Clean up the kitchen!

Cleaning up the kitchen is a metaphor for our growing awareness of how we are interconnected to the world around us.  Our health is a starting point for this growing awareness and our kitchens are the laboratories for applying these discoveries to our lives.  

I offer consultations for resupplying your kitchen with healthy ingredients for healthier diets.  We read labels and replace foods that are not healthy with foods that are.  I will recommend appliances and cookbooks to support you in making these changes and deepening your understanding of why to do so.   

I use my own life experiences to understand the resistance to change that most of us possess. My nutritional needs has been a gradual process of discovery over a long period of time.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that it has been a lifetime of small revelations that have led to the way that I presently eat.  My kitchen continues to evolve and the staples in my fridge and cupboards bear no resemblance to what they once were. 

One of my greatest achievements has been to rid myself of the symptoms of fibromyalgia which plagued me for more than thirty years!  Due to desperation, and despite the lack of guidance that I received from my doctors, I persevered in my research and figured out that the inflammation in my connective tissue was based on my diet.  By most standards at the time, I had been making reasonably healthy food choices.  I started eating organic foods and lots of vegetables when I was in my early twenties, which was late in the nineteen seventies.  Looking back though, the profile of foods I was eating then compared to now was full of ingredients that made me sick.

A watershed event in my evolution toward improved health and habits was taking a nutrition class that opened my eyes to the effects of sugar and how prevalent it was in our diets.  I had not known until then, that sugar was a heavily subsidized food with incentives for the manufacturers by the U.S. Government.  The main ingredients in most of the foods in standard grocery stores are subsidized by the USDA and other federal programs that produce food for export and domestic use.  These are wheat, corn, soy, sugar, dairy and meat.  If you read labels, you will see that one or several of these products are in the vast majority of foods.  They are configured into every imaginable form for consumption, and they are upfront in terms of our exposure to them on the shelves and in advertising.  They are now ubiquitous in the form of junk food in our society.  And they are not good for us to consume.  At all!

Good nutrition will only come by educating ourselves.  As will ensuing good health when we eat well.  There are innumerable links to many auto-immune and chronic diseases to food.  Inflammation in general is most often caused by what we ask our bodies to digest unreasonably.  Our bodies respond in kind, doing its best to conform to what we ingest.  Eventually, however, our bodies may show signs of damage if its systems are overtaxed for too long.  

Everyone of us is in the process of becoming illuminated to these facts.  For some of us, this is accelerated by physical ailments that go undiagnosed and we are looking for answers.  For others it is our lack of knowledge or the often conflicting and shifting trends on what to eat that holds us back from adapting to a healthier lifestyle.  It is a curious situation that it is not widely known what we ate is who we have become!  In other words, if one does not feel well, it is wise to examine what one consumed in the past, few hours, and not to dismiss the feeling away by thinking “for some reason…I don’t feel great”.  If you have a headache, or stomach ache or feel generally achey, or even cranky, ask yourself why.  Most times, we are in reaction to what we are digesting at any given time.  

If, like me, you have a food allergy that has gone undetected, you may develop symptoms severe enough to negatively impact your mobility and cause pain.  I discovered a gluten intolerance when I was 50 years old.  At 67, I have been avoiding it for 17 years and have transformed from pain ridden, stiff, and depressed to having the capacity to do any activity with immunity from inflammation.  This transformation began within a matter of weeks, once I went off of gluten completely.

We can all be on the road to recovery and improving health and consciousness through increasingly more pristine diets.  I do not lament that I cannot eat the foods that I used to afford myself.  There are still so many choices in food and other pleasures, why whine when my health is my reward!