12 Steps to Raw

I just bought the book 12 Steps to Raw by Victoria Boutenko. And I'm listening to the Raw Mom Summit, which is interviews with leaders in the raw food movement. I am trying to surround myself with a virtual community of raw, health-full people. I'm fortunate that my parents (who I live with) eat many raw foods, we even eat raw dinners now. But it is inspiring to be around or listen to "extreme" people. I want to be extremely healthy. So I haven't gotten to the first step in VB's book. She's just been talking about the importance of raw, etc. But she talks about the importance of being 100%, that some people can't eat 99%, that it always spirals out of control until they are back to eating the way they did before. That is definitely me. One bite is too much, and a hundred bites are never enough. When I am 100%, it creates momentum. I don't want to mess up my good record. I get set into a new way. Then I have a pancake with my son, or some chips, and then it's all down the tubes, and I'm eating pancakes, and chips and cookies and ice cream. If you are an alcoholic, you can never be 99% sober. I want to be 100% sober.

Today I drank 28oz of fresh OJ for breakfast, had a strawberry/banana smoothie for lunch with medjool dates, then I ate 14 oranges for dinner, for a snack during the eagles game, I had banana ice cream with pineapple chunks cut up into it.

Walking the (barefoot) walk (or get the log out of your own eye)

There are so many things I want for my son. But honestly, I really want them for myself. I want him to eat fruit and not junk food, but I eat junk food. I'm a tortilla chip addict. It's a very serious condition for me, so I'm not joking. I eat completely healthfully for a week, then I have chips one night, and I can't go back to 100% healthy. Every night I have to eat chips. I usually eat them with vegan sour cream (if I have it on hand), tomatoes or lettuce, black beans, and jarred jalapenos. I rationalize this addictive behavior by pointing at the raw tomatoes, the "healthy" beans, the lettuce, the baked chips, the veganness of the sour cream. But the fact is, eating chips every night of the week is disgusting, unhealthy, and addictive behavior. My tongue burns from the salt when I'm done, and after all the binging, am I satiated?? No, then I crave super-sweets like cookies and ice cream and candy to balance out the salt overload.

Tell me, how I can expect my son to be healthy when I am all over the place? I can't. I can legislate and control, because I am bigger than him, but that won't help the fundamental problem. Children take after their parents, especially in regards to food. Forget sneaking around after they go to bed, my child will eat like I do. They know hypocrisy when they see it. And a child drinking his mother's milk can even taste her hypocrisy. So I'll use my desire to see my son grow up without sickness and disease to fuel my own recovery.

I picked up a 12-step book my mom had laying on the table and read it last night while I ate dinner (tostitos, tomatoes, beans, and jalapenos). And I realized that I was insane, if insanity is doing the same thing and expected a different result. I have been trying to eat 100% raw food for about a year and a half. And every time that I try, I say this is what I am going to do, and I last exactly a week, and I say, well, I'll just have chips tonight since I have been raw for a whole week (celebrating my healthy success by poisoning myself???), and then tomorrow I'll go right back on the bandwagon. Or I'll have a once a week "treat" night. Plbbbbb. Then I'm right back to eating chips every night, and then I'm back into eating sugary desserts, and my stomach swells, my energy drops, and I stop exercising.

So this time, I'm going to go through the 12 steps and maybe check out Overeaters Anonymous. My mother has been going to OA meetings for as long as I can remember, and they have really helped her. I am reticent about trying it, since I feel like I would be completely out of place, but I may.

First step: Acknowledging that I am powerless over food.

The best parenting advice I ever received

The best parenting advice I ever got was this:

NEVER CHASE YOUR CHILD

There are exceptions to every "never," but please get the point. If you chase your child, he will run away. I've had mothers remark to me about how lucky I am that my son stays with me that their child would never do that. But my son used to run away from me, when I used to chase him. Now that I have stopped, he doesn't run. It is instinctive for young animals to stay with their mothers. Teaching our children to run away from us is not only time consuming, but dangerous.

"Our expectations about our children are extremely powerful. It's not necessarily what we tell children we want from them, but what we show we expect that children respond to. For instance, if you're at the park and you say to a child, "Now don't run away. Stay right here," you're showing him that you expect him to want to run away, which he otherwise wouldn't dream of doing because you're the only person he knows there. It's deeply instinctive, not only for human beings, but for all young animals to want to stay close to their mothers in strange territory. But once we've placed the suggestion, the next thing you know the little boy does run off, and there she goes chasing after him." (Jean Leidoff)

We also place the idea in their heads that they are incompetent. "don't do that, you'll hurt yourself." "give me that knife." "be careful!" "bye-bye and be good." All these common parenting mantras erode the child's natural caution and instill in him that he is expected to be bad. If you freak out and shout NO when he's picking up a sharp knife, he's a lot more likely to cut himself, then if you calmly show him how to use it. If you are nervous about her climbing somewhere, keep your mouth shut and just spot her (for your benefit, not for hers). If you are worried about him using a sharp knife, show him how to use it properly and then go about your business close by where you can intervene if needed. But keep in mind that hovering, standing over his shoulder is not instilling confidence in him. Your supervision is for your benefit, so don't let him feel your worry.

John Holt (education author, "father" of the homeschooling movement) had a conversation with someone who worked at something called an adventure playground. He asked the man if the kids ever got hurt, since this playground looked considerably more dangerous than a regular playground. The man replied, "Not since we stopped allowing the parents in." As Clare Cooper Marcus, a landscape architect, points out, "It is true that the site is often rough, structures built by children may be hazardous, tools could be used in a dangerous way--but all available evidence indicates that the children are so absorbed in what they are doing, and so cautious in attempting anything beyond their present capacities, that the accident rate is in fact lower than that on conventional playgrounds with fixed equipment."

Left alone, children will act responsibly, taking only calculated risks and only doing what they are capable of. Don't teach your child to run away.

Calm and Confident

In other words, because a toddler wants to learn what his people do, he expects to be able to center his attention on an adult who is centered on her own business. An adult who stops whatever she is doing and tries to ascertain what her child wants her to do is short-circuiting this expectation. Just as significantly, she appears to the tot not to know how to behave, to be lacking in confidence and, even more alarmingly, looking for guidance from him, a two or three year old who is relying on her to be calm, competent, and sure of herself.

-Jean Leidoff author of The Continuum Concept

Jean Leidoff studied two tribes in South America who were very happy and peaceful. Their children never fought, never had tantrums. She identified certain aspects of their child rearing practices that she thought helped to account for the difference. Babies were carried constantly while their mothers and mothers' helpers worked, played, etc. When the baby could crawl away, they were permitted to without constant warnings and rescuings. They were breastfed immediately whenever they wanted it.

There are key concepts that these tribes grasped about children that we have completely lost in our culture. One of these is that children want to get along. They want to fit into the culture around them. They are watching their parents to learn how to act. If I, as a parent, continually look back at my son to figure out what to do, that frustrates him, because it's backwards. And it scares him. Go on, live your life, and your children will follow you. Do what you enjoy doing. Sometimes he will want to join in, and other times he'll want to play. Leidoff calls this not being child-centered.

This is where your parent's generation goes, "I told you to stop being so child-centered years ago." And they have a point. In their day, children were better behaved and more competent, because their parents had higher expectations for them. But the way that they went about getting that compliance left their children stuck dealing with the consequences the rest of their lives. The difference here is that these tribes really believed in the innate sociability of the child. Children (and adults) were never forced to do anything. They were never made to feel unworthy if they didn't meet expectations. And the parents didn't cajole them. They simply went about their tasks, and the children learned how to behave in that culture. With force removed from the equation, you never have to worry about whether it is developmentally appropriate for the child to be doing or not doing something. The child is free to progress at his or her own pace. From climbing up and down the steps, to food preparation, to leaving the mother's bed, to weaning. There is no element of force.

Crucial to being a calm and confident parent is the belief that children have an instinct for self preservation. A friend of mine (quoting someone else) said that having a toddler was like being on suicide watch. I couldn't disagree more. It is that attitude by a parent that drives the child to behave more and more unreasonably (either acting dangerously or fearfully). "Part of the trouble is the way we keep suggesting to children that they're going to hurt themselves. We don't seem to have even a faint notion of how powerful our authority is in their eyes. We put gates at the tops of stairs, and then we accidentally leave it open one day and down they plunge because the suggestion was so strong that, if the gate isn't locked, then they are going to fall. But if there were no gate they wouldn't fall."

Our attitude of fearfulness (of our children being hurt, lost, of our own incompetence, of our own ineffectiveness, etc) is not lost on our children. If you tell your friend over and over that you just don't know what to do with your toddler, that he's just impossible, then he will be impossible. Positive expectations lead to positive results. Stop labeling your child. I hear people branding their babies as problem children for life. Um, what?

The point here is not tell you exactly what to do. The point is whatever you do relax! Instill confidence in your child that you've got it together. I know it's hard, but please try to find something else to talk about with your friends besides how difficult your children are (at least when they are in earshot--and you never know when they'll be listening). Practice framing your child in a positive light to other people. It's completely counter cultural, but just try it.

You are the ultimate authority in your child's eyes. Be calm and confident, and your child can relax and go about his business of being a child.

Fruit

Let me save you the time of reading this post, and I'll get right to the point:

Eat More Fruit



That's right. Eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

When people talk about diet, there's a lot of this nutrient and that essential fatty acid and those calories, but not much about whether what they are recommending is part of a natural diet for humans. Every other animal has a diet that they do best on. Horses and things like horses eat grasses. Dogs and things like dogs eat flesh (raw flesh, bones, marrow, blood, gristle, fat, etc.). Young mammals drink milk. Birds eat seeds. And the wild animals that share most of their DNA with humans-- anthropoid-primates (gorillas, bonobos, chimps, orangutans, etc)-- eat a low fat diet of almost entirely fruits and vegetables.

Think about it: without any tools, without your stove and oven, what would you eat? What tastes good in it's natural state? Fruit. Fruit. And some tender, tasty greens. But mostly fruit--the food that practically digests itself. The food with more vitamins than any other. And vegetables are the food with the most minerals. So we'd eat fruits and vegetables. Unless you relish chasing down an antelope, killing it with your bare hands, and eating it's raw flesh. No? Well, then eat fruit. We're living in the Garden of Eden, just go to your grocery. Never before have we had access to so much whole, fresh, ripe food, and never before have we shunned it so.

It's okay. Eat a banana. Eat four luscious mangoes for lunch. Eat a salad of baby spinach covered with red, rich strawberries. Bite into a juicy apple, and then eat four more. Notice how good you feel. Check it out.

Read

The 80/10/10 Diet by Dr Douglas Graham.
Your Natural Diet by TC Fry
Eat to Live by Dr Joel Fuhrman
The China Study by Dr Colin Campbell
Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Check out these websites:

http://www.raw-food-health.net/
http://foodnsport.com/

Even if you never go all the way. It's nice to know that you can make a healthy, balanced meal out of ten bananas. :)

Barefeet

I'm going to start off my blog with the tenants of Barefoot Parenting. (This is all tongue-in-cheek, and I'm definitely laughing at my own pretension. Laugh with me. :)

Number One: Go barefoot

That's right. Take off your shoes. And socks. Rub your foot on the carpet. Curl your toes, stretch them out. Roll your ankles in a circle. Flex your foot. Doesn't it feel good? Now go for a walk. Outside. No, don't put your shoes on. Walk on your sidewalk, walk on the grass, walk on the gravel. Feel the world. Don't stomp around like you do when you've got shoes on. Bare feet force us to tread lightly on the earth. Your feet are like your hands. They allow us to interact with the world. They have tons of tiny little bones and muscles. They can move like nothing else on your body. Imagine a country that always wore heavy gloves from morning until night...
In this country, we never burn our hands on a hot oven, we never cut our fingers, our hands stay baby soft. And the style, well, you should see our gloves. Some of them position our hands totally flat all the time, which is the most ladylike way for hands to be of course. Do our hands get hot? Well that's what we have hand powders for or creams to deal with the occasional fungus problem...

Silly country. Gloves have their place, sure, but they are just tools. We deal with occasional burns, cuts, and callouses, because it's better to risk an injury than have our hands bound. What most people don't realize is that our feet are the same way. They are designed to bend and twist. They are designed for shock absorption. When you wear shoes, your feet stomp trying to feel what they are walking on. When you wear shoes, the muscles in your foot atrophy from being immobilized all day. Most shoes (men and women) have a built in heel. From a childhood and lifetime of wearing shoes, the tendons in the back of your leg shrink to fit this new walking pattern. All of these things lead to the foot, knee, and leg problems and injuries that plague our shoe wearing culture. In countries where footwear is not used, studies shoes an almost total absence of adult foot problems.

You can spend top dollar on fancy "barefoot" shoes, and these are better than their thick, stiff soled counterparts, but the real deal is right at the bottom of your leg. And it's free. And it's the best. Let your child decide when to wear shoes, and make them soft soled shoes, so her foot can move and grow strong.

For more information check out these websites:

Parents for Barefoot Children
Barefoot Running

Read the book Born to Run

For soft soled shoes for the whole family check out Soft Star Shoes.

But seriously, don't let your fear keep your feet from the earth. Walking barefoot is a natural part of living, but it can also be a spiritual experience...which is also a natural part of life.