Challenges on the Healing Diet: Is Meditation the Answer?
My healing Crohn’s disease comes through coming back into harmony with nature, as its ecology plays out in my body. An alkalizing diet combined with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet has been the way for me, but not without posing a great challenge.
An enormous difficulty has been making new choices distinct from old habits. My very identity is at stake, as I struggle against my body’s deepest impulses, that are themselves out of balance. For example: a rule of the game for me is simply this: eat more vegetables. I must balance out acidifying foods like fruit and honey (I don’t even have refined sugar, milk, or starch AT ALL) and meat and tea with alkalizing foods, such as vegetables, almonds, lemons, and olive oil.
But for me, this balancing is HARD! I crave almond meal baked goodies sweetened with honey and fruit almost constantly. I have eggs and greens for breakfast (with almond bread), a baked good for mid-morning snack, meat and veggies and salad for lunch, then I’m craving another treat, I have dinner, and I want dessert again.
But isn’t this how normal people eat? Don’t they say to have 6 little meals a day? Doesn’t that include a little treat here and there? Yes, this is ok, right? It’s when I binge out on desert and over-indulge, when I am eating recreationally, and I know it. These treats don’t hurt me indiscretely like they the rest of the population (except with the expanding waist-bands) they hurt me loud and clear when I start to have yucky gut pain again. Maybe it’s the coffee I tried, or the unsweetened chocolate, or the soymilk I dabbled with… I’m still trying to figure this all out.
I am into meditation, and I totally get it about our attachments bringing us suffering. Trouble is, I don’t want to withdraw from the senses and let go physical indulgences. I am not a saint or an aesthetic. It doesn’t work that way, to be forced into that way of being. Sure it must be wonderful to heal the sick and work other miracles, but I just want a friggin cupcake. So I have an almond bread banana muffin with a side of kale. Delicious, but… it is a slippery slope. Yes, I have a raging addiction to sweetness, pleasure, comfort, and earthly beauty.
Is meditation the answer?
Is meditation really even better even than cupcakes?
All I can do is stop more frequently to ask what my body is trying to tell me about the state of my soul. Have I deprived myself of sweetness in other ways?
Nina-Lois Turtledove is deeply interested in philosophy, psychology, peace studies, nutrition, tradition, and progress. When she's not slinging meatloaf and gingerbread at a highly acclaimed Denver restaurant, she is helping found an online music school. She is writing a manual designed to improving people's lives through yoga, cooking, and gardening (among other things). This is an online collection of her journal.