Listening to the Body

The whole-foods, plant-based diet is an excellent guideline. But, every body is different. We all have our own unique ancestries and our own unique genetics. What’s good for me, may not be good for Sally down the street. If you’re ethnically Japanese, you might know that it’s not a great idea to eat a lot of cheese, because your ancestors didn’t eat dairy and therefore your body probably won’t react well to it. But even if you don’t know, there is a good chance you have a natural aversion to dairy products, anyway. But then again, because of cultural norms, the endless barrage of advertising, even though your body may be telling you that you should avoid eating pizza and ice cream, you may

not be able to hear it over the noise of modern life.

That’s one reason why it's helpful to develop bodily awareness. What doctors and nutritionists say is all fine and well, but if our experience tells us something else, we ignore it at out own peril. Surprisingly, most general physicians know very little about nutrition, so often we have to discover what’s best for ourselves, anyway. To find what works best for us, we must become sensitive to how the body reacts to different foods. Nonsense! I thought. This Taiwanese woman was just telling me old wives tales. I ignored her advice even though my intuition advised me to listen. So much did I distrust my own body that I ignored it even when it was finally validated by an external source. it, but I know it’s not good. So, although I still drink sometimes, I respect it as the powerful drug that it is. I don’t drink it every day, I’m careful about how much I consume, and I appreciate more when I do have it.

For many of us, as young girls and boys, we indiscriminately piled food into our mouths, and make little or no connection between what we ate and how we felt. This was certainly the case for me. Then, one Halloween I ate far too much sugar and felt sick. When I made the connection between eating a pile of candy and feeling ill, that was the beginning of bodily awareness for me. This is a gross example, but it can get much more subtle. If you pay close attention, you will notice that everything you put in your body influences the way you feel. The feeling you get from a shot of rum might be more pronounced than the one from a Greek salad, but they both have their own quality. The more we cultivate this awareness, the better equipped we are to make the dietary choices that are right for us.

I have another relevant story from my life. From the time I was fourteen to the time I was thirty-four, I had chronic outbreaks of acne. As a teenager, I assumed it was normal, and just something I would have to live through for a couple of years until it went away naturally. But, by the time I was twenty-two, the inflamed skin and angry red pimples showed no signs of subsiding--in fact it they were worse than ever. Some weeks were better than others, but I would always have at least a few pimples on my face and neck and more than on my chest and back. I used to get zits so big that they would leave crater-like scars if I dared to pop them. Fifteen years later, I still have scars of my chest. My skin condition made me angry, depressed, and it sapped my self confidence. Eventually, after several years of hoping things would change, I just accepted that I might have skin problems forever.

When I was twenty-one I somehow got the idea that I should quit drinking coffee and see if that had any affect. The idea came intuitively. I certainly never heard of coffee causing skin issues, but I decided to just try it. So, I quit for a week and my skin seemed to get better. A lot of big changes were happening in my life at the time, so I became distracted and forgot about my experiment. However, as the years rolled on, from time to time, I would again get this idea that I should quit drinking coffee, and that it might help with my skin condition. Sadly I lacked faith in my intuition and whenever the idea came, I thought to myself, oh that’s just silliness. There is no precedent for it. Surely, if coffee had anything to do with zits and bad skin, I would have heard about it. Indeed, no doctor had ever mentioned coffee as a possible cause, when I looked for a connection on the internet, but there wasn’t even anecdotal evidence.

At thirty-two, my skin condition had ameliorated somewhat without me quitting coffee. I didn’t get the massive crater-forming zits on my chest anymore, and the ones that appeared elsewhere tended to be somewhat smaller and less common. However, I continued to have inflamed skin, and now the skin on my chest was speckled with scar tissue and my back with scar tissue and blotches of melanin. Such was the condition of my skin when a middle-aged massage lady in Taiwan told me that if I wanted to improve the quality of my skin, I would have to cut out coffee and alcohol. Bah!

Perhaps I should mention that I love coffee. I know it’s addictive, but I also love the smell and the color and the taste. And I love how I feel after drinking a nice hot double latte. I’m so awake and alive and clear-headed. Perhaps it was my attachment to coffee that made me wait so long before I tried to remove it from my diet again. It was at least a year after my vacation in Taiwan that I decided I might as well just try to quit coffee for a week and see what happened. I was laying in bed thinking about it, and it occurred to me that I had began getting zits about the same time that a I started drinking coffee. Miraculously, after five days without coffee, my skin cleared up, the redness faded and even the dark circles under my eyes disappeared. I was amazed. I could have saved myself so much suffering if I had only listened to my body in the first place.

I still drink coffee sometimes. Maybe it’s the addictive quality. Maybe it’s the sensory experience, or the way it makes me feel. Probably a bit of all the above. But I know that it’s not good for my body. I can see the effect it has on my skin, but I can’t see the effect it has on my other organs. I can’t see

We can tell the quality of a food by looking at it, by smelling it, by tasting it. But beyond that, every food has its own particular energy. This may seem abstract, but there is a difference in the way we feel if we eat an orange fresh off the tree and one that we picked up from the grocery store. More obviously, there is a difference between eating that orange from the grocery store, and a package of hard cookies that come out of a bag. If you’re sensitive enough, you will notice an energetic quality from the orange fresh off the tree that you can actually feel in your hand. That mysterious quality is diminished in the orange from the bin. Hard, packaged cookies have none of that vitality. Something is lost when once that freshness is gone. Nutritionally, there’s no difference between a fresh strawberry off the vine, and a frozen one out of the bag. But given the choice, who is going to choose to suck on the frozen strawberry over the fresh one? It’s not just the taste, the temperature or the texture; it’s that mysterious life-force.