My food habits, and the two things I focus on that keep things simple

...plus, how to make food genuinely nourishing

a vegetarian meal: delicata squash baked with olive oil and herbs with sauteed veggies: eggplant, red pepper, zucchini, and spinach

As a first gen Asian-American that immigrated to the U.S. in the 70s, our meals at home consisted mostly of home-made Korean food and instant American meals. Remember Chef Boyardee, Campbell’s Soups, Tang, Nestlé’s Quick, Swanson’s TV dinners, Kraft Mac n Cheese, and Tombstone Pizza? Those were 50% of my diet.

• In college, I stopped eating Korean or any homemade food for nearly a decade.
  My diet consisted of Rice Krispies Treats, Wendy’s, Domino’s Pizza, and a $5 tub of spaghetti from a local Italian place on campus. And apples.

• In my early 20s, if I wasn’t going out for a steak dinner at Morton’s or for lamb shank at Marché, I was having Portillo’s Italian Beef with fries, a large bowl of spaghetti (from Ragu and Prego), or Minute Rice mixed with Chicken of the Sea canned tuna.

• In my mid 20s, for a short while, I went on a high-protein-low-fat diet. I drank Crystal Light all day and made a cookie sheet full of boneless, skinless chicken breasts from Sam’s Club with a dash of salt, pepper, tabasco, and lemon juice. I’d stop having carbs after 1 pm and have chicken whenever I got hungry. I’d travel with it in a plastic Tupperware (I was always in my car). I looked great but was pretty darned cranky.

It’s hard to know how much of my diet factored into my depression and anxiety in my young adulthood. I blamed it on my parents (and myself) for so long, but knowing what I know now, I’m certain that my diet contributed to it.

By the time I had my first child at 29, I was mostly eating out, enjoying some of the best restaurants in Chicago. Trying to be “healthy,” I was the annoying one asking the waiters how things were cooked, what oils were used, and ordering modifications.

Four years after my first child was born, my daughter started getting chronically sick. Long story short, I had to learn to cook because pharmaceuticals weren’t working, and the doctor that finally “fixed” her told me to get her off wheat, sugar, and dairy and to focus on fresh, whole, organic foods (in addition to acidophilus, Vitamin C, and probiotics).

Literally less than a week later - yes, I said one week later - ALL of her symptoms disappeared indefinitely, and her immune system got strong.

AND…

because I went on this diet with her, I started to feel better.

I didn’t even know I was feeling that bad.

• My allergies disappeared. I no longer needed Claritin and Flonase, which I had been taking for years, and I could walk through the perfume section and cleaning aisles without irritating my sinuses.

• Instead of waking up foggy, I woke up feeling rested and clear-headed.

• These happened within the first couple of months of changing my diet.

• When I started following Ayurvedic principles, my lifelong digestive issues disappeared.

• I discovered real food and the magical world of deliciousness beyond wheat, sugar, dairy, and processed foods.

Eventually we were able to introduce back wheat, sugar, and dairy, but the relationship with it was now entirely different.

I became a yoga student and cut out meat altogether for the next 15-ish years. I had no body aches or inflammation, and I was well into my 40s.

I didn’t focus on the nutritional values stamped on packaging. There’s no need to when you’re buying fresh fruits, veggies, legumes, and grains.

Instead, I focused on two things:

• the actual ingredients of food

• the pranic value of food

The actual ingredients

This one’s simple. The best foods to choose from are the ones that don’t have an ingredient list.

Kale, for instance, doesn’t have an ingredient list. It’s just kale. Your choice is organic or conventional. If it did have an ingredient list, organic would have the shorter list.

If the food comes in packaging, and the list is so long you’re pulling out your glasses to read them, then it’s probably best to put it back on the shelf.

Choose from the packaged foods that have only a few ingredients. For instance,

• The almond milk I drink has 3 ingredients: purified water, organic almonds, and sea salt.

• The almond butters I enjoy have 1 or 2 ingredients: almonds and sometimes sea salt.

There are enough delicious few-ingredient options available today that it’s silly to defer to anything else. It’s simply unnecessary to get things with sugar, natural flavors, additives, and vegetable oils. Yes, those may be cheaper, but they negatively impact your:

• weight management

• clarity of consciousness

• overall health

• bottom line medical costs

Even if your insurance covers everything, and therefore you think it’s more expensive to choose the cleaner options, your quality of life will have something to say about it. Check your levels of inflammation and energy. That’s a cost worth considering.

The pranic value

Another thing I enjoyed as a child was Del Monte’s mixed fruit in a can soaked in sweetener.

If you can imagine what apple soaked in corn syrup in a can would taste like…
as compared to an apple from the produce section of a grocery store…
as compared to one from the Farmer’s Market…
needless to say, each next choice gets better.

Then go to an apple orchard, pluck an apple straight from the tree, and take a bite.
There’s nothing like it.

The taste difference (and also how they make you feel afterwards) is in their pranic value.

Prana means life force. It’s the energy that creates and maintains life.

Life is still coursing through a just-picked apple. You are tasting energy from that apple, and energy is delicious. The longer it sits detached from its source, the less flavor (energy) it will retain. The more ‘shelf life’ we give it, the more we’ll have to dress it up to make it taste flavorful (energy-like).

We humans are the same way. When we are filled with life force, we are much more alive and delicious to be around, by our mere presence. Performative is how we dress up the lack.

What we eat - the amount of prana we take in - impacts our life force.

We are drawn to nature: we feel something powerful when we sit by the ocean and walk through forests. The air is different, and there’s an invisible force that makes us feel more relaxed and alive. That’s prana. Nature is prana. We are attracted to it because we need it, it gives us life force. We take in deep breaths, and we feel like we can breathe and relax again. Which is why we are drawn to places surrounded in nature. Nature is breathtaking. Life force creates beauty, health, and what Ayurveda calls ojas (the substance produced by the intelligence, or life force, in our bodies that creates vitality).

Pranic value isn’t listed on our packaging. It would be cool if it was.

Aside from picking food straight from its source, the best option with the highest life force is the Farmer’s Market. After that, from a grocery store offering the freshest vegetables. Tear off a leaf from a bundle of greens, smell it and chew it; you’ll know if it’s fresh or not.

The ones on sale have low pranic value - they’ve been priced to go for a reason.

When you eat foods with higher pranic value, the more energy you will have, and the more nutrition your body will be able to take in.

What are my food habits?

1. First thing in the morning when I wake up, I take some sips of hot water. This helps with the detox and elimination process. It also feels like a warm, loving hug for the inner child.

2. Sometime around 10 am, I drink my mud/wtr, an adaptogen made from mushrooms, mixed with raw cacao powder, and simmered in organic almond milk.

3. I eat twice a day. My first meal can be as early as 11 am and as late as 1 pm. 10 to 2 is the ideal window of time to lunch, when our digestion is strongest.

4. My meals are mostly vegetables and a little bit of fatty protein.
   Take the image that we often see of a large piece of protein with a little bit of greens on the side and flip it around.
   Eat the veggies first, and they will fill you up most of the way, helping you not to over consume the protein; and it’s good fiber. Fatty protein keeps you satiated so you’re less likely to reach for a snack; it’s a good swap.
   Sometimes I’ll include a grain.
   I never buy salad dressing because they use the worst oils. It’s so easy to make your own, so there’s just no reason to. The simplest thing to do is to mix olive oil with lemon, balsamic vinegar, or Bragg’s liquid aminos. Or you can mix tahini (sesame seed paste) with lemon, Bragg’s, and water for an amazing dressing. Or use other fruits like oranges and smash avocados and add salt and pepper as a part of your dressing. Or create a caesar-inspired dressing with cheese, olive oil, mustard, and anchovies. Have fun experimenting!

5. Between lunch and dinner, I might drink any of the following:
   - hot water
   - room temp water with chia seeds (a good fiber source and Omega-3)
   - a no-syrup coffee drink (I like coffee, and this is my treat sometimes, but I don’t have it every day)
   - lassi (1:4 ratio of yogurt to water with cardamom, honey, and rosewater, see recipe here; it’s good for digestion)

6. Dinner is similar to lunch. This meal is ideally lighter than lunch since there’s less time to digest it before sleep. I like to eat sometime between 5 and 6:30 pm. But I’m a social being whose circle enjoys dining out, so alas I end up eating later when this happens. I find that when I’m finishing my meal after 8:30 pm, I need my alarm clock to wake up the next morning.

Important things to note:

• Choose the cleanest food options you can afford.

• Bless your food. Take a moment to look at it. Take the colors and aroma in through your senses, and say thank you. This is one of the special ingredients that helps convert food into pure nourishment.

• Eat with gratitude. We are, after all, so lucky to have so much food available to us.

• Learn to taste the foods. Meaning be present with what you’re eating rather than shoveling it in your mouth as you continue talking, working, or watching the screen. If the food needs covering up with too many spices and sauces, and you’re just not wow’d by it, it could be that the ingredients lack prana (flavor), you’re not really hungry, or you’re distracted.

• Take a moment after your meal to see how you feel. This will tell you a lot. If you go into a food coma, it may be that the meal was wrong for you, you didn’t chew your food, you overate, or perhaps, you weren’t in the right head space while you ate, so your body shut you down so it can digest all that you put into it.

On this note…

The Pizza Test: how to convert unlikely foods into nourishment

I’ve historically had issue with pizza.

I love it like everyone else, but it doesn’t seem to love me: it makes me feel congested, heavy, foggy, and lethargic. To this day, I still won’t choose it except for maybe a few times a year when I’m out and eating socially.

About 15 years ago, I was at a weekend workshop learning about Spiritual Hungers. On that Friday evening, the facilitators told us not to bring lunch the next day, they’ll have it for us.

To my dismay, as lunchtime approached, I saw boxes of pizza getting stacked at the entrance. I looked for the salads - there were none.

During lunch, we were asked to do an assignment while having pizza:

come up with a spiritual hunger in between each bite (they provided us with a list of hungers), and get the hunger met before taking the next bite.

Crazy exercise, but this forced us to find creative and spontaneous ways to identify and get our hungers met quickly.

• Lesson one: I couldn’t stuff myself with too many slices because I had to pause in between each bite. Pauses are important. Spiritual teachers will tell you to put down your fork while chewing your food and then wait until you can feel your food land in your stomach before picking it up again. This is the natural pause.

• Lesson two: because I was getting my spiritual hungers met in so many ways, the pizza had zero negative impact on me!
  What we often do while eating is sit unconsciously in our emotional hungers. We either dwell on things we need to work out, or we watch things on a screen that draw on our needs, judgments, angers, and fears. Those hungers keep us hungry.
  When we’re being social, we’re often navigating the game of fitting in or managing irritation, aggravating our digestion.
  Instead, enjoy your food and company guilt-free, and with as much gratitude for food and friendship as you can.

Final note: food should be enjoyable. Eating kale thinking how much you hate it but having it because it’s good for you won’t provide you with the nutrition you think you’re getting from it. In order to receive benefits, you must accept it emotionally, just like a gift. Have you ever received a gift you didn’t care for and then thrown it in a corner somewhere? No benefit.

We are blessed to have choices. Choose from the freshest options the foods you enjoy.

And have it with grace and gratitude.

To life force, and with love,

Savitree