Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (34 page)

If you read over the menu for the dinner I described, you will note the following: no dairy, no grains, no soy, no sugar, and no sweeteners of any kind. At the time, I was following a one-month nutritional reset program called Whole30, with meals that included meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fruit, with some healthy oils and herbs for flavoring. The only thing I missed was having a little stevia in my coffee or iced tea, but now that I have a sweet life, I don’t need to import as much sweetness via my food as I used to. I’m back to using stevia now, but much less than before. I see I was mindlessly consuming it more than I really felt the need to.

Enjoying life makes it easier to enjoy food that nourishes your body. You don’t have to look to food to be your friend or therapist. If you have a love/hate relationship with food, this chapter
will help you learn to make peace with it. It can be done! If you want to live agelessly, break the old habit of mindlessly tossing processed convenience foods into your grocery cart. By knowing what healthy and delicious foods to enjoy (think creamy avocados, fresh nuts or blueberries, and so on), you’ll find it easier to make changes in your diet. Eating well is never about deprivation or being “bad.” And it’s simple to eat for your heart, your brain, your hormones, and your overall health because the right food takes care of the entire body. What’s more, you’ll find that healthy food is delicious and satisfying, not boring, repetitious, or lacking in taste and texture.

I want you to notice something. I purposely started this chapter with a description of a pleasurable dining experience complete with candlelight and good company. It sounded good, right? Though I was describing a meal created within dietary “restrictions,” I wasn’t telling you what I was depriving myself of and what I was “allowed” to eat. I was describing a meal that tasted wonderful and was rich in delightful textures, colors, and smells. It was a meal I shared with others who weren’t following the program but who also enjoyed it and had a wonderful evening. When it comes to food, you must learn to eat like a goddess who loves the bounty before her and deserves to enjoy every bite. The language and thought forms of restriction, deprivation, and shame when it comes to food will hold you back from flourishing. They have to go!

TAKING THE “DIE” OUT OF “DIET”

There are hundreds of “miracle diets” out there. You read about them in every magazine. All of them work for a while, but none of them is sustainable. I know you’ve probably tried many of them only to go back to unhealthy eating, bouncing between deprivation and plenty, frustration and indulgence, pride and guilt. Food has become too much of a drama for too many of us.

I’ve personally been on dozens of diets, fasts, and juice fasts since the age of 13. Back in my 30s, I was a macrobiotic vegan until I noticed that my hair and nails were brittle and I was gaining weight on all that grain. I’ve done Atkins, HCG,
Fuhrman—the list goes on and on. And because of my large bone structure and ease at building muscle, I’ve always weighed more than the “ideal” that my five-foot-four self is supposed to weigh. I happen to know that if given the choice between being fabulously healthy but 20 pounds heavier or being glamorously slim, most women would choose slim. That’s why women continue to smoke and take diet pills.

My weight is now stable—and all my clothes fit. I ditched my daily weighing habit about a year ago because I realized that I was treating my body like an enemy who would betray me with weight gain if I didn’t keep her on a really tight leash. Talk about a setup for shame and failure! Yes, I’m probably five to ten pounds heavier than I’d like to be, the same five to ten pounds I’ve battled with for the past 30 years. I would “lose” them, but they would inevitably “find” me again. I had a cold war going on with my weight for decades! But today, those pounds and I are coexisting in peace. And after a year of “recovery,” I can now step on the scale without a surge of adrenaline or self-recrimination.

I have said again and again that women need to think and talk about health differently. Constantly expecting that something will go wrong, and watching for it warily, is a sign of not trusting your ability to remain healthy. The same thing can happen with weight. You have to trust that your body is capable of reaching and maintaining a healthy weight. Otherwise, what you resist, in the form of “forbidden” foods and excess weight, will persist. You’ll feel deprived and eat the brownies and chips, or stress yourself out over your weight, which will end up causing soaring stress hormone levels that, all by themselves, result in weight gain and inflammation—no matter what you eat. I now realize that by resisting that “last five to ten pounds,” I was cementing them into place.

For some women, weighing themselves daily keeps them feeling in control of their weight. They see the number on the scale go up toward the top end of that five to ten pounds and they become a little more mindful of what they eat, how much they exercise and sleep, and how well they’re handling stress (since stress and weight gain are often related). The number goes down a little after some minor adjustments to their choices for a few
days or weeks. Other women rarely weigh themselves and rely on how their pants fit as an indicator of whether they need to be a bit more mindful about making healthy choices. However, for many women, stepping on a scale every day just adds to their stress over their weight. As you develop a healthier attitude toward food and your body, you’ll know whether you want to get rid of the scale or not. Trust yourself. Trust your body to do what it needs to do with the food you eat. And take pleasure in preparing and eating good food fit for a goddess.

WHAT’S EATING YOU?

Sometimes callers on my radio show will tell me that they’re eating beautifully—meals and snacks that any nutritionist would rate an A-plus—yet they’re having health problems. It’s not what they’re eating but what’s eating them. In their quest to be the perfect woman who takes care of everyone and never breaks a sweat, they dutifully fill their plates with wild-caught salmon, pomegranate seeds, and organic broccoli—but they’re moody, bloated, and losing their hair. The real problem for them isn’t the occasional piece of chocolate they might have. The real problem is forgoing the sweetness of life in an attempt to achieve “perfection” and beat their true appetites into submission. This is what raises stress hormones to levels as toxic as the most highly processed foods do!

Shame about what you’re eating creates tremendous anxiety, so just take a moment right now and pay attention to your stomach. Is it relaxed? Happy? Content? Or is it tense? Worried? Bring awareness to your stomach. That’s all you have to do. Awareness itself begins to heal the problem. No one eats perfectly all the time. You can enjoy food. You can recover from food fundamentalism. But first, you have to become aware of it.

Doesn’t it seem that no matter what you want to eat, there’s somebody who thinks you should feel guilty for putting it on your plate? The food police are everywhere, and most of us have internalized their scolding voices. I remember years ago when I was newly macrobiotic and went to the local macrobiotic restaurants, people who knew me from my work would come over
and say hello, and their eyes would quickly run over my plate. I could tell they wanted to be sure I was following the rules of macrobiotic eating. Was there a forbidden food there? Was I a “good” macrobiotic eater? As I got to know them and hear them talk obsessively about what you should or shouldn’t have in your diet, I learned most of them smoked and drank. Their attitudes toward food and their bodies were as dysfunctional and destructive as the attitudes of people who brag about eating the quadruple bypass burger with extra bacon. (And the pride those people take in that is reflective of an outmoded way of thinking anyway, because, as you’ll learn shortly, fat—even saturated animal fat—is not the problem we’ve been led to believe it is.) Extremes in eating aren’t the way to go, but it’s hard to resist those judgmental voices about “good foods” and “bad foods” when they’re everywhere.

Often, food represents “mother” and what we did and didn’t get from Mom. How an infant is fed trains that baby’s gut and brain to internalize what is good, loving food and what isn’t. Taste is learned at our mother’s breasts. In fact, breast-fed infants of smokers actually learn to prefer the taste of milk laced with the taste of cigarettes. As adults, we often try to nurture ourselves through food when what we really want is affection, love, and attention. Now is the time to stop meeting your emotional needs with unhealthy foods. As an ageless goddess, you deserve better.

Often, as you enter your ageless years, your body does you a big favor by sending you clear signals that it is no longer okay for you to nourish everyone but yourself—to eat whatever’s available, whatever’s left over, whatever no one else wants, whatever feels good in the moment but not so good in the long term. “Good enough” food is no longer good enough. You have to start taking care of yourself in a sustainable way. Over the years, after a few decades of the wrong foods, the digestive system changes and the body produces fewer digestive enzymes, which means the sugary treats or deep-fried foods that contain gluten, trans fats, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and refined sugar start talking to you very quickly in the form of bloating, gas, cramps, and other stomach distress. You can walk around with a baggie of enzymes and probiotics to use in a pinch, but it’s better to listen
to the wisdom of your body when it says, “Enough. I deserve real food. I love you too much to let this continue!”

The question is, do you know what you can be eating instead to fill you up, satisfy you, nourish you, and keep your body humming?

WHAT TO EAT

In recent years we’ve learned so much more about food and nutrition that it can be hard to keep up with just what constitutes healthy eating, so let me start by keeping it simple. I love what author and food activist Michael Pollan says: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He also says if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it, you probably shouldn’t eat it.

While it’s important to eat whole foods—mostly plants—you do need to be moderate when it comes to eating grain because our bodies rapidly turn grain into sugar, which causes all sorts of problems, including weight gain. Believe it or not, there’s evidence that even the ancient Egyptians got overly fat on grain. We eat far too much sugar to burn it off quickly, and too often our meals center on bread, pasta, cereal, muffins—you name it. Even whole grains are problematic and too easily become a substitute for vegetables and healthy proteins.

Because of addictive and ubiquitous fast foods, along with the combined effects of high insulin, blood sugar, stress hormones, and our current culture, eating well takes more planning than it used to. My father, who was a holistic dentist, used to give his patients who were on antibiotics natural yogurt that my mom made at home. He understood that the probiotics in yogurt would counteract the negative effects of antibiotics, which kill bacteria that cause infections (a good thing) along with bacteria that are beneficial for digestion (not so good—and you’ll learn why in a bit). Nowadays when you go to a typical grocery store to buy yogurt, if you read the labels, you find that what’s in those little plastic cartons is very different from what yogurt used to be. You can even get yogurt that’s neon pink and green and comes in a plastic tube with a cartoon character on it—and they sell that at health food stores!

You have to read labels and understand them, or prepare foods yourself with ingredients you trust that are whole and fresh. The more processed a food is—the further removed it is from nature—the more likely it is to spike your blood sugar or contain toxins. You may already know that if the label for a simple food has 12 ingredients, most of which you can’t pronounce, it’s best to put it back on the shelf. It’s likely to sit there unspoiled for many months, because bacteria can’t break down something that really isn’t food. It’s also important to avoid food dyes and artificial flavors (which sometimes are called “natural flavorings” because some lawyer for a large company got the food labeling laws changed). All of these ingredients are better off remaining in the chemist’s lab where they were created! And too much refined sugar, artificial sugars, and processed sugars from corn (think high fructose corn syrup) aren’t good for you either. Now add to that the adverse effects of MSG, which is added to huge numbers of foods, and you have a perfect setup for weight and health problems.

ENJOYING EARTH’S BOUNTY

As I was preparing a lecture for a large group of nutrition students recently, I was going through some of my very striking before-and-after photos of individuals who had radically improved their health by switching to a whole-food, organically grown diet. Their faces and bodies had transformed within a matter of a couple of months. Indeed, improving your diet is one of the most powerful reset buttons available. Thinking about the power of organically grown food to improve appearance and health, I realized that eating organic food is like breast-feeding from the earth herself. Improving the quality of what you eat is like a rebirth because the earth produces the very foods you need to flourish.

Begin with rich greens and reds and oranges and yellows that burst forth in the garden at harvest time. There’s nothing more delicious than taking the time to prepare a marvelous meal with fresh ingredients and enjoying it thoroughly—especially if you do it with people you’re close to, as I’ve mentioned. It turns out that most of the members of my Argentine tango community are foodies. That makes sense. Those who savor the pleasures of close-embrace dancing also savor the pleasures of eating. Our potlucks are legendary feasts. My friend Leftari says, “I love to cook so much that honey drips from my fingers into the food.”
Believe me, when you eat his food, you can
taste
the love. Here’s a prayer to reinforce healthy, pleasurable eating: “Divine Beloved, please change me into someone who is surrounded by beautiful healthy food and those who love to prepare, serve, and eat it.”