February 15th 1998
THE "LOVING YOURSELF DIET" PART 3
I wonder how far you got with making food choices. I would like to offer you some help but not too much. If you are listening too much to me and if you are not listening enough inside yourself, things will always start going wrong. The most important step to becoming a "conscious soul" is to start looking at yourself as a person who has all the wisdom of life deeply hidden inside themselves.
Let us start with breakfast. Let us assume that you usually have white toast with margerine and marmalade, a cup of coffee with white sugar and a bowl of cornflakes both with longlife milk (because it was convenient to buy those things from the corner shop) and an apple. Let us imagine that you had two weeks of spoiling yourself and ate croissants with butter and expensive apricot jam, fresh coffee with cream and sugar, egg, bacon, baked beans, mushrooms and tomatoes and cream yoghurt with strawberries.
If you were asked to describe a healthy breakfast you would say:
Organic brown bread with healthy margarine and sugarfree jam, grain coffee (Barleycup, etc - there are many types) with soya milk and honey, fried tofu with baked beans on brown toast and a bowl of organic muesli with nuts, dates and fresh fruit, especially apples and pears.
The two weeks of spoiling yourself might have had an effect on your eating already. You sometimes had indigestion afterwards or the taste in your mouth was uncomfortable after breakfast. For your two weeks of choices you might choose for your breakfast the following:
Real coffee and grain coffee, milk and soya milk, white sugar and honey, white bread and organic brown bread, butter and margarine, fried bacon and fried tofu, sugared corn flakes and organic muesli with fresh fruit and nuts. You would take your time and try both options at the same time and decide which of them you would like more.
If people are able to keep a strict diet for a few weeks they will certainly lose some weight, but they will also gain it again later as soon as the discipline wears out.
What we want to achieve are real living new habits of eating which the whole person likes and wants. They can only be acquired very slowly in everybody's individual way which is different for each person. These new habits will last much longer than any imposed diet.
Now I want to say a few things about dairy products, refined flour and sugar. They all create mucus in the body. What is mucus? It is a common word for the first stage of blocked energy in the body. Mucus stops the energy from flowing. It can result from food, environmental pollution, chemical additives and unexpressed emotions, just to name a few. It is also called "waste products".
Mucus from cheese or white sugar can get stuck in the chest and create kind of a soft warm cushion as a substitute for love. Food often serves as a substitute for warmth, love and care. But all the sticky mucus we take in doesn`t really belong to our body. It is a stranger and therefore it will always be in the way and inhibit the natural function of th body. Thus it has to be eliminated again. As soon as the body has time and space it will start to get rid of the mucus.
Everybody knows that mucus will be eliminated via our digestion or through nose, ears and mouth. If we collect too much mucus we might get a cold to eliminate it. Mucus in the chest comes out as a slimy cough. Mucus, if not eliminated, tends to go deeper inside the body and stick around muscles to make them tense. The last place for the solidifying mucus is between the bone and a thin skin around the bone which is called periost.
Gerda Boyesen, the founder of Biodynamic Psychotherapy and Massage has invented the "periost massage" where you mainly work on those blockages around the bones. Bones which are surrounded by this blocked crystallised energy, fluid and mucus will hurt when they are pressed and rubbed (as I have already mentioned in the chapters about hand and foot massage).
Proper massage can eventually clean the bone and release the blocked energy.
Slowly this knowledge is being accepted by food specialists but there are still many people who believe that they should drink a few glasses of milk every day to stay healthy and fit.
But more and more people nowadays are starting to become sensitive and allergic to dairy products.
As a child I could not eat cheese. I hated the taste of milk and would never eat any chicken. In Bavaria people have lots of milk and dairy products. Mostly in the country people think that dairy products are very healthy. Dairy products contain lots of calcium, however, and it is not easy for people with calcium deficiency to get calcium from other sources, so it might be worth looking for other sources. The most healthy dairy product, which I still have occasionally, is yoghurt with acidopholus bacteria. It has a beneficial effect on the digestion.
Spend as much time as you like with making your choices. You will see that your food habits will very slowly start to change. But it can only happen if you really start to love and truly respect yourself more than you did before. It is so easy to stick to the way our parents used to see and treat us as children and not even be aware of it.
Once your stomach and belly shrink they need exercise and massage. When I was pregnant I oiled my belly everyday with olive oil and exercised my stomach muscles every day - especially after the pregnancy. That helped me not to get any stretch marks and keep my belly thin and firm all through the years.
Massage your belly and stomach as deeply as possible. With the finger tips you can dig into the belly and work on the tonus of the intestines. Try to soften the muscles if they feel too hard and try to strengthen them if they are too soft and floppy. Pain can come from tension or inflammation. Pain from tension can be improved with deep massage, pain from inflammation should not be influenced with massage. It rather needs healing and holding to get better.
Whenever you have time, breathe in and tense your belly muscles. Hold your breath and the tension for a while. Then breathe out and let go. Do this 5 to 10 times a day.
Once your belly feels empty and sensitive again you might not want to change this delightful feeling for all the food in the world. It is such a difference to being numb and insensitive. Fasting is the best way to help you to get there. But fasting should be prepared by a one week diet.
The flower essence Crab Apple is especially suitable for preparing a fast. But the intake can cause in very few cases some side effects such as spots, excema and ulcers which are all ways the body eliminates waste products via the skin. Crab Apple can make you very taste sensitive. You probably will eat more selectively. Crab Apple can also make you feel more clean inside your body. Thus you might get less affected by your environment. People who are very fussy about smells and dirt can benefit very much from taking this essence. It can help to create in us a very healthy attitude towards being clean inside and outside ourselves and as a consequence of that to feel more confident and less critical.
On Monday 16th I will give a talk about the "Loving Yourself Diet" in Vauxhall SW 8. Cost is £ 10 (concession £ 7) Time: 7-9pm. More info on 0171 735 4513.