One thing that you need to know about me is that I consider myself pretty healthy…surprise! :0) As in, I wake with energy, I love exercising and on a typical day I am blissfully ignorant of my digestive system..as in it doesn’t speak to me via oohs aahs gripes and groans. I don’t experience unexplained headaches, body aches or anything else that a lot of people tend to consider ‘their lot’. I put this down to some genetic luck and of course to a diet, lifestyle & minor supplementation regime that on the whole works for me (late nights for 11th hour work deadlines aside!). The last month however has made me realise that this has probably lead me to grossly underestimate the power of those core diet and lifestyle choices that have become so automatic as to risk being forgotten.
I’ve just returned from a month travelling for work and I had a powerful, if very simple insight during my time on the road. It came about because by default I was eating out all the time, still trying to make good food choices of course but beyond this I had no control at all in terms of how the food preparation was being undertaken nor the actual components or the quality of the recipes and their ingredients. For breakfast lunch and dinner every day for the majority of the past month, I was at the mercy of chefs and cooks.
I feel like I’ve been through my own Supersize Me experience – minus McDonalds and any actual supersizing! 😉
One month of eating out for me lead to the insidious development of a number of symptoms with the first really being digestive. I felt just a little ‘off’, just a tad ‘queasy’. My morning hunger disappeared, I became really parched with an ‘unquenchable thirst’ as if I had been indulging in excessive alcohol and my bathroom routine (is that a polite way of saying that?) lost all routine etc. etc. Then I noticed the deterioration in my energy, tired on waking, less endurance with my running, earlier fatigue etc. I started seeking out caffeine which has never been my thing and I could suddenly see how people convince themselves that they need it. In the last week I started to link all these things to the one core thing that had really changed…my food and I thought, ‘oh my goodness, is this how other people feel?’
Because let’s face it, while I didn’t eat ‘junk food’ at any point what I did consume was a diet profoundly higher in fat (and in particular damaged and unhealthy fats), salt and sugar and significantly lower in fresh raw unprocessed foods (especially vegetables), that probably is fairly akin to the SAD (standard Australian diet). These are the basic features of FAFH (food away from home) which have been consistently demonstrated in studies even if we’re talking your homemade bolognaise V a restaurant bolognaise.
Now as I said earlier, this isn’t rocket science and it might just be because I’m a bit slow to catch on but, living my own Supersize Me experience has been profoundly impacting because it reminded me in a very immediate & tangible way about the power of both good and bad food. My baseline ‘pretty healthy’ managed to sustain me for about 2-3 weeks before the cracks started to show. The good news is that an antidote came quickly with a couple of days composed entirely of basic fresh foods. Undressed organic salads with grilled fish and a glass of vegetable juice never tasted so good nor felt so therapeutic! It’s good to be reminded of how powerful these interventions are and what it feels like to be sitting on the other side of the desk! 🙂
Group mentoring is winding up for the year with our last sessions running on the 24th of November and the 8th and 14th December. If you join a session before the end of the year you will be first in line to be part of our exciting new format in 2016 and special discounts. Group sessions are run on a monthly basis and are open to any practitioner who has a case they’d like to share or for anyone just wanting to listen to an in depth work-up other people’s cases. They’re dynamic sessions that create an accelerated learning opportunity, add to your CPE points and introduce you to like-minded colleagues to form a great network. To book into one of our last sessions for the year click here