Dear Friend

I hope you’ve just enjoyed a stupendous weekend!

The good news from here in Chiang Mai is that my wife and I have just had our first guest since converting our Tea Tree House into accommodation for two last month; a Chinese lady and her young daughter for one week, so this is a great start for our new business.

I did a bit of waitering (we had to do a dinner for six for them one evening, so I was helping Air out)… a new job for me in my life!

Afterwards I started thinking about Fawlty Towers (for non-British readers, this is probably the funniest comedy ever to be made in Britain, and was about a bed and breakfast guest house in the 1970s where the owner spent most of his time abusing his guests!), and how easy and tempting it could be for guest house owners to surprise and outrage one’s guests!

Not that I would ever do that of course, but it gave me an insight into the fun they must have had writing the scripts and while filming!

We are responsible for our own wellness

If you want power, if you would like true power in your life, get healthy. Then see how creative, productive and confident you become.

Back in 2008 after a couple of months or so of my new diet (I told the story in Letter #s 2-4), I found that for the first time, in my thus far 44-year life, good health had become a conscious decision, objective and way of life for me.

I had now unambiguously seen for myself how a change to my diet—and it was not a radical or difficult change at all—had transformed how I felt in my body and mind.

One morning, after reading through my ‘Food and Feelings’ diary (recording in my notebook every day all foods and drinks I was consuming, how I felt, and how I slept) I suddenly realised that I was now, literally, switching my health on and off like a tap.

Me. Me controlling my health.

It was me, through my decisions over my dietary choices, that was responsible for feeling healthy, joyful and alive, or the opposite, or of course somewhere in between.

[This is not the message we receive in life! Experts are waiting in every corner to tell us what to do when we have problems, especially health problems. Finding out that my health was down to my choices and actions, and not some arbitrary roll of the genetic dice, was a revelation.

In large part that’s why I’m writing these Letters, I want to share this message as widely as possible, empower people to take charge of their own health. I believe we have been badly disempowered during our schooling, and only we can empower ourselves.]

I knew from my years of observing, investigating and learning about my—our—mind and heart and soul about the causes of mental stress and how to prevent most of it, but for some reason had never consciously made the connection as to just what a huge impact food has on our mood and wellbeing, nor how it could give me a younger, fitter, leaner body if I made the right choices.

I was going to work many mornings bouncing with joy in my heart! The joy wasn’t in connection with something good happening out there in the world, it was permeating my consciousness from within myself!

Already doing well in my spiritual learning of life, I realised that one of the most supportive ways to live spiritually, to live in harmony and with a sense of inner peace, was to feed my body like it’s a beautiful temple.

When the body feels good, vital, light, flexible, I feel good!

Needless to say, with all these amazing rewards, my new diet was pretty easy to stick to, and indeed, I kept it really tight, going for seven years, with the exception of when I went on holiday to England or Australia. I didn’t want to be ‘obsessive’, or difficult when eating with friends or family, but in any case, it was also a good experiment: I’m practised and skilled in doing action research in my line of work, and there’s no better research subject than oneself.

Keeping a food and feelings journal is action research, and naturally enough I fully recommend you do this. You will notice many benefits from taking the time out to do it.

I found that my levels of wellbeing would decline during these holidays. I didn’t become ill per se, just that I could feel a tenser body, a lowering of my mood, less vitality and lightness of step and other factors which I increasingly had become aware of.

The main difference from my usual diet was an increase in animal-based foods, including quite a lot of dairy which, aside from butter and ghee, was now completely out of my diet.

I should add too that my by now vastly reduced levels of beer consumption would increase more on these holidays, and undoubtedly this has its own impact.

So just to conclude all the above: I can categorically say from my own experience that the link between mood and food, between wellbeing and diet, is a truism of human life.

It’s up to you to see if it’s the same for you. I anticipate most definitely it will be, but your level of wellness is up to you and your choices.

Always remember, and one of my main messages I shall repeat in these Letters: we have to check things out for ourselves, rather than just believing others. Look at our world today and see where we’ve got to by blindly trusting all the experts out there!

How to determine the best diet for your own physical and mental wellbeing

Now, what I’d like to do is share with you my diet that the Ayurvedic doctor put me on, and share with you the three main guidelines I use for understanding food, diet, nutrition and wellness.

I also want to reiterate what I said in the last Letter:

we do not have a one-size-fits-all body, nor does health and wellness work the same for everybody; there are certainly some general principles which fit us all on account of us being human; yet because wellness is a holistic thing, we ourselves must become responsible for our own wellbeing.

It’s also worth saying again: the best and simplest diet for everybody is to just consume whole foods and drinks, and to avoid processed foods and refined foods, and anything made by a food corporation.

Then it’s a question of fine-tuning things for your own personal constitution. On this basis, read the rest of the Letter and then good luck in changing your diet!

Pre-Reading Task

Write your answers down in your notebook, and then read on.

1. What is your blood type? If you don’t know, how can you find out?

2. How is an ‘acid food’ different to an ‘acid-forming’ food?

3. What foods do you frequently eat, and love eating, which you sense you may have to give up?

4. What are five of your favourite whole foods?

Eat whole foods, not corporate-made foods

So, as you will recall, a few years of increasingly frequent back pain led me to my first experience with natural healing, and in my case that was by tidying up my diet, paying attention to the importance of good sleep, and considerably cutting down my beer consumption.

Now, I’m going to let you know the diet the Ayurveda lady put me on back in 2008, and how it has evolved to today’s diet I follow.

But in all cases I very rarely consume anything made by a food corporation. It’s easy to do, because it promotes and protects my health, and the same for our Mother Earth.

Tip: think of all foods, drinks, creams, anything you put in or on your body, as being nutritious or toxic. Either they carry nutrients, or toxins. Not usually both.

In essence, I was put on a Blood Type O diet, so bear this in mind with my diet I list below.

I was a bit confused at the time, as her centre was based on Ayurveda, but she used the blood type lists, she told me, because past clients had had success with it.

I recommend you do some of your own research, and you will find little to ‘scientifically’ back up the Blood Type diet, but that’s the same for most things to do with food. With so much conflicting information, to a great extent we have to learn to listen to our body, for it has its innate intelligence.

Developing your own wellness means learning to trust yourself. I intuitively feel the Blood Type diet is sound because it’s not pushing a one-size-fits-all, and is based on our biology.

But, just be aware there are no guarantees, and it could be hocus pocus! It was the perfect start for me, though, so make of that what you will.

Philip’s new diet in 2008

It was immediately apparent to me that the most important part of adopting a healthy diet is to get certain foods and drinks out of our life. The main ones I was advised to drop, based on being an ‘O’ blood type, were these:

• pork, therefore including bacon and ham and most sausages

• dairy, therefore including milk, cheeses, ice-creams, yoghurt, butter

• wheat, therefore including nearly all bread

• refined sugars, refined salt, refined oils, refined flours, refined grains*

And of course all processed, corporate-made foods.

Favourites I had to give up were:

• my daily coffees (no sugar and no milk would make it yuk)

• my Shredded Wheat, milk and sugar breakfast (milk, refined sugar)

• bacon and ham, which I loved

• the convenience in Thailand of eating meals with pork meat

• cheddar and stilton cheeses which I ate often and loved eating (bacon and stilton omelettes… ahhh!!)

• cold ice-creams in hot Thailand

• normal yoghurt

• white bread, white pasta and white rice (I was not too strict on the latter as it’s so prevalent when eating out in Thailand)

• crisps, biscuits, cakes, cheesecakes, and nearly all packaged foods sold in supermarkets because all are made with refined sugars, salts and oils (and worse with the sugar, if you live in America, they use GM sugar and GM corn to make high fructose corn syrup); they also have the INS numbers, which are toxins

• pizzas, burgers, hot dogs, donuts were off the list too, but I hardly ever ate any of those

• sliced meats in packets (various INS numbers in the ingredients)

Instead of coffee, I now really focused on teas, and in Thailand they grow lots of great teas. I began to drink green teas and oolong teas in the main, and still do. Just plain tea, no sugar, no milk, nothing added. I am lucky living in northern Thailand because they grow and produce so many quality teas.

For quite a while I used to buy goats’ milk yoghurt, which was not dairy, and is said to be much easier to digest.

I did stay off all breads and butter for a while, but cannot recall how long for. But these were the first foods I brought back into my diet; however, I very rarely buy white bread. I love butter, toast, eggs. Back then I would cook up potato instead of the toast to complement my eggs-based breakfast.

Two of my cornerstone breakfasts are as follows. Sometimes I am already anticipating eating them as I go to bed the night before! Like I said in a previous Letter, embracing a healthy diet totally increased my enjoyment of food, even though I had to give up a few favourites.

• Scrambled eggs with shiitake mushrooms, spinach or asparagus, cherry tomatoes, and two slices of multi-grain toast with butter, sometimes followed by toast with locally produced honey.

• Locally made granola called Crunchy Monkey, which I add to various fruits, seeds, nuts, and dried fruits. I also add a little rice milk or fresh coconut water to moisten it all. In the past I would also add goats milk yoghurt, but that sort of fell by the wayside.

And I wash both of them down with a pot of oolong tea. I love my breakfasts!

Sometimes it’s just boiled eggs and toast, sometimes I do porridge with banana, cinnamon, and goji berries and raisins added. Sometimes I dream up other breakfasts, but these two are my default ones and I just never get bored with them.

For my added seeds, it may be black sesame seeds, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds.

For dried fruits it’s usually raisins or chopped up dates, sometimes cranberries or apricot slices.

For nuts it’s usually almonds or cashew nuts, sometimes if I’m feeling flush with money (not common!) I’ll get locally grown macadamias which are a real treat for me.

For fruits it’s usually 3-5 different kinds, and this forms the main bulk of the bowl. Go-to easy and cheap fruits here in Thailand are always bananas, papaya, pineapple, coconut, watermelon and white dragon fruits, but during different seasons so many other outstanding tropical fruits are available.

We’re talking red dragon fruits (my personal favourite, and we grow them in our garden, they fruit once a year during the rainy season), jackfruit, durian (not for me though), mangosteens, rambutans, rose apples, custard apples, passion fruits, guavas, oranges, and no doubt others I’m not recalling right now.

Also living in the somewhat more temperate and mountainous north of Thailand, we get strawberries, raspberries, cape gooseberries, mulberries (we have two trees of these), pears, and others.

But two fruits we don’t get are apples and cherries which is a pity. Apples pack a huge nutritional powerhouse into them.

After seven years or so I relaxed a few things, and began having some cheddar cheese from time to time, and I now have milk in my coffee which I can now easily drink without sugar, in fact the thought of sugar is horrible, yet back then the thought of drinking coffee without sugar was horrible!

It shows me, and hopefully you, that we can easily retrain our taste buds.

I gave up trying to not eat bread! I love bread and get some excellent locally-made multigrain bread which uses unrefined grains. I don’t appear to have any negative reaction to it being in my diet. I also therefore have butter, and I eat quite a few eggs.

My meat consumption is minimal, just a bit of chicken or fish when my wife cooks it for dinner. I sense my body prefers to have some meat, so I’m okay eating it. I don’t miss it, don’t crave it, so it only really makes up about 10% of my diet, if that.

When I fry things I use ghee (which I take to be healthy) or cold-pressed coconut oil, which I also take to be healthy. Both have high smoke points, meaning there should be no toxic reaction to cooking with them. I sometimes put a spoonful of coconut oil in my granola.

Olive oil is healthy it seems, but not for cooking at high heats as it has a low smoke point.

The key for me with oils is they need to be cold-pressed if at all possible.

As with everything to do with food, there is conflicting information out there as to which oils are best. Another good one according to my understanding is sesame oil, but ensuring it’s cold-pressed. We do also use ricebran oil which has not been cold-pressed, but is cheaper and has a high smoke point.

Ayurveda recommends sesame oil and coconut oil for massaging into your skin.

The very worst oils are those clear plastic bottle cheap ones that line supermarket shelves. From time to time I imagine no problem, but definitely not good to be ingesting regularly.

I’d like to just mention superfoods and herbs for now, but I will have to devote a future Letter to these as they are well worth incorporating into your diet.

Typical lunches for me will be fried rice or noodles with mushrooms and vegetables, or some kind of curry. Nearly all my lunches are vegetarian, same as my breakfasts.

Dinners are usually made by my wife, and she cooks typical Thai food dishes, which are all whole food ingredients, with plenty of spices and herbs and other ingredients found in Thai cuisine. So rice is a staple part of my diet, usually brown rice.

And that’s my diet really. There is more to say, but that’s for another day.

I’ve already covered a lot in this Letter, so just a brief mention for the three guiding diets.

Blood Type Diet

This is really only the work of Dr D’Adamo who wrote a book called Eat Right for Your Type, which sold millions. I’ve never seen or read it, but it worked for me when I changed my diet. I like it because it is advising a diet based on one’s individual constitution, and I know for sure that not all whole foods are for all people.

I think it’s easy to research, and you can find the lists for each blood type online.

Ayurveda and Diet

Ayurveda tells us about three major constitution types, based on the relative proportions of the five elements within you, space, water, air, fire and earth. These five elements are the building blocks of all life on Earth. We are born with our unique constitution which stays with us for life.

Ayurveda means ‘science of life’ in Sanskrit, and is not just about foods, but about all aspects of a human lifestyle. It teaches us how to stay healthy, prevent illness, and how to heal ourselves should we get some kind of ailment. It is a holistic diet and lifestyle regimen, unlike modern medicine which is only about treating symptoms, and never getting to the root causes of them.

The best thing about Ayurveda is that it’s ‘user-friendly’, meaning you and me can learn about it for ourselves.

The three ‘doshas’, or constitution types, are vata, pitta and kapha. Mostly people predominate in one of them, but some people are bi-doshic, having roughly two equal amounts of vata and pitta, vata and kapha, or pitta and kapha. Rather rarely some are tridoshic.

The idea is that you find out by doing a dosha quiz which one you are, and then you read up on your dosha to get dietary advice, and lots of other useful information on living a life of wellness. I will definitely do a future Letter just on Ayurveda.

For now I’d like to recommend an excellent starting place to do research into it. I prefer my books, and have struggled to find really decent websites to match the books, but one site I do like is Banyan Botanicals.

They do sell herbs and things, but only to people in the US. However, they have an excellent resource bank of information for all three doshas, and how to use Ayurveda in your life.

You can take your dosha quiz, but in doing so you’ll need to give them your email address. I’ve found no issues with this, and it’s a comprehensive quiz.

If you’d like to get a book to get started, then the one by Judith Morrison is an excellent book which I’ve learned loads from, called The Book of Ayurveda. This has a comprehensive dosha quiz too.

Definitely good for beginners and intermediates alike.

Acid-forming and Alkaline-forming foods

I wonder what you learned from the Weekly Task in the last Letter, relating to acid- and alkaline-forming foods?

This refers to the nature of the digested ‘ash’ of all foods and drinks you consume. Therefore, while limes and lemons are acid fruits, once your body digests them the ‘ash’ has turned into an alkaline state, and it’s this digested end-product of the foods and drinks we consume which is measured here. Similarly, meats are alkaline in nature, but once digested have become acidic ash, hence ‘acid-forming’.

There are lots of lists on the internet you can find, but the key understandings are these:

• pretty much all fruits, vegetables, herbs and other plants are alkaline-forming

• everything else is usually acid-forming

• ‘they’ say we should have an alkaline-forming to acid-forming ratio of 60% to 40%, and when ill that should go to 80% to 20%

• the understanding continues that all disease and illness arises in an acidic state

Frustratingly, yet again, I’ve come across conflicting information for this, but not much of it.

However, I think a lot of people put great store in this guideline.

A key understanding

I have seen for myself how my diet with lots of vegetables and fruits in it, and superfoods and herbs, and almost no dairy, has improved my health. I also think that so much I have read about acid- and alkaline-forming foods makes full intuitive and logical sense to me.

What it tells us is that our blood must remain at a specific pH value or we die. If we eat too many acid-forming foods, such as dairy and meats, refined and processed foods, then the body must get something more alkaline to balance the acid-raising going on with such foods. It is said it will go into our bones and take some calcium out of them so that it can balance our blood’s pH.

That has consequences for the strength and health of your bones!

I will return to the topic of diet and food at various times, as I have a tonne of more tips and understandings to pass on! But no more room in this Letter!

Weekly Health Tip

To clean chemical and pesticide residue from vegetables and fruits we soak them in sodium bicarbonate (bicarb of soda) and water for a minimum of 15 minutes. I also know that half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate in some water can often get rid of stomachaches.

If we’ve run out of bicarb of soda, I will use a bit of vinegar instead. I feel it’s important to make this effort to really clean our produce. There are lots of ‘little things’ like this that I make a habit of, which I think all add up to greater health.

And good health is only truly understood by most when they’ve lost it! Don’t let that be you, nourish yourself, take care of yourself, treat your body like a temple and it will reward you.

Word of the Week

listening

As a language teacher I am a keen observer of how people communicate, whether it’s with me, or just me as a bystander, or in media. I will say that most people have poor listening skills. This is a real drawback for us in life if we are not good at this skill.

I personally think it’s the most important skill we can develop, especially parents, teachers, leaders, and those who work with other people. Read the Sentence of the Week to determine how good a listener you are…

Sentence of the Week

“When the listener’s interpreted meaning matches the speaker’s intended meaning, successful communication has occurred.”

Now, most people listen only to see how it fits their preexisting beliefs and knowledge, and then just want to jump in and say their piece.

Most people are interrupters. It means the speaker often never gets to express themselves.

In close relationships this can be really harmful to all parties. Between nations or rival groups it can mean war and violent conflict.

Good listening is not about agreeing or disagreeing, nor about making judgements, it’s about being respectful and compassionate towards the speaker, and doing our level best to understand what they want to tell us.

I can say from my own experience that the better a listener you are, the healthier your relationships are, and even better, people finally have somebody to talk to, to really talk to! It’s so rare and so sad, and I think there’s a huge amount of ‘hidden’ loneliness in our human family, and it comes from not having anybody who will listen to us.

Be that good listener, and see how people open up to you.

Weekly Task for Letter #7

Make this coming week ‘listening awareness week’.

• Observe your own listening, and try to notice how frequently you interrupt others, or find yourself wanting to.

• Observe others in your own life and see how well they listen, and whether they are interrupters.

• Observe how people communicate with each other on media in videos, and whether they are listening to understand what the speaker is trying to express and communicate.

• Proactively train yourself to stop interrupting (if you find you do this), and to listen intently with full focus to other people, whether family, friends or strangers, and to understand what they want you to understand.

And finally

That’s it for this week’s Letter. But one final thing to share.

About a month ago I was a guest on the Pirate Living Podcast, run by two ladies, one in America and one in Canada. We talked about education, learning and schooling and I got the chance to talk about my brand of education which puts all students first!

They published the episode this week, and you can click here to listen to the podcast. If you don’t have Spotify I understand it can be accessed on all podcast platforms.

All the best

Philip

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