About FoodCanHeal...

Lying on the bed in the emergency room on June 23rd, 2003 I had what I can only describe as a “shift in consciousness”...like being unplugged in the film The Matrix.  I walked away able to see and understand how not only our actions as humans have direct implications for us and our surrounding environment, but how we are all connected to that environment.  The food we eat is connected not only to our own health, but the health of our environment and even the land itself. 

I thought that if what we eat can cause harm then the inverse should also be true; food can heal. 

I discovered that changing the way you eat can heal you physically.  Changing your approach to eating and food can heal you metaphysically.  And collectively as a species, changing the way we consume can heal the planet.
 

So what do we do?  That’s the burning question, isn’t it?  It’s what everyone that receives a diagnosis with some kind of chronic illness comes up with immediately; it’s what came to my mind in the emergency room on June 23rd 2003; “what do I do?!”

The evening of the 23rd of June 2003 I was surfing the internet for information on what had happened that day and when researching different thoughts on exercise I ran across this Bruce Lee quote and it stopped me in my tracks.  It became an integral part of my healing process and remains an essential apart of FoodCanHeal and my life. 

Doing is the physical manifestation of your knowledge and willingness to act upon that knowledge; acting empowers you, it combines the energies in knowledge and willingness with the strength of action in a synergistic way and propels you at an ever quickening pace towards success!

As time went on I was amazed both by how many other people were similarly
affected with heart disease and other chronic illnesses and by the lack of professionals successfully assisting them with the hands-on, day to day mechanism of diet and lifestyle modification.  I was given a lot of hand-outs and listened to some people speak, but very few people were giving concrete advice about what to do.  I heard many time things like “replace fat in recipes,” but nothing about what that meant, nothing about how to do it. 

Replace it with what?

Show me!

 I had many questions that first week, but one simple question kept coming back time and time again.  

The more I searched the more different ideas about diets I found....some of them exceptionally complicated.  I grew frustrated and started to apply the common sense type of thinking I’d used tackling complicated issues as a food and beverage consultant.  Sometimes I just had to stop reading because my head was spinning from idea to idea.  How could it be this complicated?  And then I started to look for similarities rather than the differences that all these authors were trying so adamantly to point out. 

What is it that we they all agree on? 

I first thought that everyone I read had a different idea about what healthy eating was, but it became clear to me that there was more agreement on the general principles of healthy eating than there was disagreement on the details. 

So what is it that we can all agree on?  Americans consume far too much salt, fat, sugar, meat and high fat dairy and we eat too few fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.  Much of what we eat too much of comes in the form of processed foods that provide the excess salt, fat, and sugar.  I don’t know any self-respecting nutrition expert, dietitian, medical practitioner, or public health official that would disagree with that statement.  Frankly, it would just be irresponsible to say anything different!

 So I began to put together my own plan and something I learned in a 28 day rehab program for cocaine addiction came back to me in a shot; you have to own your own sobriety or health in this case.  Put together something that works for you! 

I think we’re looking in the wrong place for clues that will lead us back towards health.  And it’s important to note that most folks that talk about our population’s health – that of the United States – speak in terms of moving back towards it, like our health was derailed at some point in time.  Health is something that we’ve had in the past and somehow lost.  We did something, or switched something, or changed somehow, and lost our health.

Denis Burkitt and Hugh Trowell made the mid-20th century observation that chronic diseases that affect people in Westernized countries, things like hypertension, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and others, some not chronic, were almost completely absent in rural, less developed African communities.

We have our heads faced downward, looking into the details, the nutrients involved and the minutia of metabolism, trying to identify all the variables involved in the exceptionally complicated choreography of elements that make up our physiology.  When health isn’t in the details at all; we need to look upward towards the general principles.  Health isn’t found in an individual tree, it’s found in the way all the trees interact as a forest!

I’m often asked what I think about the latest phytochemical or “nutrient de jour” as it relates to a specific condition and my response is almost always: “I don’t think about it at all and you shouldn’t either!”  If we eat following some simple guidelines, those concerns about individual nutrients go away.

In order to be successful we have to learn to fight some very basic instincts...

Our bodies are designed to naturally guide us towards health; it’s not something we have to think much about or we would have never made it to 2009 as a species.  There’s a problem though; our bodies were designed to function in a quite different environment or context; our earth context.  We are living a “life out of context,” a life out of balance with our original environment and the same physiological mechanisms that have always guided us towards health, now betray us and have lead us into the mess of obesity and chronic illness that exists in the United States and other developed countries today.  This moving away from context, separating ourselves from the “whole” with which we are meant to be a part, and within which we thrive and enjoy health, is what the “Human being is part of a whole” Einstein quote is all about.  It’s a metaphysical concept with very physical implications!

Moving our mind back into the eating process and becoming once again familiar with our original earth context is what folks are talking about when they speak of “conscious eating.”

But just knowing about that doesn’t mean anything...remember...it’s all about doing!

In a lifestyle modification, acting...even upon limited information...is far better than having all the information and doing nothing!  Knowing how to apply information to your lifestyle modification is where FoodCanHeal comes in.  I can show you how to apply, how to do!

One thing we’ll never be about here is adding yet another dietary protocol to the mess that’s already out there.  We’re not about arguing the details here; we’re about acting on the similarities!

FoodCanHeal and Chef Steve can assist you with the day to day mechanism of diet and lifestyle modification by providing very specific instruction about how to efficiently function in a home kitchen environment to create food that is creative, tasty, but still exceptionally healthy!  FoodCanHeal is about doing not talking!  “Healthy Cooking Live!” events are your introduction into the way FoodCanHeal and Chef Steve can help you along your personal lifestyle modification journey.  You CAN do it, and we can show you how!

Along the way FoodCanHeal will...

• Help you get back in touch with your real context!
• Help you to concentrate general principles of health instead of the details!
• Empower you to own your own health!
• Empower you to take action!