Back to reality, oops, there goes gravity

As I am working on this blog a little here and there, I wondered if I should hit on some of the highlights of
what it is this is really all about rather than just diving into specifics as I have been. You can also read about some of the basics in the “About” page. I would also like to discuss some our psychological “issues” surrounding this admittedly unusual lifestyle/diet and how we may struggle to accept the myriad implications.

What’s the Main Idea?

So, as you can see, I don’t think there is any real consensus as to what to actually call this diet. We call it “The Diet”, but others call it the WAP (Weston A. Price diet) and I think I have seen NT (for Nourishing Traditions). Perhaps the most sensible one I’ve seen is calling it the “Traditional Foods Diet. ” And first things first: by “diet”, we mean… the way we eat on a regular basis, not a “diet” you go on and then get off of. We are not “going” on this diet. We are simply eating/living this diet!

So, here are just a few of the key principles, but by all means, check out the sources on the right hand side to read up on your own about some of this stuff from other people’s perspectives. Especially check out the Cheeseslave blog which is very comprehensive and is already doing exactly what I’d like to do here. It would be worth your while to spend some quality time perusing her site for recipes, info on vitamins, health and parenting on this diet.

The key point that we believe in is that food should be traditionally prepared in a way that renders it most nourishing. Food that is not prepared in this way harms us in one or both of the below ways:

1. It over-taxes our bodies as it works to metabolize improperly prepared food (ie, food that is not in its most digestible state)
2. It literally poisons us if it is not close enough to a nutrient to actually nourish us (in the instance of a huge variety of preservatives, heavily processed foods, chemicals, etc. that we consume regularly but that are not actually food products or so far from the original product, that our bodies cannot recognize them as food) causing all sorts of health problems (usually those that manifest over a long period of time.)

Coping with the Implications

There is a lot of baggage wrapped up in really embracing this type of lifestyle and diet. The implications of doing so are numerous and can easily turn people away from the ideas that are discussed here. In my opinion, these hard-to-cope-with implications are:

• Feeling supremely overwhelmed, dismayed and confused by an overload of new information that contradicts what you thought you knew… and what it could mean if you ignore this new information as well as if you don’t!
• The idea that we have been essentially deceived for our entire lives by the media, the government, our health care practitioners and others (resulting in feelings of frustration and anger)
• The idea that we may NOT have been eating (or feeding others in our families) healthfully (like we thought we were) and feelings that might accompany this (frustration, guilt, anger)
• Frustration at the financial cost of eating truly healthfully (compared to what we may be used to)
• Frustration and anxiety about how to manage a new lifestyle that requires more food preparation, more experimentation and learning, more research, more shopping around, etc.
• Disbelief in general — why should we believe any of this bunk!? After all, if it’s so true, why haven’t we heard about it before

I know it took us a couple months to mostly recover from our shellshock — that everything we thought we knew was wrong. How could we have been lied to (essentially) all along? I will not get into the layers of politics here, but suffice to say, you most definitely cannot believe everything you hear or read. And yes, you should test these ideas for yourself as well. As for us, the more we read, researched, pieced information, health patterns and so forth together, the more it all made so much sense. There really is no part of this diet that doesn’t fit into a sensible framework for us.

For just one example: it may not seem like you really need to soak and roast your nuts before consuming them. Many people really look at us strangely when we mention this idea. However, I knew that after eating LOTS of almonds during my ravenous afternoon and evening lapses between meals while I was going straight from work to school and not getting home until 9pm, I eventually began to suffer extreme digestive problems when eating my almonds. Once they seemed to “save the day” when I could not eat a proper dinner … now, they were causing embarrassing digestive problems and unbelievable cramping. I could no longer enjoy them. After reading about the traditional way of preparing nuts, I was excited to give it a try. Sure enough, my GI complications vanished after I began to eat soaked and roasted nuts. Not only this, but I only needed to eat perhaps half of what I used to eat in order to feel just as satisfied. Wow! There was really something to the idea after all. Our bodies are just not equipped to digest certain parts of certain foods. Sure, you can put up with it for a while, but eventually, it’s going to cause problems of one kind or another. Now I also knew why eating peanut butter would cause similar problems. Perhaps this was also why I would occasionally suffer an allergic reaction when I ate cashews.

At any rate, I am saying all this to 1. encourage the skeptics and 2. encourage you to make it “make sense” to you in a personal way. If it seems too outrageous to believe that you’ve been deceived, that you may need to re-juggle your finances so you can increase your food budget (and hopefully eventually decrease your medical budget!); that you may need to invest in some decent cookware, go to the weekly farmer’s market, etc…. check out other resources on the subject for yourself. But try to look at it from all angles. You cannot safely make a judgment if you only read literature from one side of the issue (ie. Only the government, only the packaging/processing companies or only pharmaceutical companies.) Look at unbiased information and research.

This is why I do recommend reading Nourishing Traditions. The authors incorporate a wide range of literature including historical accounts of how food was once prepared before we became so darn civilized (refrigeration no longer mandated that food stay fresh through various fermentation processes) and so darn greedy (cutting nutritional corners to save on production costs not to mention the advent of hundreds and hundreds of processed “fake” food like soda and pre-packaged foods that we have become so addicted to and regularly spend money on.)

See if anything adds up and most of all, ask yourself “Why have the media, the medical professionals (most, although, I am sure not all), the drug companies, the agricultural corporations, food packaging/processing companies and the government been sending the messages that they have been?” Only until you can believe they sadly do not really care about your well-being, but rather your influences as a consumer, will it begin to make some sense.

We encourage you to give yourself time to process any and all of this new information. It is not something anyone can change overnight. I think after doing this for nearly a year, that a safe amount of time to expect on transitioning to the WAP diet would be 1-3 years depending on the size of your family and their willingness to try new things and alter lifestyles. Good luck… leave a comment!