Success is within your reach
A few days a go I got up at 6 a.m., let the chickens out, fed the dog, cat, and bird, brushed my teeth and grabbed a banana, a container of raisins and a glass bottle of home-filtered water. Off I went to work for the day. My client waited patiently since last December for the weather to break, and it was going to be sunny and 50 degrees, so we were all geared up for me to finally run 100 feet of heavy cable to prepare for his new hot tub (electrician is one of my trades).
I arrived at the work site promptly at 8 a.m, and worked for seven or so straight hours with no break, except to run up the road to pick up a part. All I ate was a banana, and a handful of raisins until noon, at which time I ate about two cups of (cooked) vegan spinach pasta from the local food co-op. I came home around 5 p.m., at which time I again attended to the needs of various animals in the house, and also had to re-mount my business sign which had been leveled by a driver a couple of months prior.
Finally at about 6 p.m., I was ready to consider eating. Now, I was pretty beat from having been physical all day, and I naturally had the urge to zip down my speed dial to my favorite local pizza place, but…nooooooooooooooooo. I have a health column. I have a face book group on health. I have a YouTube site (on health). I have an email address…you guessed it…for the topic of…health. On and on I was listing all the guilty reasons I didn’t want to disappoint my “fan base,” etc.
So instead of calling for pizza (white flour, sugar, pasteurized dairy, pesticide-sprayed non-organic tomatoes in all likelihood), I went to the fridge, and … grab onto your knickers, ladies…I took out seaweed and chopped it up. I took out a scallion and chopped it up. I drained my many jars of fresh broccoli, mung bean, wheat grass, and alfalfa sprouts, to create a veggie broth as a base for a marvelously pro-biotic miso-soup I was to make. All the while I am snacking on fresh pineapple chunks from a fruit I cut up myself, a day earlier.
WHY did I do this? For my reputation? Shame? While all these things may have some truth value, the overwhelming real reason is I wanted to. My little internal voice had changed, finally and for good, it seems. I am here to tell you, if you re-program yourself long enough, it DOES work! I call myself the agnostic because I am a skeptic, but in this case I can tell you 100 percent from my own experience that this is possible to re-program yourself, if you can hold your commitment long enough. I find other examples of it as well. I used to love to grab a quick Snickers or Kit-Kat at various times of the day – now I grab FRUIT or very low sugar fair-trade, organic dark chocolate.
Now, am I saying I will never slip up again, and go for the processed stuff? I would not be so presumptuous. But, as I have said before, perfection is not a requirement for success. Consistency and majority-time-behavior are much more important. The higher the percentage of time we can make these kinds of choices, the more results. A good point to remember along this topic was made by author Mike Anderson in his excellent book (and video) “The Rave Diet.” He points out that “there is only so much room in our stomach,” so that if we choose the “good stuff” first, we will likely not have room for very much “bad stuff.” And of course, the reverse is true: If we eat high-calorie candy bars or fried junk first, we are not too likely to have room for that salad, even if we had the best of intentions to eat it.
It is worth re-iterating that this process of re-programming ourselves takes TIME proportional to the number of years we spent forming our existing eating habits. It is a very back and forth journey from where you may be to where you know you should be. As you practice the technique of mindful eating, paying very close attention to how each meal makes you feel rather than just how it tastes, you will begin to make your choices earlier and earlier in the cycle, until you can exercise preventive judgment to avoid food substances which harm you and/or make you feel bad. Examples of bad are heavy, bloated, tired, mentally cloudy, nervous, hyper, just to name a few.
Good would be satisfied but not stuffed, buoyant, energized, and clear-headed. As we will discuss, some of the temporary symptoms of detoxification can overlap, but the difference is that at the end of a detox, short-term or long, we feel clean, refreshed, and more alive. We will address this soon within the topic of fasting.
Until then, do the best you can, and measure your progress over months and years rather than days.