know if you’ ve made the right choices? What do you do if you haven’ t? What can you expect from a major change? I will provide you with some answers, but by no means all. First, in broad terms, your diet should
• Support your general health, your activity, your chosen work, and your spiritual aspirations
• Feel comfortable and right, tasty and satisfying
• Help you feel centered and clean
• Keep your weight and energy at a comfortable level
• Help restore your health if you’ ve lost it Your diet should not
• Block your health, your activity, or your work
• Make you depressed, bloated, overanxious, irritable, tired, overweight, underweight, or cause pain anywhere along the digestive tract
• Cause you guilt, worry, or confusion Change is the real secret of a successful life— the ability to adapt to new circumstances, new forms, new events that arise out of the old. Continuous change is also what keeps our bodies healthy: sloughing off old cells, getting rid of metabolic waste matter, blood and lymph flowing easily, their pH balance constantly monitored and adjusted. Whenever we are stuck, when change and movement are blocked, stagnation and illness set in. It is time to change your diet when
• It’ s not doing what you feel it should do( see above)
• You feel you’ re ready for a change In addition, you may have various complaints or discomforts that you feel are associated with the way you eat. Often, your family doctor will tell you“ it’ s all in your head,” or“ food has nothing to do with it”— but deep down in your bones you know that things would vastly improve if you ate better, and most of the time you’ ll be right. There is another time to change your diet, and that is the most difficult time of all: when you’ ve already changed to a strongly recommended, clearly stated, apparently sensible health regime— and it’ s not working, or not working anymore. You don’ t feel right, your energy’ s down, your spirits are down, perhaps you’ re losing too much weight, or gaining too much— and you’ re feeling vaguely guilty because it seems that it’ s you who is wrong, not the regime, with its great backup and testimonials to its effectiveness.( For more on this, see“ Can Health Food Make Us Sick?” this page, in the following chapter.) It is a difficult moment, because you have already made a change, a new commitment. If you have invested considerable time and energy into putting the new approach into practice, it’ s even harder. Yet sticking to a regime that doesn’ t work for you is pointless, regardless of its objective validity, scientific basis, or philosophical justness; regardless, too, of the conviction, clarity, credentials, or rhetoric of its proponents. This caveat applies to all diets, from the most“ sensible” Recommended American Diet( RAD) to the most“ outlandish” raw-foods regime. You should always take into account where you are at this point in time: If you have been eating raw foods for five years, you may well need a changeover to macrobiotics or a hearty R. A. D.; or, if you have been doing the Standard American Diet( S. A. D.), you may need a raw-foods regime to alkalize and clean yourself out. The time that is most highly indicated for a change in diet is when you are feeling stuck and need out. HOW TO CHANGE YOUR DIET Tuning in to Your Body Signals If you have decided that you do need to change the way you’ re eating, you must then decide how to go about it. The first thing to do is to pay attention to everything you eat and to how you feel right afterward and up to twenty-four hours later.“ There is a wisdom in [ the body ] beyond the rules of physic,” wrote Francis Bacon.“ A man’ s own observations, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.” We each know much more about ourselves than we realize. The problem is that the knowledge is nonverbal; that is, it is not intellectual or rational. Our deepest self-knowledge resides in the body, which a great deal of the time does not speak the same language as the mind. Our senses are directed outward, and no sensory nerves are connected to the major organs that support life. Therefore the only“ body information” we get are vague sensations and generalized signals. We are usually not consciously aware of that vast filing system of useful information about our general and specific condition, and have to go to a professional healer or physician who has made it his or her life’ s work to read other people’ s signals. If our code can be cracked, and the healer tells us what we already know about ourselves, we think the professional is right, and go home happy, believing we gained some new information. Because our subconscious signals are nonverbal, our highly verbal society often ignores them or pronounces them insignificant, not real.“ I feel” is not a medically acceptable statement about our physical condition if it is not supported by clinical findings. And yet, as one doctor once said to me,“ You are sick when you feel sick.” The reverse may also be true. What I find significant is not that I may feel tired, for example, but that I feel that it’ s“ not OK” to feel tired in this