A Long and Healthy Life

By Dean Fraser

Dean Fraser

Our human body is the only physical means we have at our disposal to enjoy this amazing bluey green planet of ours!

It makes perfect sense then the fewer stresses we put on our physical body and digestive system by choosing carefully what is taken into it, the easier time it is going to have.

Personally I have found during the course of the last three decades plus of studying how my own body reacts to what I choose to nourish it with, it functions better by giving it mostly unprocessed food. The more natural my chosen food stuff is, the smaller the list of ingredients on any kind of label gracing the packaging, the healthier and happier my body is.

Eating food free from artificial colours/sugars, flavour enhancers, e-numbers and artificial preservatives means our delicately balanced digestive system is going to have an easier time coping with it.

So many of us tend to eat as regular as clockwork and this can leave us feeling either hungry, in those times when we are burning those extra calories or else overfull, because we ate when the clock told us it was time for lunch, even if we didn’t actually feel like it right now.

Develop the habit of eating when hungry, rather than when the clock insists it is our mealtime. This is listening to the needs of our body and places far less stress on our digestive system.

Grazing throughout the day; eating a little often, gives our digestion an easier time by never stressing it. Further on this subject, overburdening our body and this applies even with the healthiest food or drink if we overeat, is putting unnecessary strain on our finely tuned digestive system.

ANOTHER CHOICE

As someone who then lived the urban life, the invitation to spend a few days staying right in the heart of the country on the poultry farm owned by my extended family was an opportunity I readily jumped at.

We seldom realise beforehand those pivotal moments which happen in life, this was to be just such an experience.

Arriving late at night, the following morning I got the guided tour of the farm, consisting of shed after giant shed of caged battery-hens. Entering the first shed to witness first-hand the stark reality of the confined life of these hens left me shocked and horrified. Over the next couple of days of my vacation I occasionally ventured solo to peer into the sheds, observing more closely, but only from the safety of the doorway. If you have never seen such a place, let me tell you the stench and sound is overwhelming, that combined with the sight of tens of thousands of tightly caged birds ensured I left after a few days, to return to my life resolutely vegetarian and seeking to know more.

A vegetarian diet uses about 25% of the land required to feed a meat eater annually. For a vegan it is only 20%. Of two identical areas of land, one purely for rearing cows and the other given over to vegan food, the vegan plot will feed up to five times as many people. This crop will also require a minute percentage of water needed by the cattle, and of course, none of the methane our bovine friends produce (adding to greenhouse gasses) will be produced by that field of wheat!

Vast areas of land, including the rainforest have been or are being cleared to rear livestock for consumption. Over half of the grain produced in the world is used to feed livestock; of which but a small proportion (some estimate as low as just 10%) could instead be used to feed all of us across the world.

Having become established as a vegetarian, I later graduated to vegan and am currently macrobiotic vegan, through listening to my intuition during a recent journey to self-healing.

I attribute much of my ongoing wellbeing to also becoming entirely free of sugar or artificial sugars in my diet; more of which shortly.

I drink plenty of water (but not too much) and get plenty of exercise. If I cannot get out and take a walk (my favourite form of exercise) I ensure to make the effort to have a 15-20-minute aerobic work-out with weights at home each day. A few years ago, I decided it would be a good idea to take myself off to my chosen healthcare provider and get a full physical. As a validation to myself I am doing things right. Imagine my delight when she told me I have the physiology and level of fitness of a healthy twenty-five-year-old (I am not twenty-five).

BROWN RICE

This does have a bit of an image problem here in the West, I get that. Brown rice has become a little synonymous with VW campervans, the tie-dyed hippie movement and free love. I love hippies by the way; I have been labelled The Hippie Holistic Coach by the press on more than one occasion due to my uncompromisingly approach to wellbeing and more than likely, my bohemian appearance.

The simple truth is pure brown rice benefits one and all. In the Far East brown rice is an essential part of the diet.This ancient grain is one of the purest foods we can eat. Naturally high in fibre, brown rice still contains all those essential vitamins and minerals which get removed when it is processed to make white rice.

I recommend this staple of the macrobiotic diet, regardless of your own dietary lifestyle. Brown rice added into weekly meal plans, ensures you are taking into your body one of the most natural foods on the planet.

Eating not only brown rice, but other natural grains such as whole-wheat, rye and barley and avoiding refined white flour or synthetically processed foodstuff, ensures we fuel our bodies in the purest way. Combined with fresh vegetables, beans and pulses we eat as holistically as possible.

VITAMINS

We have easy access to just about every and any type of possible vitamin, mineral or supplement conceived of or imagined. All we need to do is hit any high street or go online. Yet how many of these vits do we genuinely need to be taking and how many are simply passing through our bodies serving little useful purpose or even physically harming us?

During the last thirty years or so I confess, as a health aware vegan, I must have sampled at one time or another pretty much every of the myriads of different vitamin and mineral concoctions available; the promised goal being to replace the essential elements vegans apparently miss out on through avoiding meat, dairy and fish.

The message here is vits are easily obtainable and we are all free to self-diagnose. If you do genuinely feel you could use some extra vitamins over and above your usual diet, take the time to go and get checked by your chosen healthcare provider. That way you are sure to be supplementing with vits or minerals you genuinely need short term. Then take the care to look at what could be added into your diet for the long-term fix.

If you are veggie or vegan, it is practically mandatory to have your B vits checked periodically as a matter of course and for peace of mind. A nicely balanced diet might well render further supplementation obsolete.

The other point we need to bear in mind is our needs are more than likely going to be entirely different during the summer months as opposed to winter, if your instinct is you would benefit from supplementation, a visit to your choice of healthcare provider allows you to know for sure. Facts when it comes to our wellbeing are always preferable to guesswork!

SUGARS

And so finally we arrive at the subject of sugar, the avoidance of which in any form has become one of my own personal passions!

I need to qualify before we start this section, I am not a nutritionist, and whilst we all need to develop the habit of listening to the needs of our own bodies, nevertheless before contemplating any extreme dietary changes it is wise to firstly consult your chosen healthcare provider.

And now back to sugar…

Too many refined, artificial or even natural sugars which are added into thousands of the things we eat is asking a lot from our bodies to be able to absorb these alien substances which have only really become such a high percentage content of our diets in the last fifty or sixty years.

There’s an excellently researched book called Sugar Blues by William Dufty; although written back in the 1970’s, its continued relevance today cannot be understated. If serious about wellbeing I do recommend you read this or a similar book.

Sugar causes highs and lows in our moods. And yet so many of us are unaware of just how many refined sugars we are taking into our bodies every single day. Sugar is added to practically every single processed food. Even if you think you might well be enjoying a low-sugar diet, check out all those ingredients and you will find virtually everything does indeed contain sugar or artificial sugar concealed under one name or another.

COMMONLY USED NAMES FOR SUGARS AND SUGAR ALTERNATIVES – Aspartame, Syrup, Fructose, Saccharin, Sucralose, Sorbitol, Glycerol, Dextrose, Concentrated Fruit Juice, Galactose, Corn Syrup, Ethyl Maltol, Glucose Syrup, Maltodextrin and Barley Malt; there are literally hundreds of chemical and e-numbers manufacturers of foodstuff and cosmetics use in place of simply stating sugar on their list of ingredients.

Sugar gives us that familiar high. It contains absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, but it certainly does give us a high. That energy rush, unfortunately shortly afterwards comes the crash. Then we feel lacking in energy. Yet not only does sugar affect us physically, it directly influences our moods.

Wendy felt incredibly down and lacking in motivation a lot of the time. Digging down into her life revealed nothing of any real consequence which might be causing her to feel this way. She had no health issues or stresses beyond what most of us experience. I followed my intuition to suggest to Wendy she might like to adjust her diet for a minimum of two weeks by cutting out as much sugar and artificial sugar that she felt comfortably able to. She duly reported back after this fortnight she felt like her life had been transformed, experiencing a sense of being so much more in control of her emotional wellbeing and balanced in her moods.

Ponder deeply sugar, by all means research it online - but first a word of caution. Be sure to read from reputable sources, a fair percentage of the online ‘research’ relating to sugar has been rather sneakily funded by a certain global high-profile soft drink manufacturer. Not exactly unbiased advice! Shame they aren’t as public in admitting the phosphoric acid used in their soda is made out of horse urine; still as it only makes up 10% of the content of their popular soda I guess that’s all okay…

After looking into sugar and its side effects, you agree with me this is not something which ought to be part of your diet – start to gradually reduce your sugar intake. Don’t go cold-turkey and cut it completely out of your diet, gently easing away from sugar will put far less stress on your body.

As part of my own healing journey a short while ago I decided overnight to abruptly adopt this no sugar and free-from artificial sugar lifestyle. Convinced as I personally was, through paying attention to clues from my body, sugar had contributed greatly to the health issues I found myself dealing with. This left me with no choice; I had to go cold-turkey. Having experienced that particular rollercoaster I can share with you gradually reducing our sugar intake is for sure the gentler way of doing things!

If you too go sugar free, you are going to soon feel the difference in your life. There will be a period of withdrawal, stay with it anyway and persist until your body is cleared of all those processed sugars.

I wake in the morning energized and have the most amazingly balanced moods/emotions I have experienced at any time in my life.

ORGANIC

There is organic food and then there is ethically produced organic food.

Some of the animal waste based organic fertilizers, such as chicken pellet manure commercially used by growers and directly available to us via garden stores, has been produced as a by-product of factory farming in one form or another. This might be okay for many people; however, with the broader picture of ethics taken into consideration, feeding our plants with the by-product of a brutally efficient system of farming can hardly help us to grow happy botanical specimens.

The same applies with pesticides. Rather than drenching our food in chemicals like most commercial growers do, there are more natural ways of doing things. Permaculture is an example, the planting of sympathetic plants to protect one another from likely pests. Using essential oils such as citronella as a repellent to avoid crops being eaten by insects or lavender to discourage weeds are becoming more widespread. There is a wealth of reliable information on the internet
from organizations such as The Soil Association and a version of the Organic Consumers Network exists in one form or another in most countries.

If you are buying most of your foodstuffs in from grocery stores, a little personal investigation into where their products come from and how they are grown can pay dividends. Alternatively, growing your own fruit and vegetables puts you in control of what products go onto them and happily there is a wealth of ethical organic options out there, either for fertilizing or pest control.

ABOUT DEAN FRASER

I began my quest to learn more about human potential well over three decades ago. Taking a year out from my corporate life, I read hundreds of books, travelled to visit ancient sacred sites and networked with fellow seekers of wisdom from around the world. I qualified in Body Language Psychology which acted as a springboard to my life's quest to help others discover the reason they incarnated on this beautiful planet of ours at this time. I never returned to the corporate world. Each year I write for thirty magazines across the world on ways of living in harmony and wellbeing with ourselves.

https://www.deanfrasercentral.com

Share this article with friends!