MacroLife – Marijke de Coninck – Macrobiotic Counsellor and Healer

In the last decade, there has been a lot written about food, health and our way of living. When we buy magazines, we are often confronted with these subjects.  Over the last decade, everyone has gradually become more or less conscious about the food that we are eating and how it can affect our health. Generally speaking, we eat too much, too much fat, too rich, too much animal food and too much sugar.
If we look at the USA, lots of people are overweight, diabetes is a disease that that is becoming more and more common, even amongst young people. Mostly everyone agrees that we do not live healthily enough.

We do have a different eating pattern than we have 100 years ago. Since 1900 we changed our eating pattern drastically, this has never happened during the past 2000 years.
 
Over the last 2000 years, people ate mostly what we call ” PRIMARY FOOD”.  Primary food or traditional food, consists mainly of whole grains, vegetables and beans. Often people added to this diet SECONDARY FOOD : small amounts of animal food : meat, fish or a little dairy and fruits and seeds depending on where they were living.
Nowadays, we often eat the other way around and live from secondary food: dairy, meat and sweets and only small amounts of primary food.  Many cultures remained faithfull to their traditional food and if we travel around the world , we still see that in Northern Africa people still eat grain in the form of couscous together with vegetables and chickpeas (beans).
Middle Africa uses more sorghum, a kind of millet, as a grain together with vegetables and beans.  The mediterranean area eat grains in the form of pasta: spaghetti and noodles, lots of vegetables, fish and beans, olive oil and also polenta (made from corn).  In most of the Swiss restaurants, polenta is still on the menu.  In Austria barley soups, stews and soups with dark bread is served.  In South and Middle America they use corn in the form as arepa’s and tortilla’s, red beans, soups and stews.  In China, Japan and Thailand it is rice (nowadays it is mostly white rice, but it used to be brown rice), sushi, wok dishes, miso soup, fish, seaweed, soya beans, tahoe, tofu and tempeh. Of course nowadays, everywhere we travel we find Coke and sugar and the influences of industralisation.
Originally in England we had whole oats as the main grain, porridge and oatcakes. Porridge came originally from Scotland, people boiled the oatflakes in water, later in history they added milk; porridge on the continent is cooked with milk and thickened with a bit of white wheatflour.  In Germany, they had a tradition of ryebread and sauerkraut. Belgium is a country of wheatbread eating people, they often had it with lentil soup.

Youngsters today don’t even have a habit of cooking anymore; if they think about cooking, they often think about taking a pizza out of the freezer and putting it in the microwave. Some of them survive on junk food.  Even babyfood has been changed from the natural mothers milk for at least a year and after that grain and vegetable purees to cows milk, southern fruit, sugar and biscuits.  Often, food from the supermarket contains lots of sugar,we find it even in mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard etc.
 
 
 
The reasons why we don’t eat healthy food is:
 
        1. The QUALITY of the food has changed a lot over the last hundred years, due to chemical agriculture using herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, artificial fertilizers and due to environmental changes, the soil has become less rich in nutrients and minerals such as magnesium, zinc, etc and our mother earth has become more and more poisoned. Think about car pollution and heavy metals.  Choosing better quality food such as ORGANIC FOOD can make lots of difference for our bodies.
 
       2. REFINED FOOD, over the decades, has become more and more famous. In bygone times, people ate unrefined carbohydrates (whole grains), nowadays most people often eat white bread, white noodles, white rice and simple sugars. Bread seems a far cry away from a healthy product, it looks like sponge full of additives and preservatives. One even uses chlorine to keep the white colour in the bread! Chlorine is used in our tapwater as well, although everyone knows it is carcinogenic.
How can we heal? become whole again if we don’t eat whole food?
We live in a time of separation, we meet separation everywhere and find it so difficult to find peace and unity in ourselves, in relationships and spirituality.  The more we eat refined food, the more we become separated from ourselves and we think very in a separated way. Western Medicine is an example of separation in ‘thinking’. When one develops a disease for example a cyst, often the doctor suggest to take it out and the problem is gone. A sore throat is treated with antibiotics, anti =against, bios = life. It looks like a battle against life, against viruses and bacteria. If we eat whole food, we become whole again and it affects our approach to life and our thinking.

Where does the disease and the problem come from? What did I do to develop this? The throat is related to the kidneys, am I too tired, do I need more rest. On which meridian does the cyst appear?
No wonder we feel separated, we eat white bread and run to the chemist to have bran because we are constipated. We eat refined sea salt and run to the natural health foodshop to buy minerals.
Everything in our body is related to each other and related to the food we are eating and the lifestyle we are living and the choices we are making in life.  Choosing UNREFINED FOOD as much as possible can contribute to a healthier body and a holistic way of thinking.

     3. MODERN CONSERVATION TECHNIQUES and WAYS OF COOKING, for example freezing the food.  Using frozen food, pasteurised and sterile food, on a daily basis, is using dead energy, we become more and more sterile and out of touch with ourselves. For people who burned themselves out or suffer from ME and fibromyalgia, this is an important point. Microwaved food and electrical stoves give much more chaotic vibration to the food than food cooked on wood or gas burners.

Due to modern transport techniques we don’t eat so much local food anymore.  Cooking FRESH FOOD every day and using NATURAL SOURCES of energy to prepare the food is the next step forward to health.
 
     4. Not understanding the ENERGETICS OF FOOD
There are reasons why certain foods grow in certain areas. If we understand the energetics of foods and understand that the universe has its laws, than we will choose to eat according TO THE SEASON we are in and the AREA, CLIMATE we are living in.  A warmer climate (yang) produces bigger and juicier plants and fruits to cool the body down(yin).  A more wet and cooler climate (yin) produces smaller and hardier plants (yang) to keep us warm. To keep ourselves balanced, we have to adapt to the life on earth and not expect that life will adapt to us. Therefore, on a daily basis it is not such a good idea to eat bananas, kiwis, oranges and drink juices and smoothies in this damp climate.
 
 

 
 
 
    5. EATING IS OFTEN THE ONLY WAY WE KNOW TO DEAL WITH OUR   

     EMOTIONS
How often do we eat when we are not hungry and drink when we are not thirsty, which is a very natural way to be in touch with and to nurture our body?  Often we use chocolate, coffee, alcohol, dairy not to feel our feelings, to suppress them and to comfort ourselves. Sugary food especially keeps us sweet.  We were often trained like that.  Our parents gave us sweets when we were sad as a child.  Simple sugar, or fast sugar (honey, white and brown sugar, fructose, maple syrup, agave syrup, cane sugar, molasses, maltitol, saccharine, aspartame) gives us immediate energy so the blood sugar levels rise instantly and we feel energised and ecstatic, but a little later the blood sugar levels drop drammatically and we feel guilty, bad about ourselves, depressed and we crave sweets again. Mood swings and sugar addiction is the result and swings in energy.  The answer to this and a condition that is related, called hypoglycemia, is EATING COMPLEX SUGARS or slow sugars, which we find in carbohydrates and whole grains. It gives us endurance and a constant gentle form of energy and good mood. “Sugar Blues” written by William Dufty is an interesting book to read.  Learning TO DEAL WITH OUR EMOTIONS other than by using food: expressing ourselves, feeling the feelings, writing in a diary, breathing exercises, painting, walking in nature, do something creative or see a counsellor on a regular basis.
 
     6. WE DON’T KNOW that  DAIRY products are very mucus forming and collect in all the cavities of the body (ears, throat, breasts, ovaries, lungs, sinuses) and cause their associated problems. Dairy is a main cause of arteriosclerosis, breast cancer, allergies, weak immune system, lymphatic problems , osteoporosis and poor digestion.

Prof. Campbell dedicated his whole life to study the relationship between dairy food and health and the effect on the body and in his book: “The China Study” he writes that all countries which have the highest intake of dairy food have the highest rate of cancer and osteoporosis. AVOIDING dairy food and using sesame seeds, tofu, almonds, seaweed, leafy greens, grains, sauerkraut, beans, bancha tea as a source of calcium.  
                      

Our TAPWATER is full of hormones, due to women taking the birth control pill, peeing the excess of the hormones out and it goes into the water of our country, where the fish are changing sex, these days it ends up in our drinking water, purified but still with residues of hormones.  Choosing good quality WATER is an important step on our path, as we consist of 70% water.
The more we eat secondary food as our main food and forget about the primary food, the more likely it will be that we develop sooner or later degenerative illness such as cancer, heart and circulatory problems, arthritis, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimers, Parkinson, asthma, multiple sclerosis, depression, etc.  Make grains, beans, vegetables, soups, pasta, seaweed your PRIMARY FOOD and as an addition to that, make the food a little richer with a good quality oil, seeds and nuts, condements and seasonings, some fish,  local fruits and natural beverages.
 
     7.  FOOD makes our BLOOD and our blood makes our CELLS.  We are responsible for what we eat and for who we want to become. Eventually our blood nourishes our brain cells and every cell of the body. Our thinking and behaviour is influenced by the choices we make in our lives.  Blood quality changes over a four month period. We transform through our blood, through our food. Food is not only what we eat but everything that comes to us. I’ll talk about that in the next newsletter, but remember that food and what we eat and drink is a choice we are making. We are free to put in our mouth what we want and create the blood quality we want and who we want to become. CHOOSING THE BEST QUALITY FOOD IS AN ACT OF SELF LOVE.
 
If you have questions about this article, or you want more detailed information or would like a consultation to help you further on your path, I am very happy to do that and you can contact me on de.meridiaan@scarlet.be

With lots of love,
Marijke