“Jack up the raw” over the holidays…without giving up your favorite food or parties!
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I’ve had a very long journey learning to find ease in living with food.
By the time I was 14, I’d become deeply entrenched in eating disorders, and subsequently struggled for many years with the pain and self-loathing that accompanies any kind of food addiction. Back then, it was the 70s, and eating disorders weren’t the commonplace subject it is today. Knowledgeable help just wasn’t accessible to me. So, from an early age I embarked upon a solo journey to figure out how such a thing could be healed… permanently.
For years I lived in near-constant angst over food. My illness, both acute and chronic, was like a constant dark shadow I couldn’t seem to escape, no matter how resolutely I tried. The thing about food is, you can’t fix the problem by removing it from your life, as an alcoholic or drug-abuser can. You’ve got to live with food and find a way to make that relationship harmonious.
Today, I live an entirely stress-free life around food. How did I get to this place from such a painful beginning? Non-resistance.
The Magic of Non-Resistance
A turning point occurred for me while I was still a teen-ager. I was at my utter wit’s end and reaching both deep and high for a new understanding that would deliver me to safe ground. The thought occurred to me, “What if I just stop fighting this so hard? What if - just for this moment - I accept that, for whatever reason, this is who I am right now? And it’s okay…”
And with that one seemingly counter-intuitive but courageous thought, I had my first experience of the healing power of nonresistance. I felt an enormous sense of relief. I experienced self-acceptance. Choosing a stance of non-resistance enabled me to set down - if even for just a moment - a truly heavy burden I’d been carrying. I was able to give my spirit a rest, and honor myself in a way I had refused to recognize.
Over time, this pattern of choosing non-resistance and creating the space to honor myself rather than fight with myself is what led to eventually healing from the patterns that gripped me. It sounds backwards, but there is definite logic to such an approach. In fact… there is simply no other way to truly heal.
Most of us have heard the saying “What we resist, persists.” And this is indeed true, on the most practical of levels. Mustering our force of will to control, conquer, or dominate something in our life conveys the assumption that what we want to control has great power over us… otherwise we wouldn’t need to take such a tough stance. It makes us hard and hyper-vigilant. It creates profound stress, and obscures any sense of ease.
And when it comes to food, we are a culture that is anything but “at ease”.
A Culture At War With Food
As a society, we struggle epidemically with food. I see it everywhere. I know every nuance of that struggle because I lived it.
It doesn’t take someone to be crippled by anorexia or bulimia to be held in the strange-hold of food addiction or an eating disorder. If compulsive eating, punishing “exercise atonement”, obsession over food quantity, or the stressful adherence to strict dietary rules takes over one’s life and obscures an experience of joy and ease on a daily basis, then one is engaged in a personally undermining struggle with food. And I bet you’d quickly run out of fingers if you started counting the people in your life (perhaps yourself included) who fall into one of these categories.
Living with food is not meant to be so hard. Food is intended to be a source of strength, support, and true enjoyment. It’s meant to serve and enliven us so we can go about the business of being massively creative and joyful humans carving out wonderfully fulfilling lives. But somehow, we’ve turned this around and have gotten lost in a highly dysfunctional relationship with food, at a societal level.
Our Denatured Diet Creates Food Addiction
Since those painful early years, I’ve come a long way in my understanding of what I went through and what contributed to the enslavement I experienced. And one fascinating clarification came only after I started exploring a lifestyle “jacked up” with raw foods, and began to experience what it’s like to live in a body that is fueled primarily by whole, completely unadulterated living foods. That contrast (and subsequent fluctuations between consuming a “high-raw” diet and a diet comprised of mostly cooked foods) showed me without a doubt that whole, un-denatured foods create balance in the body, while processed, denatured foods set up a pattern of cravings and stress that lead to imbalance.
“Denatured “foods (as I’m using the term) are foods that the body no longer recognizes as a natural, whole food. Cooking begins the denaturing process, further chemical and refining processing takes the journey further away from a whole-food state, and the inclusion of non-food additives flags “denatured in the extreme” to our systems the moment such foods are consumed.
When we eat whole, undenatured foods, the body remains relaxed and in a state of ease, because it is consuming food with nutrients that are maximally bio-available, the way nature intended. But when we eat denatured foods - and the more denatured those foods tend to be - the more we trigger cravings and imbalance in our systems.
It’s my theory that, when our body goes to digest and assimilate denatured foods, it perceives that code in the DNA or molecular structure of that food has either been compromised or gone completely missing, and it sets off to go find the missing components. This initiates stress in the body, the restlessness of cravings, and - ultimately, if continued habitually over time - degeneration into disease (dis-ease).
So just the very foods we choose to eat can initiate food addiction, without a psychological component. And since our current culture is richly laden with denatured foods as part of our everyday culture (so much so that we generally don’t even recognize that most of our diet is wildly denatured — we just call it “food”), food addiction has also become a normal part of our society.
If, in the course of fighting against the negative path down which our food addictions take us, we then acquire obsession or psychological stress, that is the point where an eating disorder might evolve.
The Healing Power of Living Foods for Food Addictions and Eating Disorders
The beauty of radically increasing the raw and living foods in one’s diet (and I mean anyone’s diet… meat-eater, junk-food eater, vegetarian, or vegan) is that raw and living foods enable nonresistance. All you have to do is add the good stuff, and your experience of being in balance will increase while your feelings of stress will decrease. The more you add, the better you’ll feel, and the easier your relationship with food can become because you need not focus on controlling your diet or your cravings any longer.
This nonresistant approach is at the very heart of the approach I teach to my clients who want to “jack up the raw”in their diet. I want them to focus only on adding as much raw, living, high-water-content, nutrient-dense foods to their diet as they can (especially using the power of Live Green Smoothies), and to not worry about the rest. The rest… it takes care of itself, gradually, over time, at the speed of gentle evolution.
I’ve found in my own life, beyond even dealing with food issues, that the most potent path to healing and wellness is ironically the gentlest one, the one that is most self-honoring and self-nurturing rather than an approach exercised with brutal will and rigid discipline.
And, having found peace and the freedom of a stress-free way of living with food after much heartache and struggle, it’s very much my mission, purpose, and profound pleasure to help others find the same. 
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