and today, though, I've had it with salads both lunch and dinner and, while I don't care for the garlic taste that lingers in my mouth long after, I feel a sense of being 'resoundingly' satisfied, as if the pitch of my body is in tune and my mind is clear. Light, because it was a small amount of food, and yet satiated. My elimination has also been better.

I had also started using spinach instead of lettuce as my salad base, per the recommendations for my 'type' in the metabolic typing, so perhaps that helped too. It makes it harder for scientists, but I believe that it is a beautiful thing that there are almost always several factors at play when circumstances change. Several causes for an effect.

Since I have been focusing, thinking and preparing to cleanse of late, it is also possible that this is partly an instant manifestation of the intention: while I gather information and supplies to undergo cleansing, I've given the message to my body and it is starting to respond.

I know that many people are positively allergic to the kind of thinking exemplified by the previous paragraph, and it is something with which I have faithfully tussled for a long time and about which I regularly fall into doubt, despair or confusion. The whole topic of creating our reality versus magical thinking versus cause and effect will be subject for another post.

Parameters, Practicalities and Compromise (getting away from 'black and white' once again)

When I lived in Hawaii, I knew people who so eschewed gasoline that they would not even accept a ride in a car from someone else, nor use chainsaws/weedwhackers/lawnmowers that were key tools for many in that farming community. I knew people who would not eat anything that was not locally grown/hunted/gathered. There were people who believed that all soaps were toxic (even locally-produced ones!), people who would not eat food that had been refrigerated, let alone 'tampered with' or altered in any other way. Many people very successfully used solar panels to generate adequate electricity most of the year, but there were people who decried the manufacturing process that went into the solar panels and batteries and eschewed those too. The constant availability of used clothing generated by the transient portion of the population provided a gray area as far as avoidance of manufactured clothing.

This may seem extreme, and apocalyptic thinking and paranoia are certainly prevalent in that community. But these parameters were all so readily comprehensible to my 'black and white' aspect that I felt I had truly found home; and the longer I lived there, the more like that I became. And the universe laughed out loud and sent me out to Alaska, to a place where very many people truly 'rough it' with few basic amenities in a much harsher climate, and where very few indeed care a jot about the obsession with clean diet and its relation to health that sent me to Hawaii in the first place. It is also one of the few remaining places where there are still good supplies of wild fish and game to be hunted, and in the short but manically intense months of midnight sun putting up as much of this 'protein' as possible is the focus for many people.

Polar therapy for my black-and-white tendencies in all sorts of ways, then! The experience has provided the reflection that all of life is filled with parameters along which we make our choices, and that an inflexible and extreme parameter is nigh-impossible to maintain throughout the circumstances that life offers up. Especially when we choose to share our life with another person or persons, or when, as Lynn's sister so cogently put it, we desire to participate in life, compromise is a necessary and graceful temper to the parameters. Of course, it inevitably occurs in life that one of your parameters may be in conflict with another, and so you discover within yourself, or else consciously choose, an optimality hierarchy of parameters to guide in the decision. For example, the surprising and strongly therapeutic life lesson that my move to Alaska is providing me was precipitated by my realization that my parameter of desiring a long-term loving relationship with someone was ranked higher than my parameter of requiring to live in a tropical or near-tropical climate (my belief that the latter was a non-negotiable parameter had initially delayed my relationship with Phil from moving forward).

Making this incredible shift brought the concept of parameters and their hierarchies to my awareness, and ever since I have been in a practice of identifying them and seeing how they are always subject to exceptions.*

Here are some parameters that I have been learning to become more flexible on. What are some of yours?

Often, parameters are polarized, or else pairs of parameters compete. For example, I have a life-long challenge with the pair of parameters 'take care of yourself' versus 'not wanting to have special needs.' 'Take care of yourself' was long demoted, partly consciously, partly through obliviousness and obsessive focus on other parameters. 'Not wanting to have special needs' could summon up other parameters to bolster its cause. For example, 'Don't waste water' could lead to my washing myself with a quart of tepid water and a cloth rather than affording myself the relative luxury of a gallon or so of solar-heated water (which is quite often possible in the summer here). Or, 'save energy wherever possible' could lead to my not preparing myself a smoothie if it was going to be 'just for me' ('no special needs'), instead either consuming the ingredients without the synergistic effects of blending, just mashing them up as best I could, or having something less attractive/appropriate to save the effort.

For very many people, the parameters of time and convenience compete with doing something more slowly and with more personal effort but less external energy. How many people look for a parking spot as close as possible to their destination rather than walking some, or even all, of the way? How many people row across the Bay rather than taking a motor boat? How many turn on a stove rather than gathering wood and building a fire? What about drying laundry? Most people at the laudromat use the dryers as well as the washers (we like to take ours home wet and use it to humidify our cabin as it dries).

Now, of course, my beautiful Pyrrhonism comes in to remind us that all of these actions that privilege time/convenience over frugality/energy efficiency are very appropriate in certain contexts. At certain times of the year in Hawaii, if you didn't put your clothes through a dryer at least sometimes, they would mildew! When the snow is several feet deep, or when there is a genuine emergency, park as close to the door as you can get! In many contexts, it's actually more efficient to use a stove or a heater than to build a fire, not to mention 'safer.' Parameters are tempered by practicality. I worry (and have some parameters) about emf's and wifi's but they provide me with certain things that enhance the quality of my life too. I worry (and have parameters) about spending too much time on the internet as opposed to building high-quality relationships with people face-to-face, but some of my dearest in-person friends I met either over the internet or else facilitated by it in some way, and many of my dearest in-person friends live thousands of miles away from me but are within reach through internet or phone.

It is very important to foster and build consciousness about why your parameters are ranked as they are. Is there a self-destructive part in there that is gaining leverage by forcing the 'be frugal' parameter to be ranked higher than 'take care of yourself' to the point that you consistently let yourself get far too cold before turning on the heater, or far too hungry before eating, or far too sick before you address the situation in an appropriate way? Is your 'do something just for fun' parameter so far demoted that you make a martyr of yourself, or is it so highly prioritized that you don't pay attention to what else might be adversely affected by a temporary high?

Living in Hawaii, I was able to adhere pretty rigorously to the 'eat local foods' parameter, and eat mostly plant-based and raw foods in doing so. The whole 'eating local' parameter is interesting and involved enough that I'll do a whole separate post about it at some point soon. Suffice it to say for now, 'eat local foods' in Alaska is challenging indeed if you want to eat exclusively plant foods, especially in the winter and especially if you have any kind of parametric inclinations about freshness of food (versus frozen or otherwise preserved). I am reminded of the problem among many raw-foodists, brought to light (to my knowledge) by Frederic Patenaude in his book 'The Raw Secrets:' to wit, that many raw-foodists had made the parameter 'eat only raw foods' a higher priority than 'eat only foods that are healthy and nourishing to my body,' and that this was causing undesirable consequences.

Parameters are tools, guidelines, shortcuts. I have found it revealing and also fun to make lists of my parameters in all kinds of contexts, and am working towards having flexible hierarchies so that, for example, whilst I still place a high ranking on 'frugality,' I am able to treat myself on occasion, to purchase life-enhancing products and to open myself up ever more to the flow of abundance whilst maintaining a consciousness of ensuring plenty for all.

If you make it a practice to explore what parameters are in play for you in a given context or decision-making process, you may find that you become much more conscious about your own inner workings, and also much more empowered to choose to prioritize what you _really_ think is most important in the situation, as opposed to just making your default prioritization automatically.

Sticking with a default prioritization automatically, prioritizing 'extreme' parameters with no exceptions and not examining other possibilities are all very safe strategies. I know that I have tended to gravitate to these practices, despite a life supposedly dedicated to increasing awareness and consciousness, because I have been so afraid for so much of my life! If my parameters become fixed in rank, become absolute rules, I can feel so safe because I know how to react when my button is pushed one way or another. I don't have to be afraid. But I don't want to be that safe anymore! I don't want to be on autopilot, waiting for something else to push my buttons! I don't want to react, I want to act! And so I am working toward having a hierarchy of flexible parameters that can be reranked based on specific circumstances, that allow compromise and practicality. It is a practice that is building consciousness about my moment-to-moment decisions and that is challenging my fearful parts. Deeply-ingrained habits are being brought up for scrutiny - often after the old pattern has been slipped into again and again. Do you agree that this is an exciting process?

*Anyone who has studied some Linguistic Theory might recognize the concepts of 'Optimality Theory,' where competing constraints are ranked in a hierarchy and selected in order to generate phonological and syntactic rules and their exceptions. For this examination of lifestyle choices, I have always conceptualized in terms of parameters (a key term, coincidentally, in an earlier and perhaps competing linguistic theory)rather than constraints, perhaps because this feels like a more positive description. One of the criticisms of Optimality Theory as a model for Linguistics is that it proliferates thousands of constraints, some of which seem very ad hoc: in other words, it is not reductive or elegant. For what I am talking about here, I think that that is a positive thing: I am not trying to create a reductive, rigorous explanatory system but merely to help myself (and hopefully others) become more conscious about how choices are made.

Wordstalks 1: Different Englishes

Since I love to eat my words, I want to have a whole bunch of posts that I call 'wordstalks.' Puns and multiple possible segmentations intended!

Reading a novel by a Canadian author (Margaret Atwood) just now provided me with one of those delightful 'prods' reminding me of the ways in which different varieties of English have such different grammar, idiom and contextualized expressions, and how fluid these are, to the point that one is by no means stuck with the settings with which one grew up.

After 10 years in the US, most people (but not all) can still hear that I have an accent and some of them can correctly identify its provenance. Back in the UK, everyone asks about my accent! The funny part to me is that recently I commented on someone else's blog and another commenter identified me as a 'Brit' from my writing alone!

When I first arrived in the US, hearing people say 'different than' (as opposed to 'different from') was so ungrammatical to my ear, I almost had to hold my head. Now, I say 'different than' all the time (except when I'm talking to Brits)! The same with the expression 'it's not that big of a deal/big of a difference:' that 'of' there had no business being there. Apparently it's a grammatical shift that's subject to regional variation: we talked about it in Syntax class and plenty of US English speakers were just as uncomfortable with it as I was. Nowadays, if I don't say 'big of a deal' I hear the gap where the 'of' might go. I say the 'of' out loud more than half the time. And then, slang had to be painstakingly interpreted for me. This is partly my fault for not keeping up with the media/watching TV enough (shame on me!) - but last time I was in England I couldn't understand some of the slang there! It changes so fast.

Another regionalism that I've grown accustomed to since spending most of the past two years in rural Oregon and rural Alaska is the use of 'anymore' as a positive-polarity conjunction meaning approximately 'nowadays.' It doesn't even have to be contrastive. The first few times I heard 'anymore' as the first word in a sentence I was fascinated and startled: now I try not to say it all the time myself (I think it would sound affected, like when I was hanging around with a Southerner and started saying 'might could:' I couldn't help picking it up, but got teased mercilessly). Interestingly, I had thought that this was a purely American outlandishism but my Mum reminded me that our Irish neighbor says it too.

Reading Atwood's Canadian English reminded me of expressions where a word takes more than its 'neutral' value by virtue of being in a specific context. (E.g. when someone says 'wow, that's some speed!' the context makes clear that this means fast speed as opposed to just neutral speed. Or, when someone says 'she's sure got a mouth on her,' they're not just stating the banal and obvious but remarking upon the foul language coming out of her mouth.) Some of these expressions exist in one variety of English but not another. So, at one point in Atwood's novel a character is come across who has a serious wound. The person checking him over notes that 'he had no temperature.' Of course, what was meant was 'he had no fever,' but I've been away from people who use 'temperature' in the context of illness to mean a high temperature for so long that it's not at the front of my mind. I understood pretty much immediately, but was fascinated to observe a split-second where, misplacing the idiom, I thought 'ha, that's like saying he didn't have a pulse!'

I didn't know that this was the kind of idiom one could lose track of for lack of use. I guess there are some that I have 'acquired' since being over here too.

Book Report: 'The Year of the Flood' by Margaret Atwood

This novel runs 448 pages but flows along compellingly, seamlessly, a painfully believable tale of dystopia moving into calamity. The only novels of Atwood's that I had read before this were set in contemporary (70's and 80's) Canada, and tended to be very observant and psychologically astute in a way that almost made them hard to read at times because of the painful detail of the innermost parts of characters.

That observantness to the point of being hurtful is still there, but the world view sustained in the presentation of the story is so much vaster, and I don't think that is just because it has to be because a non-current world is being presented. There is more compassion in the writing, too: compassion for the characters, especially the two through whose eyes the story is focalized turn and turn about, and compassion for the world being presented there.

The characterization is impressive: concise, precise and consistent between the two focalizing viewpoints. The descriptive passages are vivid and naturally allowed to unfold. And the plot is so inexorably inveigling - which is accomplished in part by the partially-retrogressive narration so popular in fiction these days.

Th presentation of characters who eschew technology and go 'back to the land,' with their inconsistencies that are gradually revealed, was very poignant for me (on a personal note) and I enjoyed all the humorous touches with which she treated them, (with an uproarious sideswipe of humor at religion serving as a structural theme also) as well as the eugenicists on the other end of the spectrum.

Although a lot of really harrowing material is covered, as is to be expected in an apocalyptic novel, she manages to provide it with a somewhat happy ending.

I really enjoyed it as a reader as well as a writer (I don't always get both) - and now I need to go read 'Oryx and Crake,' several of whose characters are apparently featured in 'The Year of the Flood.'

Metabolic Typing - The Right Thing at the Right Time?

'One man's meat is another's poison:' Previous acquaintance

I have just been reading Wolcott and Fahey's 'The Metabolic Typing Diet,' and have been so excited by what it offers me. I love reading diet books in general, and especially those that give some explanations for why their suggestions might work, and offer differentiation between different people's needs. I used to love reading about Ayurveda, Chinese medicine too (although I tended to get lost in the finer distinctions between 'excess yin' and 'depleted yang'). I love anything that synthesizes the observations of ancient healing traditions and modern scientific understanding.

I'm aware that I'm also ripe for an 'aha' moment, given the long quest for balance of parameters in figuring out what on earth to eat. I'm also better able than at any previous point in my life to answer questions about my body truthfully. I recall reading Gabriel Cousens' 'Conscious Eating' when I was still pretty enthralled to anorexia and definitely utterly fruitarian-biased. Cousens goes over much of the same territory as 'The Metabolic Typing Diet' but gears it to vegan and living foods. Back then, I simply could not answer the questionnaires for identifying your body type! I was so overwhelmed with 'shoulds' about how to be, and answered the questions according to those, and I cheated and picked answers that would say 'eat more fruit, less fat' too. I do now remember that I entertained the idea 'what if I am a fast oxidizer/parasympathetic?' and even admitted to myself that I probably could give up sweet fruit as a staple and eat that way: that it might even feel better. I dismissed it because it would be more expensive (those foods are harder to dumpster-dive), harder to do so entirely locally and would require more food-prep. So those parameters all trumped 'might feel better.' Glad to be out of that phase now!

This time around...

This time, I did the questionnaire as sincerely and without bias or prejudice as I could: I didn't read any of the preceding explanatory chapters, I didn't try to guess where the questions were going. And truthfully, there were so very many questions on so many tangents that the little part of me that did try to calculate along the way was flummoxed: I was under the impression that I had similar numbers for all three possible categories. Well, as it turned out, when I added them up I came out very clearly as a 'Protein Type' (or, in Cousens' parlance, the fast oxidizer/parasympathetic). And, when I went to the chapter about 'Protein Types' and it said 'here are some oft-observed characteristics of Protein Types' it was 'check, check, check - that's me!' I've never had such a clear confirmation on a dietary questionnaire before (unless I prejudiced myself and 'rigged' the numbers, and then it was never quite so convincing).

Then I went back and read the explanatory chapters. I would have preferred it if he hadn't tied the explanation of variety of metabolic types to the Weston Price/traditional diets/geographic locations theories. I wish he hadn't partly because my husband doesn't believe in this and I didn't want him to dismiss it - nor other people be put off by the intrusion of that dogma. But mostly I wish he hadn't brought it up because it's immediately falsified as an explanation by the observation that traditional cultures themselves have long observed differences in people's dietary requirements and have codified them based on differences in body types amongst other things (as he himself shows)!

After that, though, I loved the explanation of how the same minerals can balance or imbalance a body depending on which system is dominant in the metabolism and on how quickly or slowly certain processes take place in different bodies. I love the recognition that the same remedy can have different effects in different places, and that our bodies change, too: that in fact, a person's type can change over time. It would be great to learn within my own body, for example, that I don't need to take so much Magnesium: that if I balance things, it'll be able to express itself. That I can still eat the veggies I love, but that there are some that can help my system come more into balance. And as for protein, I am currently highly ambivalent about my meat eating: although I never want to lose the sense of compassion, empathy and connection with humans and other animals that becoming a meat eater has brought me, I am not sure that I still want to eat meat! But it was fascinating to me to look at the chart for the recommended meats for Protein Types and to see that the ones that I had liked the most (things like organ meats and herring, not things you'd expect a life-long vegetarian to be drawn to!) were the most highly recommended ones!

I do love the full-circle way that this brings me back to Gabriel Cousens' work, and am so grateful for his work showing how to apply the insights of the metabolic typing without necessarily having to eat loads of meat. I have had one validating experience so far. The issue for Protein Types, besides actual proteins, has to do with purines, and the meats that I have been drawn to generally turn out to be purine rich, which is either a coincidence or an indication of some validity there for me. Cousens tells that spirulina, chlorella, brewer's yeast and bee pollen are high purine vegetarian foods (I love all these too, although the algae were an acquired taste). I've also found this table of purine contents: I love knowing the underlying point (eat purines) and being able to look for them rather than just being given a flat list of foods, because then I can make my own list! 'Ulterior harmony'… So - the validating experience. I've really been enjoying my raw-vegan breakfast of chia seeds soaked in water and nut milk, with some protein powder, spices and sometimes berries. A couple days ago I had this breakfast with blueberries and noticed I was still very hungry afterwards. I had a few more blueberries and a little apple and instantly felt much worse, even a little nauseated. (That's why so often I've stayed with just being still hungry, for fear of making matters worse.) So the next morning, I had the same breakfast but without the blueberries and with some chlorella and some pollen/royal jelly powder instead. And I felt so much better! I still needed a little snack before lunch, but I felt much clearer, less achingly hungry, not at all nauseated. Exciting for me, anyway.

Avoiding Dogma and further thoughts and limitations

But I am not taking on Metabolic Typing as another dogma: I will experiment but suspend judgment. I recognize from the outset that I'm ready for 'something' that will help me. I'm intending to try eating just the recommended veggies and leaving out the rest, emphasizing protein and once again quelling my fear of fat (it always makes me feel better - why do I keep cutting it out?), cutting out the dried fruits in raw treats, even avoiding chocolate for a bit, just to see what it feels like. I am very determined not to get obsessive about it again.

I recognize that while I was 'ready' for this, the questionnaires might be off-putting for some people. If you've never eaten red meat, for example, some of the questions are unanswerable. But you can do Cousens' version in Conscious Eating or Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine instead. Some of the questions are a revelation in their own way. For example, there are questions to do with how you feel when you eat a snack before bed. I don't eat before bed because I have long had a belief that it's 'bad' to do so, so I didn't know the answers to those questions. But after doing the questionnaire, I realized that very often I am hungry at bedtime! On the other hand, I imagine that it would be fairly easy to ridicule the questions as 'unscientific,' 'anecdotal,' 'vague,' etc. Personally, I think it would be a shame to take this attitude. Both Wolcott and Cousens emphasize that the most reliable way to figure out your type is to take their tests and have them measure it. Since they'd love for you to spend lots of money on their personal attention, but recognize that not everyone is going to be able to, it is pretty smart to give people epiphenomenal indicators that are often accurate and give the opportunity of self-diagnosis. 'Teach me to fish,' don't just hand me a fish (or a handful of nuts, or whatever) - which is why I'd have preferred more discussion of the specific micronutrients that are most important for balancing the different types, how to tell in more detail which macronutrients each needs to emphasize and avoid - although I recognize that this gets into the kind of area where it's probably harder to make generalizations (and this is where they want you to come to their clinic and get the full work-up).

I also recognize that this book is more likely to be helpful if your system is imbalanced - but then that's when you're most likely to be looking for help from a book like that anyway. In this connection too, you're more likely to get something out of the questionnaires and less likely to feel skeptical and dismissive if you are currently working through a health challenge and have been wont to notice and track your physical tendencies. I would also say that if you turned out to be a 'Mixed' type, the book would be much less helpful, because the recommendations for this are a mix of those of the other two types and therefore less clear up front and more dependent on your own fine-tuning. The most standard 'healthy diet' put out in the mainstream is closer to the 'Carb' type diet than the 'Protein' type, so there may be fewer surprises if you're a 'Carb' type also.

Applicability for CR?

From the point of view of Calorie Restriction and getting the most 'bang for your buck' out of what you eat, wouldn't this be a potentially very useful tool? My biggest concern with the whole CR program is the question of absorption. A lot of calculations that I've seen around the place, presenting restricted calorie diets that provide all the RDAs of all the crucial nutrients, beg the question to me 'but can the person eating this absorb all those nutrients?' For example, if I, as a protein type, am eating significant amounts of kale to meet all kinds of nutritional requirements, but am not only unable to absorb them from the kale but actually am impeded from absorbing other things I need because kale contains too much potassium for my metabolic type, then wouldn't it be useful to my CR practice and to my health to replace the kale with spinach, which is more biased toward sodium? Even more concerning than that, the suggestion is that the RDAs themselves are misleading (something I'd long suspected anyway): might it not be useful to employ the fine-tuning contained here to make sure that one obtained the right balance of micronutrients for oneself as opposed to aiming for some arbitrary figure from a bell curve? April? Anyone? I recognize that when I got that bloodwork back in the fall saying that I was barely absorbing any protein, and had currently been eating a very high-protein diet (including a lengthy experiment with dairy, which I'm allergic to), I kind of gave up on protein, thought 'what's the point of eating it if I can't absorb it?' According to this book, when a deficiency situation leads to a malabsorption situation and the vicious cycle of being deficient but not being able to take in the nutrients, that's when eating according to your metabolism's needs is the most important, to enable healing to take place. That makes sense to me. I think I threw the baby out with the bathwater. Initially I felt better because I'd quit dairy and increased carbs to a bearable level, but since then I have been having troubles and infections again, and the days I eat the most protein are generally the days I feel far the best. Just need to keep taking those enzymes!

So, finally, I have enjoyed and benefited greatly from this book, but I know that a lot of that is in the current eye of the beholder.

Diet and Suspending Judgment

"Pyrrhonian Diet"

One of the many potential names for my blog space that didn't make the cut was 'Pyrrhonian Diet.' I know, catchy, isn't it! Worth a second glance? Please stay with me, though, because this is interesting. My aim is neither to bore foodies to tears with disquisitions on ancient philosophy nor to dismay philosophers looking for something sensible on ancient Skepticism, although I recognize that I run the risk of doing a little of both. However, the discipline of the Pyrrhonian skeptic has been inspiring to me in many aspects of life and no more so that in trying to navigate the jungle of contradictions in the world of dietary recommendations, while my attempts to navigate said jungle have constituted the best real-world demonstration I've seen of the merits of Pyrrhonian skepticism. I wanted to do a post on this early on in my blog because I suspect that I'll refer to it again later.

"Pyrrhonian"

Before I lose everybody, let me explain what I mean. I'm not going to go on at great length about the Pyrrhonian skeptics: if you want more of an introduction without having to reach for the hardbacks, there are good online introductory essays at the Stanford Encyclopedia, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Peter Suber's page . But I am going to explain where I'm coming from, at least, and really hope to show and share why this is so interesting and inspiring to me. In broad strokes, the Pyrrhonian skeptic is a perpetual and perennial seeker. She poses a question and examines possible answers. For any given question, she goes through the process of seeing that there is a multitude of possible answers, and that in different situations or in the eyes of different people, different ones of them appear to contain the truth. Impressed by the equal validity of the different possibilities, she suspends judgment as to a single true answer. Through the repeated practice of this process, she attains peace of mind - the goal of the seeking.

Skeptics also observe the discomfort of those who do not suspend judgment, who make a choice for one worldview/theory or another. A choice, btw, is a hairesis in Greek: in the context of the Christian church later, those who made the 'wrong' choice were the 'heretics.' In the field of philosophy, those who had chosen one or another world view/belief system were 'dogmatists.' This word did not yet hold the forceful connotations o inflexibility and the stigma that it now has: however, in the view of the Pyrrhonian skeptic these might have been applicable. Dogmatists did not suspend judgment and were continually having to defend their position, being caught in inconsistencies, far from the peace of mind that was the stated goal. The Pyrrhonist continues to lead her life as seems best, and in so doing appears to act in accordance with beliefs. However, her propositional attitude toward these actions is not one of enacting belief, and she reserves the right to act differently in the same context at another time. If she is staying with vegetarians, she may choose to refrain from meat, but then if she is offered meat at a business lunch during that stay, she may accept it. A dogmatist would never adjust their diet or dress code to suit context. A Pyrrhonist might sow the seeds of plants according to the phases of the moon, because it seems to work out that way; a dogmatist might do the same thing but because of strict adherence to a belief in a theory.

"Diet"

'Diet,' of course, when Hippocrates used the word, meant more than just 'way of eating:' it referred to all aspects of lifestyle relevant for health....

Now for my experience of how Pyrrhonism applies to the question of how to feed ourselves, and especially as relevant for the health seeker. I want to talk about my experience on two levels: the level of seeking information about diet and applying it, and the level of the effect that it has upon your outlook on the world when you assent to a dietary belief system. On the issue of seeking information about diet, as I said, it is a jungle. There are so many possible points of view, all claiming scientific backing for their approach. Not only that, there are so many parameters on which these approaches are based. Some prioritize longevity for the eater above all else. Some prioritize the eater's best integration with their local environment, whether that means using locally harvested herbs and food or getting along with their tablemates and not demanding special treatment. Some are ethically motivated, and I have seen some ethically motivated dietetic advisories espouse meat eating as fervently as the more familiar calls for vegetarianism.

Nowadays, of course, an enormously swollen percentage of the literature in this area is oriented toward weight reduction. And it is here, perhaps, that the valid claim of validity for more than one approach can be seen most readily. Diet styles making opposite recommendations are fervently evangelized and boast legions of faithful, who ascribe their salvation to that diet. Some approaches insist that everyone ought to follow 'their' kind of diet, that anyone who claims it doesn't work for them is doing it 'wrong' in one of a variety of ways. And these approaches seem to have the greatest numbers of 'justified faithful,' rendered righteous and healthy by adherence to the one true way. The approaches that grant that there may be a diversity of different needs among different people seem to draw 'dogmatists' of a less fanatical stripe: however, the stories by which they explain this diversity of requirements within the population (whether this is because of blood type, paleolithic genes, climate zone, physiognomy) may require suspension of judgment in its own right.

When I look at all the information that is tossed back and forth in this arena, all the participants apparently sincere in their beliefs and wishes to help others with them, and to have more people like them sharing their beliefs, I feel most at peace when I suspend judgment about the absolute, objective truth of any of this.

The only subjects on which I haven't been able to achieve this impartiality are trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup: I simply cannot see any way in which they can be healthy for anyone, ever. However, I am in danger of falling into my pet dogma of prioritizing and valorizing what is 'natural' over what is 'man made.' And I'm living among people these days who think that this whole diet thing is a silly mind trip, that food-related health problems are in your head only, that they want their soda and cool-whip and if it makes them happy, then it must be good for them. P.S., veggies are bad for you! If I find myself disagreeing with them, I am taking up a dogmatic stance of my own: for a Pyrrhonian skeptic, their stance would be the cue to suspend judgment on the absolute truth, although I, for example, am free to lead my life as seems right to me and to avoid those things and maybe refuse to feed them to others either.

My experience as a 'Diet Dogmatist'

Now for the situation of taking on a 'dogma' regarding diet and applying it. As I mentioned in my introductory post, I am recovering from a lifelong proclivity toward black-and-white thinking. Suspending judgment is therapeutic for me, and when I speak of dogma, I am speaking from experience. This post is getting long and I want you to stay with me, so I'm not going to go through all of my experiences as a food dogmatist. I just want to give some brief observations on how my world view was affected and constrained through the lens of the dogma, (and how I have seen other dogmatists affected and constrained in the same way (although how do I know for sure whether they were truly experiencing the same as me?)) and - here is the important thing: how my world view was expanded by surrendering the dogma.

From 2004-7 I was a fruitarian, eating mostly sweet fruit with some greens every day and some nuts/seeds/nonsweet fruit some few times per week. Nothing cooked, no supplements, no oils. I believed that this was the optimal way for me to eat and that any more than 10% fat in my diet was recipe for disaster. I believed that most hunger I felt was probably something other than real hunger and that part of my path to a freer and stronger, more efficient and more spiritually tuned body/mind/spirit was learning to deal with this other than through food.

I even had supportive friends who did this too, and who believed sincerely that it was the way to health for everybody. I regard it as my saving grace that I never professed to believe that this was the only right way to health for everybody. Deep down, though, I probably did think this, that 'ideally' it would be right for everybody but that given the demands of life only a 'chosen few' were suited for it. (I write objectively and honestly now, I intend not to dwell on the shame that arises within me as I admit to this.) This dogma was a wonderful thing for me at the time: it played a huge role in my recovery from anorexia, providing a very highly structured framework within which to focus on the good parts about eating food, and placing beyond the pale all kinds of frightening foodstuffs. However, it also placed beyond the pale a lot of the social interaction that goes along with those frightening foodstuffs, which I now believe are also an integral part of recovery. Not only did I not participate as fully or readily in gatherings where normal food was in evidence: I felt a trickling but constant alienation by its presence. Judgment was always present within me: I could not empathize with people who put those things into their bodies. I could hardly bear to look at a child eating cheese, or candy, or pretty much anything other than fruit.

This physical aversion, this 'not being able to look,' this alienation, affected my study of Classical literature: my brain would simply dissociate and go elsewhere in the descriptions of sacrifice, cooking, meat-eating. If I was reading through a raw food recipe, if it mentioned spices or a cup of nuts, or salt, I would have to look away and stop reading. I was never quite at the level of fervor of the friend who insisted that if Jesus, Buddha and all other spiritual masters had been cooked-food eaters, then they could not really have been spiritually realized, or the friend who suggested that the guy who brought a warmed sprouted grain dish to a raw potluck was secretly cooking his grains and deceiving himself (and the rest of us) about it because he had been taken over by his candida infection. Another friend, speaking about the phenomenon of so many fruitarians being crazy for durian (quite literally (I used to dream of it at night)) whereas many other people (especially those who actually got some fat in their diet otherwise) absolutely loathe it, said that probably the people who loathed it were too toxic and would come to love it if they ate like we did for long enough.

I always maintained that I believed that this way of eating was not for everybody: just that I thought it was for my body. But if I had to go hungry or eat something off program, I'd go hungry every time. I'd even go home hungry from raw food potlucks. I was hungry a lot, and almost always able to explain it away to myself as something other than hunger. If it was a choice between eating something off program or being sick, for a while I'd have chosen to be sick. Eventually, choosing to recognize that my body might have changed and needed something different, when I was very sick with a broken arm and a staph infection on my ankles, I did break out of the dogma.

Releasing the Dogma

But at the time I made that break, I was no longer surrounded by dogmatists of the same stripe. The only person living close by who was a dogmatic fruitarian was so obviously very unwell, so minimally functional, so narrow in scope of interests and world view, that in fact his example might even have nudged me away from that path. The fact that there were other people rendered similarly narrow and judgmental by the dogma I take as evidence that it wasn't just because I was coming to it from anorexia that I took it that way. Nowadays, living as a relative newcomer in a very conventionally-diet-oriented community, I even have a close friend who is a dogmatist of the opposite persuasion: veggies are bad for you, white flour is good. And I see the same signatures of dogmatism: the same lack of ability to comprehend having different needs, the same righteousness.

In contrast, as I gradually came out of the dogma, my experience of the world blossomed. Rather than just paying lip service to the concept that different people thrive on different lifestyles, dietary considerations and all, I felt like I could see and feel that diversity. The farm animals that I had found noisy, stinky, demanding nuisances as a dogmatic fruitarian, I came to have genuine connections with, to love and appreciate. I no longer had the constant feeling of needing to defend myself, whether from attacks concerning my dogma or just from noise and danger and everything else 'out there.' As the months went by, I kept getting comments about how much more grounded I seemed to be, how much more comfortable I was to be around, and I felt so much more accepting in turn.

Perhaps much of this was to do with improving nutritional status. I have to suspend judgment :) but my feeling is that a lot of it was also to do with my altered perspective, with the removal of the blinders that only allowed me to see one possible way for myself to be, the judgment of others implied therein, and the opening up of a much broader and more fluid perspective on life. Probably the two go together. Of course, I think it's possible to be a raw vegan (or anything else) without becoming a dogmatist about it. Although my experience is that for myself, adopting a dietary strategy without falling into dogma is extremely challenging. Maybe I will try that!

The 'What,' The 'Why' and the 'How'

The 'What'

Here I am. After years of eschewing technology, and then some weeks of agonizing about accusations of narcissism and my lack of home internet connection, here I am carving out my own little piece of netspace, port of embarkation for virtual exploration, haven of comfort to which I can welcome guests. There is so much I want to share, write, communicate! Everything that I say comes from the context of being in recovery from black-and-white thinking.

The name 'Ulterior Harmony' is a reference to the saying by the Ancient Greek (presocratic) Philosopher Heraclitus, fragment 54 'Harmonia aphanes phaneres kreittwn' - 'The hidden harmony is more powerful than the obvious' (or - 'An unmanifest connection is more powerful than a manifest one:' one of the many things I love about Heraclitus is the multiplicity of entendres.) Heraclitus has been my 'muse' for many years and this fragment in particular helps express my quest for balance in general, and the balance in particular between accomplishment on an obvious and linear path, and accomplishing all kinds of things below the surface when it looks like you're just daydreaming or washing dishes. Having a title that is an oblique quotation, by the way, also expresses my wish to balance the constant desire to be 'original,' to experience life on my own terms, with the equally constant recognition that 'original' is meaningless without pre-existing contexts and presuppositions, and that my own terms are defined in relation to many others. I expect to want to talk more about Heraclitus.

I also expect to want to talk about finding home on our beautiful planet. I currently live in a tiny cabin 30ft from the edge of a bluff on the outskirts of Homer, Alaska, looking out over the Kachemak Bay. Previously, I lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, almost as different as you can get, climatically speaking, and in the California Bay Area. In all three, I have been engaged in learning to listen to the land, be out in 'nature,' growing food, growing community. Relationships, first and foremost with my wonderful husband, who brought me here, will get their turn too, and the general question of how to be our best selves. My community is spread out farther and wider too: I grew up in England, with frequent trips to Israel, and my family lives over there, as well as many lovely people whom I still consider as dear friends. I count myself so grateful that I am able to have such a nurturing and fulfilling relationship with my family despite being so far away.

I expect to be talking a lot about food. I'll probably find myself talking about raw foods a lot in particular. I was a strict rawfoodist for a half dozen years, and then for various reasons needed to step away from that, and am now finding myself drawn in that direction again, especially because of my desire to reconnect with the wonderful people that I got to know in that world.
I expect that I'll also be talking about recovery from Anorexia Nervosa. My break from raw foods was needed to take that recovery to a new level for me, and the fact that I'm being led back towards that world is hopefully an indication that my healing from the 'black-and-white' pitfalls in that area is well underway. I feel my throat loosen just as I type that I expect to be talking about this topic. For several years I had felt ashamed even to mention that this had been a problem for me, had not wanted, as I moved home repeatedly, to create relationships with people having them know that I had been 'one of those.' Now, though, I recognize that talking about it in appropriate contexts is one of the ways that I may be able to be of help to others: that I am still alive after almost giving my life up to Anorexia completely is a message of hope. (This is part of the 'Why,' too.)
Some wordspace will also go to 'Calorie Restriction with Optimum Nutrition:' a path that I feel drawn to explore (ironically) because of the metabolic and absorptive challenges my body is left with after Anorexia.
I'd love to talk about the whole issue of parameters in food choices: what a huge variety of parameters influence our decision making, conscious and otherwise: how to recognize and optimize these.

Writing about writing. Well, of course! I love concatenations of words and the communications that can flow from these. Of course I'll have to talk about them. And I suspect I won't be able to resist a book review here and there either.

The 'Why'

I want to share, I want to communicate, I want to explore recipes for success and for delicious foods with others of like mind. In what I think of as my 'real' life, I have been inspired by the fiction of writers such as Peter Watts and David Marusek to recognize the reality of the 'virtual' world as a good reason to have a base for myself here too. I want to be able to be seen both by my friends and loved ones who live far away, and to help me integrate into the community right here, where I am a relative stranger.

And, after some years of avoiding and eschewing modern day technology of any kind, anticipating its imminent collapse and a return to stone implements and telepathy, I was finally persuaded by the advice of my wonderful friend Lynn, or her narration of her sister's advice to her. Her sister told her that it behooves her to stay on top of technology and other current coin of the world, to move with the spirit of the time, if she wants to continue to participate in life. This spoke to me too. Starting this blog is an acknowledgment of my desire to participate in life and a recognition that writing is one of my primary modes of engagement and the internet one of the primary modes of sharing it.

The 'How'

I have no internet at home, and a regular part of my exercise program is hiking down to town to use the library. So my posting here will be far from trigger-fingered and will not be every day. This is not the home at which to contact me in an emergency! But this little space has been very dear to my heart for a long time even before I made the decision to bring it to life, so the 'how' will also be with sincerity and dedication. I really hope that it will be a friendly space for comments, discussion and camaraderie.

To the joy of perennial learning without dogma! To the health of all of us!