Tapping and Feeling Empowered; PUFA-Experiment Update

Feeling Good: Thanks, Tapping World Summit!
We are such moving targets: we adjust one thing and something else changes too. Sometimes change spreads like a stain, from the focal point outward; other times, it's more like a domino effect, and everything changes in a cascade.

A snapshot only catches a glimpse of our perpetual motion.

I am so excited by having the feeling of being able to make things better. I'm so excited that I've woken up the past couple days feeling really energized and confident! I have been working on the Tapping, having listened along this past week or so, and am amazed at how it has been affecting my energy and general outlook. With any method of self-help and self-improvement--or anything novel, for that matter, I worry about the trajectory where an initial burst of enthusiasm then gradually peters out and moves into disenchantment. However, the Tapping is having such an immediate and positive effect, internalizing the Law of Attraction into my physical meridians, that I'm finding myself motivated to continue with it. They suggest committing to 40 days of Tapping post-summit, clearing one blockage each day. Now, I'm thinking that many of my 'blockages' will take more than a single day to clear, but I'll take the empowerment of group energy and the optimism of commitment!

Any suggestions, shared stories, ideas for further reading would be much appreciated.

Further thoughts on PUFAs (and how to avoid/reduce them) and an Update on My Experiment

Self-Experimentation

Speaking of being moving targets, and of the impossibility of changing one thing without changing others... Of course I haven't been 'perfect,' haven't completely eliminated all PUFAs, not even all omega-6's. But I have dramatically reduced them in my diet the last month or two, and on the few occasions that there's been something more omega-6-heavy around, like that peanut-butter-mousse brownie (yes, my fault!) I've added back some flax or chia into my morning smoothies to balance it out.

Here's a post by Dr Weil that Mindy shared in a recent comment that explains in straightforward terms why it's so important to keep the omega-3 to -6 ratio from getting overly high to the -6, to rebalance if you have something high in the -6.

Well, a couple of observations on this. I hadn't realized until I put flax/chia back in my smoothies that the post-breakfast nausea I'd had for ages had gone away. It came back when I put them back in! Whaddaya know? And I don't think it was a case of higher overall fat content: I think I'd upped the coconut oil in my smoothies to compensate. So that's an unexpected downside of flax or chia for me (I hadn't noticed any correlation with nausea at times other than breakfast, though).

Otherwise, I haven't noticed any instant alarm signals like memory loss, neurons not firing, intense depression, or any of the EFA deficiency classic signs. One the other hand, I haven't noticed that my metabolism is roaring quick all of a sudden without the metabolism-dragging PUFAs (although my digestion transit seems to have improved, as I mentioned earlier, but that seemed to be more to do with increasing starch consumption).

One negative thing that I have noticed, or more accurately, that Phil has noticed, is that my skin is not as clear and smooth as it had been since I started coconut oil and a generally higher-fat diet. It seems that my back is broken out and that generally my skin is a little rougher. Again, I don't know whether to ascribe this to absence of PUFAs, to reduced fat intake overall, to increased starch, or to my excursions into cacao and more sugar than normal for me (mostly by way of fruit).

For other reasons, which I'll discuss more soon, I'm nixing the cacao and sugar excursions and suspect, just from how my body works, that I should replace them with more fat, i.e. coconut, in my diet. Hopefully that will smooth my skin out, but if it takes flax and chia seeds and a few nuts to make that happen, it would be some interesting data for sure!

PUFAs and How to Avoid Them

Unless you're of the 80-10-10 persuasion (as I was for years) and avoid all fats like the plague, it might sound like a pretty tall order to be a mostly raw-foodie who eats good amounts of fat and to avoid all heavy PUFA sources. In fact, it's really pretty easy. When I started out, I wasn't even eating avocado or olive oil on my salads for a bit, and was still enjoying satisfying and delicious salads as a staple. (Lately, perhaps for sanity's sake, and partly because my ND specifically asked me to eat avocados, I've eased up on that restriction: both olive oil and avocado have much more Monounsaturated fat (or MUFA) than they do PUFA.)

This is a 'slaw that is pretty much what you can see: napa cabbage, purple cabbage, carrots, sprouts. The dressing was made of appropriate spices, apple cider vinegar and coconut oil! Kind of Asian-tasting and really good and refreshing.

Since macadamia nuts have virtually no PUFAs in them, you can team them up with coconut to make all kinds of creamy dressings and dips. By the way, here's another instance of a case where the 'cooked' version of something might be healthier than the raw. At the moment, I feel better about eating real black beans than a raw mock refried beans dip made mostly of sunflower seeds (although it's true that legumes contain more omega-6 than omega-3 also, like most seeds of any kind, flax and chia being the magic exceptions, legumes have far less of either than nuts and seeds do). Ditto for nut-based hummuses.

For the wiggle room, since I'm not crying off them altogether and forever, there are ways to reduce overall PUFA content in your creation. I think the best long term strategy is to use mostly coconut and macadamia (sure makes me miss Hawaii--why are mac nuts so expensive when the farmers there can't sell their crops?) and otherwise use flax and chia so that the PUFA ratio favors the omega-3's.

But for the excursion times, I already showed in my peanut-butter-mousse-brownie recipe how easy it was to reduce the PUFAs by using mostly peanut flour instead of peanut butter.

Thankfully for us, cashews and filberts are relatively low in overall PUFA (around 2g per ounce), so they'll work for the odd cheesecake and crust...(though I love a mac/coco crust).

Another trick: remember those Congo Bars I made all the way back before Christmas (wow, have I been playing with reduced PUFA that long??

Well, the base involves a whole bunch of walnuts and pecans (i.e. a boatload of PUFAs), that you pulse first and then add a bunch of other ingredients. I processed them a little far, and the cold ambient temperature and the warmth of the processor provoked the nuts to release their oils, and they separated from my dough. Rather than try to mix it back in, I poured it off!

It was a slow process: you can see the oil still pooling at the parchment paper under the batter to the left of the pic. I probably got about a half cup of oil from those two cups of nuts! So that was a half cup of PUFA that no one had to eat (although it may end up on Phil's popcorn one day)!

Conclusion: I feel good about continuing my moderate exclusion (as opposed to exclusive exclusion!) of PUFAs. I still think that the most important thing is to avoid much omega-6, however, and I wouldn't be shocked if long-term, flax and chia regained their status as staples in my diet. More changes coming soon!

What do you think about omega-6's? Do you think I'm over-thinking this whole thing or is it interesting? What's your latest great experiment on your body? (And what about that Tapping?)