Healing with Food Article

Healthy Diet

Accompanying recipes: Buckwheat Polenta and Steamed Buckwheat

In thirty-six words, here's your optimum preventative, and healing, diet.

Enjoy freshly prepared, organic foods. Eat adequate protein, use quality fats and oils and limit carbohydrates. Favor a wide variety of animal products, vegetables, beans and whole grains. Moderately consume fresh fruit, sea salt and water.

Avoid highly processed, refined, denatured foods, including leftover or stale foods. Please avoid artificial sweeteners, coffee, alcohol and drugs as well as chemicals in your environment and water supply.

For more details, review Finding Time to Cook, Fat & Oil Guide, and Thermal Properties of Food.

Implementing a Healing Diet

There's nothing mysterious about designing and realizing this diet. And it's one, incidentally, that utterly satisfies and deeply nourishes. Preparing such food is anything but drudgery.

All it takes is intention and organization. I speak both from my own experience and from my work with countless students.

Intention: We all wish to enjoy health and happiness. Therefore, it's prudent to take good care of ourselves. The Buddha said, “You may search the ten-fold universe and not find a single being more worthy of loving kindness than yourself.” Deeply intend and resolve to nourish yourself. From this ground, I personally find that I can better extend nourishment and my basic humanity to others.

Organization: Start with your kitchen and give it a deep cleaning. Recycle unused equipment and shoddy ingredients. In shared kitchens, however, do not impose your dietary preferences on others. It's counterproductive.

Next, organize your kitchen so that each utensil, pot and food staple is placed where it naturally belongs. For example, my potholders hang right next to my oven so they're there when I need them. Don't let those cookies burn while you rummage through a drawer for a hot pad.

A clean and organized kitchen invites you right in. Now, set yourself some realistic goals. For example, if you rarely cook, determine to prepare just one meal each week for the next six weeks. Schedule your time accordingly.

Just as we allow time to get dressed before stepping out the door, so we allow time to prepare a meal. We all know the hard-to-digest consequences of waiting until we're hungry before thinking about dinner. By planning and making some dishes in steps, I have many meals ready in under fifteen minutes.

What will you fix? Start with whatever dish sounds best. If you've a yen for mashed potatoes, mash potatoes. Use good quality food, allow yourself ample time, and the odds are it will taste great. Even if the potatoes are lumpy or scorched, they're better than instant potatoes or those from the deli. And if the dish is a total disaster, it's grounds for a good story.

As you nurture yourselves with good food you gain increased strength, vitality and well-being. This enables you to slowly increase the number of at-home meals you prepare. As you do so, the kitchen indeed becomes the heart of your home.

For my strategy of preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner from one pot of grain, see One Pot—Three Meals. I use that principle in the accompanying recipes for Buckwheat Polenta and Steamed Buckwheat.

May you be well nourished,

Rebecca Wood