Article: The 3 Laws of Dietary Hygiene
by Gilles Marin, Senior Tao Instructor
Director of the Chi Nei Tsang Clinic USA
THE 3 LAWS OF DIETARY HYGIENE by Gilles Marin
Excerpt from Healing From Within with Chi Nei Tsang by Gilles Marin
To keep ourselves strong once we are detoxified it is important to recognize our poisons. No one can have a healthy appetite, and therefore know what is good for her/himself, if toxified. We have to be well into our healing process, to be in touch with what we are trying to hide from ourselves by toxifying, in order to have freedom of choice in matters of nutrition. The only way is to first recognize our cravings as such: to become self-aware. If we want to change and progress we need to know what it is we need to change and for what purpose. Our digestive system is already designed to let us know what is best for us. All we have to do is to listen to it. The best way to realize that is to follow what I have come to call "dietary hygiene." Hygiene is based on good habits. Similarly we have to follow a way of eating naturally that serves our appetite. I have found three basic principles that when followed have led many of my clients, and also myself, into remarkable and speedy transformations and recovery many imbalances in a matter of just a few days. These principles involve how to eat rather than what to eat, and when followed, promote and strengthen a healthy appetite, or knowing what is best for us to eat.
FIRST PRINCIPLE: Regularity and Consistency
The first principle of dietary hygiene is to respect our body's need for regularity and consistency in our dietary habits. Regularity is a basic body need: regularity of exercise and rest, work and leisure, sleep and wakefulness, digestion and assimilation, absorption and elimination, and so on. The body needs to know when it is going to be fed, not only to prepare for digestion and assimilation, but also to feel safe and comfortable. Knowing when the next meal is and what it might consist of brings a sense of peace and comfort to our inner mind. If we don't eat at regular times, we are sending the inner message that food is not available on a regular basis. There is nothing more stressful for our body than to be hungry. This message will trigger the stress response, flooding our system with stress hormones and stimulating the body to save energy for the future instead of having it available now, causing us to get fat and tired. The net result of having meals on a regular schedule every day will be to differentiate between appetite and cravings. All it takes is three days: If for three days in a row we can have our meals at the same time and take the time for them, sitting down and chewing our food, the fourth day we will be hungry only at meal time and we will feel an appetite for very specific foods. The big problem is habit and lifestyle: working with scheduling, then with food preparation. No one can change in a snap. For this reason having regular meals for three days in a row might take weeks and months! It will become possible only when felt as a need as opposed to a chore. But it doesn't matter how long it takes. Let's take our time but get started now! The sooner we start, the sooner we'll get there.
SECOND PRINCIPLE: Mindfulness to Promote Discernment
The second principle of dietary hygiene is mindfulness: avoiding being distracted from our meals. This means enjoying them and letting discernment rise in ourselves, paying attention to the combination of tastes and how food feels in our bodies, giving constant attention to our sense of satisfaction and absolute comfort. Mindfulness involves making sure that nothing will disturb the enjoyment of our meal: no upsetting news, no anger or anxiety. If we do feel upset, it is important to use our mind to change the subject, to give ourselves a break while eating. We have to be our own internal waitperson. Even if our food is prepared and served by someone else, no one can digest it for us. We have to cultivate in ourselves the skills of the most attentive and compassionate inner waiter.
In France, as in Japan, where by tradition, everyone is very conscious of the quality of a meal and its impact on health, it is absolutely bad taste to talk about work during meals, especially business lunches. Business is for after meals, while having coffee or tea. Many unsuspecting Americans have lost business deals in these countries because of "bad table manners." If we are busy and distracted while eating, we are sending the inner message that we don't really care, that what we are busy with is more important than our own health and well being. Imagine how we feel internally to be less important than some insipid TV melodrama, the news, the president's sex life or a business deal. If we are healthy nothing will prevent us from tasting the food and being aware if there is anything wrong with it and how much we feel like eating of it. Healthy people don't let themselves be distracted from attention to meals.
A sign of poor health is a lack of interest and attention to oneself. I am not saying that we should be obsessed with ourselves but that we deserve more attention and care than we usually give ourselves. Discernment is also needed to know when we have had enough to eat. The only way to know is to pay attention to our sense of satisfaction. If we obey our appetite and have the kind of food we need, prepared and cooked the way we want, the next step is to pay attention to when we feel satisfied and stop eating right there and then. I know we have all heard the stories about starving children in the world and that wasting food is bad. Well, there is refrigeration, and at worst there is compost. But one more bite might be enough to overload our system and cause a stress response. Blood sugar will drop because of insulin, and all of a sudden appetite turns into craving and the sense of comfort and satisfaction disappears. Furthermore, taste is as much, if not more, important for health than the quality and quantity of food.
The quality of food is important to bring the right kind of nutrition to our bodies, but taste nourishes the spirit. If the taste is not right, no matter the quality or quantity of the food at this point, the spirit will suffer, and this will be readily translated into emotional distress and trigger our stress response with its stress hormones that will prevent proper digestion and full benefit of the food. The use of spices in food has no purpose but to enhance the nourishing value of food and make it healing. All spices have a healing quality, including salt (sea salt, of course, which is lower in sodium and richer in other minerals, including iodine, than plain table salt, which I consider poison). Most spices are either antiparasitic, disinfectant or stimulate the secretion of digestive juices and production of digestive enzymes without which the meal would be too heavy to digest. In addition, they add the last touch to individualize the taste of food for our particular inner and external conditions, such as excess or deficiency, seasons and weather. Taste is the origin of the use of medicinal herbs and healing oils. In Traditional Chinese Medicine emphasis is given in cooking according to the five tastes that correspond to the five forces of nature that constitute our existence and are responsible for giving us life and health.
THIRD PRINCIPLE: Proper Food Combination
Food as our best prescription drug: The third principle of dietary hygiene concerns food combination and applies only to people that are not yet to the point of being able to discern the right composition of their meals according to taste. Unfortunately, not knowing what is good for us is becoming a condition of epidemic proportions. Healthy people don't need any rules but their own, and they will most likely follow the same precepts as do most healthy people around the world. Their pancreas delivers a balanced amount of both insulin and glucagon, and therefore, they can eat the way they want. If we are not in that lucky group, we probably don't really know what we want until the last minute, and then all we want is to eat something, anything, as a result of a stress response. Most of us are hypoglycemic or diabetic, and until these conditions are resolved, we can never have a healthy appetite but instead will be controlled by these imbalances.
FOOD FACTS
Food is divided into three groups called macro-foods that encompass everything that we can digest: carbohydrates, protein and fat. To be healthy we need a combination of all three in our daily meals. Fats are all the oils, butter, margarine, mayonnaise, salad dressings, heavy cream etc. and are present also in most meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. Proteins are the foods, such animal products, soy products, yeast, fungus, algae etc.that contain all essential amino acids or certain combinations of carbohydrates, such as rice and beans, wheat and nuts, that when eaten together provide all the amino acids necessary for the production of our own proteins. Carbohydrates are everything else we eat that's not fat or protein, from refined sugar to pumpkin, fruits and vegetables, grains, beans, nuts, chocolate and pastries and so on. Some carbohydrates are very starchy or highly refined so their sugar content is easy to break down and is easily available, foods such as crackers, bread, muffins, pastries in general, sweets, potatoes, bananas, grains, rice, pasta and so on, and are called high glycemic index foods. Fresh vegetables and fruits are low-glycemic index because of the fiber content that slows down the digestion of sugars. The category of food that supports the delivery of insulin is the carbohydrates, especially high-glycemic index carbohydrates like all starches, bread, crackers, corn and potato chips, bakery, dried goods, potatoes, rice and grain in general. These are the emergency foods, as the more refined the food, the more readily available for blood sugar production. They are considered winter foods, high calorie foods we keep for when there is no fresh food or when we need extra calories because of cold weather.
The foods that promote glucagon production are proteins, animal or vegetal food that contain all the amino acids that our body needs to rebuild itself. Fats harmonize and complete our diet with essential fatty acids indispensable for the functioning of our nervous systems and endocrine system. If you have a hormonal imbalance such as hypoglycemia or diabetes, never ever eat carbohydrates without proteins or eat proteins without carbohydrates. If you are hypoglycemic or if you have diabetes or a weight problem, either that you are overweight or underweight, your attitude about food has to change. Instead of being the enemy, the poisoned relationship, food can become your prescription drug and your way to salvation. You must eat the way you would take a very potent prescription drug: you have to evaluate your daily requirement of protein according to your lean body mass and activity factor, divide it up into four meals and two snacks, and balance it with the required amount of carbohydrates and unsaturated fats 9.
Even if you just have a piece of fruit, if you are hypoglycemic or if you have diabetes, make sure you are having the right amount of protein and fat to balance it: a piece of cheese or some lean white meat. Make sure you always have a variety of protein sources available: milk, eggs, cheese, tofu, fish, protein powder, meat and so on. Also don't eat red meat every day. Try to have at least a full vegetarian day every week by eating some soy-based products or seafood, eggs and dairy products. After just a few days you will experience decreased cravings and the beginning of an appetite. After a while you won't even feel like eating any differently and will get better and better. If you are a vegetarian and experience the conditions of hypoglycemia you will have to combine your carbohydrates with a lot of tofu or other soy-based products, especially if you don't eat any dairy, milk, cheese or eggs. Any grain or grain products and beans should be thoroughly chewed to liquid consistency before swallowing to allow the freeing of the essential amino acids from their carbohydrate settings.
A lot of vegetarians try to get all of their amino acids through a combination of grains, nuts and beans, which is just fine if you are able to eat slowly and chew thoroughly, and if you have a very healthy pancreas. However, if you are hypoglycemic, chances are that you are unable to eat slowly because you are responding to the stress response and functioning in the sympathetic mode. Rice, beans and bread are swallowed almost whole and remain carbohydrates because the amino acids don't get a chance to be absorbed. This will continue the vicious cycle of hypoglycemia. Stay away from all high-glycemic index foods for a while until you are able to eat slowly. Replace them with full protein products even if you have to get off your vegetarian diet for a while. Remember that your food will be your most important prescription drug until all symptoms disappear. If you are diligent in following your prescription, you will be surprised how fast results come. I followed these directives myself and lost ten pounds on the first week of the diet without ever being hungry, and another ten pounds during the next three months: more than the weight I had put on before the birth of my child in what has been called "the couvade syndrome" for men that put on weight while their wives are pregnant. Because Chi Nei Tsang is about uncovering and cultivating our body wisdom, it is indispensable to supplement treatments with the dietary hygiene program to insure the strengthening and transformation that healing provides and to prevent relapses into the previous unhealthy patterns.
