I’ve been on a health kick lately. Okay, Missy and I have been on a health kick lately. I was trying not to be one of those half-couples that always refers to themselves as a “we” and not an “I” but the truth of the matter is we’re working on this together which means we’re both getting much better results. This health kick has three components: Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred, Bikram Yoga, and my holistic healer guy Byron Jacobson.
So all that exercising I’ve been talking about doesn’t mean squat if I don’t eat better, right? Garbage in, garbage out, whatnot. I think I’ve already mentioned that my eating habits are way better since Missy came into my life, for a few reasons. She likes to cook, so we eat at home. She knows how to cook healthier stuff, so we eat healthier stuff.
She’s been seeing this guy I’ve come to refer to as the “holistic healer guy” on a recommendation from another friend of ours who saw great results for some chronic issues through working with him. His name’s Byron Jacobson and his office is in St Louis Park, MN. Based on what Byron told Missy, she’s made some changes to her diet and has experienced relief from some chronic issues of her own.
I’ve been thinking about making an appointment with Byron ever since Missy’s first visit. I would like to eat more healthfully and I was hoping that Byron would help guide me towards what is and isn’t more healthful for my body specifically. What sold me on Byron is his statement that you should always be working to optimize your health and not solely reacting to the problems you experience. I finally pulled the trigger on that visit this month.
For the last year and a half I’ve been thinking, thinking, and thinking some more about what I eat.
I’ve been inspired by what Steve Pavlina has written about all the experimenting he’s done with his diet. He spent 2008 focusing on his diet. He’d been vegan for years and had done a few raw food trials. He kicked off 2008 with another raw food trial, went back for about 30 seconds, and has stayed raw since. I don’t see myself doing anything even remotely as extensive as he has, but the engineer in me loved reading about all the research he’s done and the analytical results of the changes he experienced. I’ve come to truly believe that your body processes raw foods differently from cooked foods in a way that makes the calorie content almost a non-factor. I.e., your body uses foods it likes so differently (that’s foods your body likes, not foods your brain thinks you like) and so from a health and weight loss standpoint, it doesn’t matter if you consume more calories eating raw food vs a cooked diet. I also belive that this applies to healthy cooked foods vs unhealthy cooked foods, though the degree of difference is smaller.
No, I’m not going on a raw food diet.
Missy and I recently attended a workshop put on by Shine Health Counseling on the topic of why diets don’t work. Basically, just because you eat less calories doesn’t mean the food you’re eating is good for you (which jibes with what I was already thinking). The aha moment was that there’s a yin and yang between foods that have expanding properties and foods that have contracting properties. When you get an overload of something on one end, your body craves stuff at the other end. Fruits and vegetables are closer to the center. Salt and sugar are closer to the extremes. Root vegetables are opposite leafy vegetables. Brown rice is the perfect balance; everyone should swap out white rice for brown rice immediately!
So much thinking. Time for doing. Which brings me back to Byron.
He uses kinisthetic muscle testing which uses weaknesses in your muscle response to indicate specific internal/organ issues. Based on those relationships he determines what foods and other substances your body doesn’t like. If you’ve ever been to a chiropractor once, you may have undergone this test. Your arms and legs will give in response to the pressure whether you want them to or not if there’s a sensitivity or other issue present. It doesn’t at all matter how strong you are.
So Byron has boxes full of small vials containing a variety of substances. He can tell by laying them on my stomach and doing the muscle test on my arm if I’m sensitive to the substance and if a certain remedy will reduce the sensitivity.
My list of sensitivities came out to the following: dairy (knew that), grains, aspartame, plastics (!), and hydrocarbons (!). I’m glad the list is short, but… plastics and hydrocarbons? I wonder if my job has anything do with that. So I’m working on cutting out the dairy. I haven’t specifically cut anything else out yet.
He asked me if anyone in my family had ever had their gall bladder out. My dad did, about 7 years ago, I think. Apparently gall bladder issues are always related to food allergies. Your gall bladder and liver respond to allergies the same way your lungs do: they seize up, contract, restrict blood flow. He did some poking around and apparently my gall bladder was a little unhappy. He determined this not just from physical sensitivity in the vicinity of my gall bladder itself, but also from sensitivity at a referent point located somewhere else entirely on my body and also from my kinisthetic muscle response with and without the addition of specific pressure points.
Byron also noted that my hips were way tilted to one side. I knew that from a short-lived stint with a chiropractor a couple years ago. The chiropractor adjusted me to fix it. Byron massaged it out. I’m hoping the yoga will really help with this. I can tell during yoga that my two hip joints do things a little differently. Clearly my muscles and other joints have adjusted to accommodate this. I’m curious as to what the effects have been (because I can’t tell) or what the possible ramifications of staying a little crooked and tilty are.
So here’s what I’ve done differently so far:
- I’ve cut waaaaaay back on red meat. This seems to pain my mother. I wouldn’t turn down any ribs or burgers or steaks she put on the grill, but it’s not something I eat all the time.
- We got a rice cooker. We’re working on making a batch of brown rice on the weekend and having it to eat with meals throughout the week.
- We’ve been experimenting with quinoa. It’s the only grain that’s also a complete protein. It makes a great pre-yoga snack. You cook it up in vegetable broth, sautee some onion and garlic with it, and you can toss in a variety of stuff like edamame, black beans, raisins, sundried tomatoes, spinach, etc. Whatever sounds tasty. The texture kind of reminds me of tabbouleh.
- I came home from my inital Byron visit with a bunch of enzymes (four tablets and two sprays) and a probiotic. He said my body wasn’t responding to the cheaper probiotic that Missy takes. It asked for the more expensive one, even though he tried to give me the cheap one. Great! The first month’s supply is mostly about detox, I think. He also told me my body didn’t want the multivitamin I had been taking but the calcium supplement was okay. I’m visiting him again next week to see what kind of progress I’ve made.
- We’re much more attentive to avoiding high fructose corn syrup. I’m having a dilemma over pop. I finally got a trio of pops that I like: Coke Zero, Diet A&W, and Fresca. No high fructose corn syrup and no calories! But there is aspartame in them. And they still invoke an insulin response on your body, but since there’s no actual sugar, your body doesn’t know what to do after that. Better off to actually drink the full sugar pop which will reduce later cravings for sugar. The answer is to not drink pop at all, but I’m not there yet. Interestingly, after one of my first yoga classes, I came home thinking that a Fresca would be nice and refreshing but I really couldn’t bear the thought of putting that into my body after I had just spent 90 minutes sweating all the toxins out.
- I learned during my dairy-free February experiment that I actually eat much less dairy than I thought I did. This is due to Missy’s already having done a lot of work cutting dairy out of her diet. The main thing for me now is cutting out cheese. I’ve already happily substituted guacamole for cheese and sour cream (and cut out rice all together) in my Chipotle orders. Most times you can’t even tell the difference in a cheese-less sandwich. Pizza is going to be the biggest challenge here. We don’t eat a lot of it, but one of my favorite local joints is an awesome pizza place and it’s a half mile from our house.
- I drink a lot more water. This is partly because I have to to make it through yoga without passing out, partly because I have a hard time swallowing pills and now that I take 19 of them per day it takes a lot of water to wash them all down, and partly because I’m just trying harder.
I heard Sean Bonner give a talk at SXSW Interactive 2008 about the radical lifestyle changes he’s made. He mainly talked about riding his bike everywhere and going vegan. He said — and this has stuck with me ever since — that you don’t really know how badly you were feeling until you don’t feel that way anymore.
So between Byron’s recommendations and what I’m learning about what I should and shouldn’t eat, I’m hoping that… I don’t know, I’ll feel something different and better. I don’t actually have a specific goal in mind like weight loss. Right now I’m just working to optimize my health.
Except I wouldn’t be mad at dropping a few pounds. I can’t help but feel that that would be a reliable indicator of progress. But I’m trying really hard to not be tied to that as an outcome. I’ve done a little bit of reading on colon cleanses (no current plans for that, but it’s simultaneously fascinating and squicky reading). Knowing that scouring out my intestines could result in weight loss of 10 or 20 pounds without changing the way my clothes fit hammers home that you can’t be tied to the numbers on the scale. I know all this in my head, but I’m still working on internalizing it.
Just like yoga, it’s the process.
