Letter #6: Diet Discernment and Determination
A real salad for the taste buds!
Dear Friend
Circa 2010… a year or so since changing my diet and discovering that this changed my whole level of health and wellbeing - in mind just as much as body…
I arrived at Khun Churn’s for lunch in the swanky part of Chiang Mai. I was meeting my good friend there, and this was our number one place for lunch at that time. I used to think it was the place for lunch in the whole town!
Khun Churn translated into English means Uncle Churn. I never knew who the uncle actually was.
It was an absolutely buzzing place in those days, tremendously popular with all health-conscious people and/or vegetarians who loved good healthy food. It was a sort of outdoor restaurant, half undercover, and half out in the open with many tables, each under their own big sunshade umbrellas.
In the undercover bit was all the food: the salad area, the soups area, the stir-fried foods area, the grilled foods area, the curries area and so on. There was also a choice of about five different herbal drinks, in large jars with ladles to scoop out your glassful.
It was a buffet made in heaven, and not an ounce of meat or dairy foods there - good food most certainly doesn’t have to include animal foods. They did, however, have hard boiled eggs in the salad section.
They always had that sort of jazz/lounge kind of music playing at a background volume, which lent to the whole ambience of chicness: it was a place to be, for all the reasons you want in an eatery. Many people would always be there, but with so many tables you’d usually get one without trouble.
Lunch-goers were animated, smiling, laughing, and exuding a positive energy. Most looked healthy, self-assured, and happy to be alive. The whole place suited my new, healthy, vibrant guise in life down to the ground.
As was my habit upon arriving, I perused all the main dishes to see what choices there were, wondering if any of my favourites were there that day. My favourite curry was indeed there. I was salivating already!
However, I liked to start with a small plate of salad, so I sorted that out (this offering had loads of different foods, not just your tomato, lettuce and onion) and then went over to sit with my friend.
As I sat down I said with great enthusiasm, “Fantastic, they’ve got the banana flower soup today.”
He burst out laughing, which I didn’t quite get until he said, “Look at what you’re getting excited over these days, and how things have changed”. He was right, I was buzzing because I would be eating flowers - not the likes of steak and prawns, or stilton and wine, but flowers and herbal teas!
We chatted, animatedly, and as always I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch, and managed to not overeat. It was also at this time that lunches started to become more of a thing than dinners for me, leaving me no temptations with the alcohol, and enabling me to stick to my new 10pm bedtime.
Definitely from my experience, changing one’s diet leads to changes in lifestyle.
Sadly a few years later Khun Churn’s relocated to a new place, and while it carried on being really popular for its magnificent array of healthy foods, that perfect ambience was gone. It has since moved on again, and in recent times I don’t even know where they are now.
~~~~~
Philip’s Top 10 Tips for Changing your Diet
In this Letter I want to share my absolute basics when it comes to food, nutrition, diet and your eating habits. I will say more about food frequently throughout the year in future Letters, as our diet is foundational to our life if we wish to live with health and wellbeing.
My objective, today, is for you to use these basics to guide you in selecting a diet which will support your health, and act as the solid foundation for transforming your life into one which you find fulfilling, meaningful, rewarding, and above all, healthy and joyful.
My experience, and that of many people I’ve chatted to, is that eating a healthy diet transforms not only the energy and vitality we feel in our body, but also our mood, our mental wellbeing. I’m convinced that much of the anger, frustration, anxiety, depression and general lack of positive energy in today’s world is down to the poor diet that most people now consume.
The reason I’m cutting it right down to basics is that from my extensive research, from 2008 onwards, I can tell you that there is conflicting information on just about everything in relation to what constitutes a healthy diet, and which foods are good or bad for you. It’s astonishing all this differing information, and it can certainly be confusing. And I’m talking about what I have discerned to be credible sources of information too.
It’s why I’m wary whenever I do my research and read people being certain that xzy or abc is good for us.
I want to give you the perfect springboard, and as it turns out there are some sound principles that I feel apply to everybody. We will focus on these principles and understandings.
First, in brief:
Don’t go on a diet, change your diet
Mindset shift needed
We have to take responsibility for our own wellness
Eat a whole food diet, and avoid consuming corporation-made foods
Be aware of, and avoid, the SAD: Standard American Diet
Whole foods
Raw vs cooked foods, solids vs liquids
A change in diet leads naturally to lifestyle changes
Create time and space to reflect upon your life
Ayurveda, Blood Type Diet, and Acid-forming vs Alkaline-forming foods
Task
Before you read the longer version of this list, read through the 10 items again, and ask yourself what they mean to you. Then read on.
In detail
#1 When we talk about a diet, it is not to go on a diet to lose weight, because when we go ON something we will assuredly come OFF it. No, what we want is to CHANGE our diet, and we choose one which will support our health and nourish our body. Notice the subtle shift in mindset: the aim is health and wellbeing, not thinness!
When you eat a healthy diet, your body will slowly find its natural weight for your personal constitution. So just aim for a healthy, tasty diet and let nature do its work on your body.
You can make initial changes, and then tweak it as you become more attuned to what your body is telling you. See it as an evolutionary journey.
#2 To successfully change your diet requires you to make some key mindset shifts, otherwise you’re going to struggle with temptations:
your body is your temple, not a trash can, and you are a beautiful human being worthy of living with health, harmony and happiness.
you will need to create more time to make or prepare your foods and meals
you will need to make sure you are eating plenty of foods you like
make it your default diet, and allow yourself to break it from time to time if you so feel like it.
I will add that when I made the break back in 2008, changing my diet overnight all in one go, I quickly found that all these healthier foods actually increased my enjoyment of food. I had no cravings for any of my foods that were dropped from my diet.
There is absolutely no need to think that a healthy diet is going to be boring, or just composed of rabbit food and chunks of tofu steak!
#3 Here is some crucial information which applies across the board in life, but which we can truly grasp as we adjust to a new diet:
there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to living with wellness.
This assertion goes against western science, western medicine, nearly all diet books and the way our whole society is set up, which has been on a relentless push to herd us all into one way of life.
It means a hugely important thing which will act as the basis for your self-empowerment and transformation:
Wellness is a personal thing, you have to learn what works for you, you have to discern what dietary choices are bringing you vitality, clarity and energy to you. You become fully responsible for you. You become your own expert, your own guru, your own nutritionist. It takes time, but this is non-negotiable: responsibility is the essential precursor to freedom, and freedom brings joy, love, peace, connection and vitality to our life.
This is massive. Our schooling denied us any chance of developing responsibility for ourselves and for our own thinking, and so our societies have a plethora of experts such as scientists, doctors, researchers, academics, educators, life coaches, spiritual gurus, and we also defer to government, science and media for important matters in this world.
We therefore lack the skills, know-how and confidence to truly be responsible for our own life.
That must change if you are to empower yourself and transform your experience of life. By changing your diet and learning how to discern the messages you get from your body, you have the perfect vehicle for becoming your own guru. And as I say, dietary changes will naturally lead you to other changes in other areas of your life.
We cannot go to doctors and ask for wellness, from them we can only get pills to treat illness!
You can pay for nutritionists and the like, but again, they will offer you conflicting information, and it will keep you dependent on others for your wellness. Make your wellbeing your responsibility. Learn to discern information which comes from people offering integrity, insight and intelligence, and then test it out for yourself.
Learn, also, to listen to your body and discern what it is telling you.
Become your own amateur scientist which I always remember as ROV, but which runs in this order:
observe >> replicate >> verify.
This is exactly the process of science, and any of us ordinary mortals can do it to enhance our own life.
#4 Consume whole foods and drinks, and avoid consuming corporation-made foods and drinks.
This for me constitutes the main diet which is suitable for (just about) every single human being on the planet.
There is little room for conflicting information here! This is THE diet to end all diets. Whole foods are natural foods, produced by our Mother Earth for us. Notice it has no name, so nobody is marketing it! It’s the supreme self-empowering diet.
The key to this diet is that we avoid foods and drinks which harm our health, and then we choose from what is left. You view your body as a temple, and refuse to treat it as a trash can.
Corporation-made foods are those that make use of refined sugars, flours and oils, and are processed foods, coming in packets, tins, boxes, containers, jars and so on. Many of their ingredients are genetically modified too, which just adds to the horror show.
Avoid junk and fast foods, avoid fizzy soda drinks, avoid packaged foods with lists of ingredients that have strange-sounding words and INS numbers (the old E numbers). INS numbers are all things like flavourings, additives, preservatives, colourings and other kinds of chemicals which I simply assume to all be toxic to the body.
Once in a while is no big drama, but when such foods are a staple part of your diet you are constantly subjecting your liver and immune system to a lot of work, and it is this that leads to ailments, skin problems, digestion issues and all manner of physical afflictions.
It’s another topic for another time, but ailments, afflictions and symptoms are the body’s effort to detoxify itself from what we’ve put in it!
It may well be useful to not associate the words ‘vegan’ and ‘vegetarian’ as being synonymous with healthy foods. Lots of processed and refined foods are non-animal foods, but harm your physical and mental health.
#5 Be aware of the SAD: Standard American Diet.
This includes things like burgers, pizzas, hot dogs, bacon, sliced meats in packets with INS numbers in them, crisps/chips, ice-creams, donuts, cakes, cookies, white bread, pies, colas and other fizzy drinks, processed meats, processed cheese, refined grains/carbohydrates, and lots of fried foods including fried chicken.
Such foods are filled with refined sugar, flour and oils, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS; which is also genetically modified), toxic chemicals, and all in all such a diet says that our body is a trash can suitable only for garbage.
If we have any sense of self-worth and love for life, we will get rid of all of this from our diet. I will add that the food corporations actually employ people—they call them ‘craveability experts’, no kidding—to devise ‘foods’ which are designed to be addictive, so if you eat a lot of them, you may need to conjure up plenty of determination during the first few weeks.
Wean your tongue off them and stop adding to their profit bank - these corporations not only harm us but also our environments and ecosystems.
The odd pizza or packet of crisps or whatever will do no harm, but I found that once I had got used to my new diet and my much greater levels of vitality and clarity, I just didn’t want any of this in my body. I previously loved my stilton and other cheeses, but I did not miss them.
I will sometimes eat biscuits or sliced meats or white bread on holidays in western countries (because it’s so prevalent), but my default diet means none of it passes my lips except on rare occasions. I also find I eat more meat and dairy on such holidays, and I definitely notice a sluggishness coming to me after a week or so.
Most supermarket foods are bad for our health. Even the good stuff, in #6, has usually been sprayed with toxic pesticides and various chemicals, picked too early, grown in depleted soils and so on.
#6 Whole foods can be of both plant and animal origin. Whole foods include:
whole, unrefined grains
vegetables and legumes
mushrooms
fruits
nuts and seeds
herbs, spices and superfoods
flowers and leaves
teas and natural coffee (not the processed coffee in jars)
eggs
butter and ghee
cold-pressed unrefined oils
meats, but not sliced meats in packets with INS numbers listed
fish and poultry
and various natural beverages such as fruit shakes, kombucha, kefir, fruit juices, veggie juices
There is conflicting information about the role of animal foods in our diet, and I will come back to that next week. As I’m writing now, I realise I should continue with this theme of diet and nutrition next week. I will also share with you what my changed diet looked like, and how it has evolved over the last 15 years or so.
I don’t sweat over it, but I always like to get brown bread, brown rice, brown pasta, and other whole, unrefined grains. It’s rare I eat their white counterparts. I avoid white sugar almost totally.
#7 Raw vs cooked foods, solids vs liquids.
Early in my journey into healthy living, I came across many people in the books, on websites and in person who advocated we should only eat raw food, including meats!
This was not the kind of information I liked, because I was not into the idea of radically changing my diet, and I had always eaten cooked foods as well as some raw foods. I was also mindful of making demands on my wife when she was cooking dinners.
This illustrates that there is so much more to living with wellness than simply making one or two changes. We really do have to try and discern information and see how it applies to our common sense, instinct, and logic. But you will be developing the crucial ability of awareness and self-awareness to help you along the way.
My conclusion was that I wanted to have both cooked and raw foods in my diet, and that I should makes sure I also included liquid foods, such as soups, smoothies, juices and so on. No fizzy drinks, really really bad for our health!
I once read that we should ‘drink’ our solid foods by chewing thoroughly, and ‘eat’ our drinks by mixing with saliva before swallowing. Saliva is the first stage of the whole digestive process.
#8 Diet change means lifestyle change, so be prepared to evolve and act with flexibility, and to avoid being listening to the anti-change inner voice!
This is something we find out for ourselves. For example, I have two standard breakfasts I make for myself (I will share them next week), and both of them take a good half an hour to make. Busy people may kid themselves they don’t have time for this.
I would counter that this means the busy person is too busy to look after their own health, and what is more important in life?
Secondly, and you may recall this task a couple of Letters ago, just go to bed earlier, and wake up earlier, and now you have the time to make a proper breakfast!
Eating a healthy diet will lead to improved quality of sleep, and so such a lifestyle change comes naturally. This is what I mean when I talk about our journey just evolving and unfolding as we go along.
#9 Make time and space for your reflection on how things are going whenever you make changes in your life.
Crucial, very very crucial!!
This is my teacher self speaking, but also what I’ve done as an integral part of my life for 33 years since I accidentally emigrated to Thailand.
Early on in my own diet change, probably for about two or three years on and off, I would keep what I call my ‘Food and Feelings’ diary. For weeks or months at a time I would record everything that I ate, drank or smoked* every day, and how I felt. A big acid test was sleep, sleeping right through the night was now the norm, and then how I felt upon waking up. At times I would almost leap out of bed with energy!
(*I still could not fully give up the cigarettes at the time, but I only smoked on Fridays in the pub for pool league nights. However, I'm smoke-free completely for about 8 years now, so 'be patient and keep trying' is my tip for smokers!)
What I was doing was learning the connections between what I put into my body and how my body and mind would feel.
When I went back to England, I could see how the diet I was eating was robbing me of vitality and flexibility in my body. Before a year was up, in my new approach to diet and lifestyle, I realised from reading my diaries, and seeing what happened when I departed from my new default diet, that I could now literally turn my health on and off like a tap.
This was a revelation to me.
It was the first time in my life I saw for my own eyes that I was responsible for whether I lived with vitality and clarity, or sluggishness and back pain and niggles and tensions and all the rest of it.
This is not a welcome message for many who won't, or think they can't, make changes to their diet and lifestyle. But truth is often a bitter pill to swallow!
Truth is, we are the architects of our wellness or illness, to a very great degree, and my diaries proved it to me. This is a tremendously liberating discovery to make. I strongly suggest you keep the same kind of diary, noting everything you eat or drink, including alcohol and so on. Note down how you sleep, and how you feel each day. Then when you read back over your entries a few weeks later, you start making connections.
#10 Ayurveda, Blood Type Diet, and Acid-forming vs Alkaline-forming foods are my main go-to guides for healthy eating that I recommend to others.
Ayurveda recommends foods according to your natural constitution. This is only about whole foods, and it may be that you cannot eat nuts or eggs or whatever without feeling bad. We learn here that once we’ve eliminated processed, refined and corporate foods, we can now start focussing on which whole foods suit us or don’t suit us.
Again, take your time in discovering this, and the diaries will help you a lot.
Blood type diets are only really written about by a Dr D’Adamo (and his book sold multiple millions), but it was what I was put on by my Ayurvedic lady doctor at the start of my journey, and it worked for me, so I put great store by it.
You can research it online, but I will return to this next week. As with Ayurveda, what I like about the blood type diet is that it is attuned to your natural body constitution, and not a one-size-fits-all.
Acid-forming and alkaline-forming foods… well, this will be your Weekly Task! I will say more on them next week.
And that’s it, that’s my Top 10 tips for changing your diet! I hope you like them, and I suggest you read through them again. Use them to help you plan what you will do next, and then take it all step by step.
Much more to come on diet next week, as clearly it’s a huge topic, and my Letter is now getting longer and longer!
Weekly Task for Letter #6
Your weekly task has two components to it.
Task 1
Firstly, to practise doing research and being responsible for your own wellness journey... and food and diet is a great subject matter for this.
I would like to ask you to learn about acid-forming and alkaline-forming foods and drinks. This knowledge helps us big time to get a good basic idea of how what we consume affects us, for better or for worse.
Here are some guiding questions for your research, and I will come back to this next week.
What foods and drinks are acid-forming?
What foods and drinks are alkaline-forming?
What is the recommended ratio of each that we should consume?
Think of this ratio and apply it to your typical diet in your own life, and reflect upon how it impacts on your wellbeing. (Use your list of foods and drinks you wrote down in your notebook from the last Letter’s Weekly Task.)
What does this understanding of acid- and alkaline-forming foods tell us about corporate-made, processed and refined foods and drinks?
Task 2
Write a summary in your notebook of what you recall reading in the main part of the Letter. You can do it now, or finish reading the Letter first. I would recommend you then reread the Letter and see how well you summarised what you had read.
Health Tip of the Week: Liquorice Powder
When making smoothies, or any foods that you want to sweeten, you can use liquorice powder. Not the black candy stuff, but actual liquorice powder. This is super healthy for you anyway (research it!), but it’s also sweeter than sugar, and doesn’t have a dominating taste. So it could be used if you are making healthy cookies or cakes too. I put half a teaspoon into smoothies for two, so minimal amounts are needed.
From Letter #5
Can you recall the health tip?!
What was the word and sentence of the week?!
The tip was to chew your food thoroughly, and because so few people do this it’s well worth a reminder.
The word and sentence both talked about determination. One of your main adversaries in changing your diet is likely to be your tongue which will tell your mind it wants the foods it’s used to. Friends and family may have things to say too, which will not help you. Determination will carry you through any challenges that come your way.
But, equally importantly, if you happen to ‘fall off the wagon’, simply make sure you get back on it and double down on your determination to transform your experience of life. I’ve fallen off my wagon many times, but as time goes by this happens fewer and fewer times, and I can immediately get back on it.
I’ve run out of time, so there’s no word or sentence of the week in this Letter, please do forgive me! In fact, why not create your own instead?! Find a quote you like, choose a word from this Letter and write them down in your notebook.
Finally
So, pick your diet, be determined to make it work, and learn to discern what is good for you, both from the books and websites you read, but also from how your body is feeling. Keep that diary! You will need to write it down every evening or as you go along, because you may forget things the next day.
So until next time, happy eating!
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