Hello, this is my body diary.
I'm trying to figure out what works best for me, and how to live sustainably in Metro Manila and everywhere else.
♥ Feanne
- Food should nourish you, make you glow, put a twinkle in your eyes. So, you have to be happy with the diet you pick. For example, eat healthy because you love it, not because it keeps off the pounds. Otherwise, you’d be walking around mad at the world everyday because it deprived you of chocolate.
- Don’t obsess about it. When you are obsessed about every part of your diet, you lose the joy in it. There are some people who claim to follow the healthiest diets on earth, but they look so frail with dark circles under their eyes. They get obsessed about every ingredient and snap when they can’t get this or that. (No wonder they look like that.) I don’t want to be them. I want the glow and rosy cheeks, not be a stick with gray skin.
- You don’t have to pay a lot of money to know that you should be eating a lot of vegetables (Hint: biodynamic vegetables especially), avoid sugar and processed food, and get good protein. (Hint: pasture-raised meat.)
- If you eat when you’re hungry, and begin to stop starving or depriving yourself, the bingeing stops. So will overeating. As your body knows it will be nourished every time, it won’t find the need to gorge. And how ever can you sustain a very restrictive, lower than required calorie diet? The day you go off this diet is the day you will overindulge because you felt so deprived for weeks, months on end. (Also, eating so few calories a day is dangerous. When the body is starved for calories, the body’s metabolism slows down to preserve energy. And then you’re in big trouble.)
- Once we start equating food with “shoulds”, it becomes dogma. And who wants to eat dogma? I have had enough of that elsewhere. Food ought to be joie de vivre. Of course it should be. It’s what you put in your mouth. And there has to be butter, chocolate and wine in that equation. Although not exactly measured.
"I wish fashion bloggers could be more supportive of sustainable lifestyles: Less foreign brands. More Filipino brands, especially those that put real thought and value into their products, instead of just mass-producing cheap (or overpriced) goods made out of unsustainable materials, harming the environment, laborers, and culture… I wish we could just put a little more thought into the things we VOTE FOR and APPROVE with our attention and our hard-earned pesos."
“One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full…One finds one is shedding not only clothes – but vanity.
Here I live in a bare sea-shell of a cottage. No heat, no telephone, no plumbing to speak of, no hot water, a two-burner oil stove, no gadgets to go wrong… I have shed my Puritan conscience about absolute tidiness and cleanliness. Is it possible that, too, is a material burden? … I don’t worry about the impression they make on other people. I am shedding pride. As little furniture as possible; I shall not need much.
I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”
Notes on staying happy healthy and kind / minimalism, from “Gift From The Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Calculated costing for the fish fillet lettuce tomato basil sammich = P70! Good enough for me :) If you cut out the dressing, you can bring it down to P45 without sacrificing the main bits of the sammich, and I think the taste is okay too (very very fresh). I updated that post with the details of my costing.
I believe that healthy eating shouldn’t be expensive!
It’s part of my eating manifesto. :)
"Babies do not come from storks. Babies are created out of soil, air, rain, food, and rivers. If we change all of these into poison, we change our unborn into poison as well. What materials will be used for their arms but the minerals of the poisoned continents? Of what stuff will their eyes be fashioned but the water of our lethal rivers?"
"This reminds me of the Japanese phrase Itadakimasu. It means something like I’ve taken your life / thank you for sacrificing yourself to me / I’m grateful for the nutrients you’ve given me."
When my rashes heal, I will quit being insecure, and treasure and nurture my good skin, hair, and bones.
First by carefully choosing what I apply on my body and what I ingest; second by carefully choosing what I spend my energy, time, feelings, and thoughts on.
What affects the body, affects the spirit; and vice versa:
“You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.”
- Ayn Rand
I’ve been reading up on cosmology, the food industry, humankind’s place in the ecosystem, and the primal lifestyle. It all seems to tie in.
Is Milk Healthy?
Notmilk.com is pretty all-out in declaring war against milk, but here’s a good article that explains why pasteurized milk you buy from the supermarket is unhealthy. This milk is produced by unhappy, unhealthy cows who live in a deplorable state, pumped full of hormones (recombinant bovine growth hormone) and antibiotics, and fed commercial feed (roasted soy, chicken feathers). You know those pictures on milk cartons showing happy cows wandering about in green grass pastures? Lies! :c
“Advertisers promise that consumers can have the healthiest possible food from happy animals in idyllic settings at low prices. This is obviously a lie, on all counts, but it’s a lie that most people accept. People don’t stop to understand that this cheap food makes for expensive health care, which is the whole vicious chronic illness industries cycle. Did it ever occur to you that you might be getting hoodwinked by the cheap prices - in light of industry’s enormous profits and obscenely compensated executives, mightn’t you be getting shortchanged? Ethics aside, chronic illness is a profitable short term economic model, but unsustainable as a foundation of advancing society.”
Are Microbes Bad?
Most of us think:
microbes = “germs” = bad = kill ‘em all!
“Biologically, over 90% of the cells that make up the human body belong to nonhuman microorganisms - mostly bacteria, but also a smattering of fungi and other microbes. While these microbes are just a fraction of our overall bulk, they make up the huge majority of cells living on and within us. Our genes constantly exchange molecular substances, involved in our growth, development, and reproduction, with these microbial genes. Humans are not individuals, but rather colonies of creatures that are not just casual hitchhikers. The human body is a mini-ecosystem within the overall ecological system in which we exist. While some of these microbial hitchhikers are capable of causing harm to our bodies, most are so essential to well-being that humans couldn’t live without them.”
If our science is really so advanced, then why do superbugs exist? Superbugs are the direct result of the overuse of antibiotics. Antibiotics don’t kill 100% of the microbes they target, resulting in surviving microbes with resistance to that drug. Stronger drugs are then used, producing stronger surviving microbes, and so on:
“Already, some diseases that were previously susceptible to a variety of antibiotics are now untreatable… approximately 70 percent of infections that people get while hospitalized are now resistant to at least one antibiotic. Resistance to antibiotics is rapidly outpacing our ability to synthesize new drugs, which should give one a good idea of just how advanced our science really is [not].”
“While we’re cruising along this path, growing ever more less nutritious foods, and producing even more unhealthy processed foods with chemical additives, we’re propping up an unsustainable false economy. Reduced nutrition increases consumption, which plays into the hands of agribusiness, and reduced health plays into the hands of the medical establishment. That such is accepted as human advancement is pure hypocrisy.”
This is why I eat fruits and vegetables when I’m sick, and avoid pills whenever possible.
P.S. Virgin coconut oil seems to soothe the rashes nicely when left on overnight.
“If we understood that food was memory, we would stop our miserable eating habits.”
“Instead of eating the natural foods Earth has created over eons of subtle experimentation, we stuff ourselves with fake junk put out by multinationals with less knowledge of the Earth than could be stuffed into an empty peanut shell, resulting in cancer, heart disease, and all the needless suffering associated with folly. We need to realize that, from a biological point of view, eating is remembering. Why? Because food is rich in the information our bodies need. Through hundreds of millions of years, life forms learned to feed on each other. This means more than supplying fuel. It means supplying the informed sequences of molecules and amino acids required for our epigenetic unfolding. Our bodies wait for, expect a particular spectrum of foods. Not just anything will do. Particular molecular compounds are required, those that were fashioned by the millions of years of creative experimentation.”
“Many of our physiological patterns of activity depend on certain complex chemicals provided by natural foods. The physiological processes are the way the body remembers its ancestral heritage, and this heritage insists on particular natural foods for its remembering. When you eat grains, legumes, and good, fresh meat and vegetables, you enable your body to remember its powers… The foods enable patterns of activity to start up.”
Excerpts from The Universe Is A Green Dragon by Brian Swimme
A book that Lola Chit lent me.
I credit these words with singlehandedly pushing me into the journey I’m on now.
I’ve read about “going green” before… I’ve been hearing about this sort of lifestyle change from many of my friends and family. Although my conscience and spirit instinctively knew it to be the right thing, I was partly skeptical, partly jaded, and partly too lazy to really believe it and act on it.
But reading these lines really, really pushed it into me, the realization that my body responds to everything I give it. Garbage in, garbage out! And the planet is the same way… and we are all connected. ♥
