Happy Monday to You!
I hope you all had a lovely weekend.
In this blog, I will share what I’ve been up to for the past several days, and then I’ll share a little on the issue of food and stress management.
Catching up!
I’ve been a little less frequent on my blogs lately because I really needed rest after returning from Toronto. My schedule has been intensely busy the past six months and when I got home, I could feel it was time to go inward for a while and get some deep rest.
Thank You to all of you who sent me birthday notes, cards, emails, texts, and gifts!
Above, you can see me with my buddy, Ryan Hughes, Professional Motto Cross Coach. Vidya and I love Ryan’s art and it was my lucky day.
Ryan and I have been waiting for a day to hang out and enjoy some art, rocks and deep conversation for some time. He’s busy traveling the world teaching, as I am, but we got to visit yesterday for a great day. Thanks for the beautiful art Ryan! I’m looking forward to seeing it framed and hung on the wall so I can enjoy it every day at work Bud!
Ryan and I spent the whole day hanging out on my porch listening to great music, enjoying the sun and all the creatures in the garden, and drawing. This is what we created together.
In Hindu mythology, it is believed that the world is held up by an elephant. When a wise man is asked, “What holds up the elephant?”, the answer is, “A turtle.” When asked, “What holds up the turtle?”, the wise man says, “an elephant”. When asked how long this goes on for, the wise man answers, “for ever!”
Here you can see our cosmic elephant and our cosmic turtle shell. The elephant’s right eye is the eye in the black of yin; the elephant’s trunk is wrapping around the right (yang) eye of Great Spirit, who looks through it all at SELF. This is our version of the creation story and we had a great time creating it.
Amazing Figs!
I’ve been having the greatest time with my fig tree. After three years of growing from a little sapling, she’s now bearing fruit!
This little fig tree is amazing! Her figs are so full of juiciness that the figs actually break open at the bottom. It is as though the figs are tempting the birds to eat them and spread the love! I shared one with Ryan yesterday, and his reaction was the same as Penny’s when she first tried one, which was, “Wow, these figs are great!”
Like Penny, I told him that he is tasting what happens when my pee is transformed into sweetness by a fig tree! I love peeing on my plants when I water them so they get some natural fertilizer. Seems to help! I don’t recommend peeing on your plants if you aren’t healthy though, it is likely to kill them.
For centuries in China, they collected everyone’s excrement and added them to the community compost pile. Today, that practice has been stopped because the excrement has become so toxic, it kills the plants instead of nourishing them.
This is a very dangerous sign from an ecological perspective. It means that as expressions of nature, we have deviated from the natural plan to the degree that our expulsions are no longer a healthy contribution to nature, but are toxins to every creature they touch.
How far can we go on like this before the people of the planet are so diseased that they won’t have the energy or brainpower to figure out how to clean up their mess? And possibly, more realistically, will children that know far more about corporate logos and iPhone apps than common foods and farm animals have a clue what to do when the curtain comes down?
My Latest Big Stack
My biggest rock stack I’ve ever built stood in my front yard for the better part of six months before it finally got blown down. Stacks like this are quite tricky to build because each slight imbalance or mismatch between the center of gravity of the stone below and the one on top creates rotational torque. As you add successive stones, if you don’t balance the “imbalances”, the stack becomes very unstable.
I really loved the look and feel of my last one, so I waited until I had the energy to tackle this project again. I have to go very slow and be fully centered as I create a stack like this, or it will fall over easily, and possibly on me!
It took me two hours to build this one back up again. I changed the structure of it quite a lot just to make it original again. I had to stand on the top step of an eight foot ladder to crown this one.
It certainly gives you quite a buzz climbing up there and trying to carefully balance yourself, and place stones atop a very sensitive structure. There’s no need to sit with my legs crossed to meditate when building rock sculptures like this.
If you are not fully present in the “NOW”, the stone Buddha’s will be like a zen Master, whacking you with their bow to “re-center” you!
Please be exceedingly careful if you try to build tall stacks like this. Many people try to emulate things they see on my blogs and I want to be sure everyone knows that this is dangerous; every stone you go, particularly if they get above head height, the risk of injury increases!
It is essential that no one is near you when building such stacks, and that you always have a clear escape route planned before putting up each stone.
I have many scars and have smashed many fingers and toes as part of my personal training in this art form. I’d hate anyone to bite off more than they can chew; a 20-pound rock falling from several feet above your head could be the end of all your bills and appointments on the earth plane…
Food and Stress Management
Stress is the number one killer of human beings.
Undoubtedly, as humanity, we are further from our natural developmental environment (nature) than we’ve ever been.
As you can see in my diagram above, there are six primary classes of stressors that we both need, and can be dangerous to our health in either excess or deficiency.
Before I go on here, I’d like to point out that researchers have found that our body uses many times more resources, such as vitamins when stressed than when not feeling stressed.
I believe it was Linus Pauling that showed that the body uses about 20 times more vitamin C per hour when stressed than when in homeostasis (functional balance).
Good Food Stressors
There are some essential stressors that we need with food if our body is to remain healthy. They include:
1. Periods of low food intake, usually due to challenges with food availability.
2. Periods of high food intake, usually due to periods of abundance; when we know there may be shortages, we tend to “stock up”. This creates stress on the digestive, eliminative and metabolic systems in general. If excessive eating isn’t too frequent, and is coupled with adequate exercise, the long-term damage is negligible, if any.
3. Exposure to new foods we’ve not eaten.
All plants, and many animals produce defense chemicals to protect themselves from being eaten. Whenever we consume a new food, we must build enzyme systems to detoxify new food chemicals that may make us sick, or kill us.
We had to carefully taste small quantities to see how much was safe. Then we had to work carefully to determine what processing methods may deactivate dangerous chemicals. As we eat more and more of a given foodstuff over time, we get better and better at processing the defense chemicals in each given foodstuff.
4. High fiber foods were a much more common component of our ancestral diets. Fiber is very important for providing adequate bulk to give the digestive tract something to grab hold of and move through the system.
During periods where there wasn’t any big game animals (or in regions where there aren’t big game animals), we had to eat a lot of high fiber foods to survive.
Because our digestive tracts are not adequately long to ferment fibrous foods effectively enough to extract proteins from them, we had periods of adaptive stress. In these periods, low to moderate, or even high levels of malnutrition often appeared. This has been demonstrated by numerous studies of the bones of people from different time periods.
Tips For Reducing Food Related Stress in Your Life!
As you can imagine, this is a very big topic, for which I could write multiple books, and have! If you don’t have a copy of my book, How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! I’d recommend you start there for a more comprehensive approach.
If you don’t feel you have time to read a whole book, my multimedia ebook, The Last 4 Doctors You’ll Ever Need – How To Get Healthy Now!, is a shorter book with audios, videos, and slide shows to speed comprehension and give you the essentials we all need to know to be healthy.
For today, consider trying these tips to reduce food/drink related stress in your life:
1. Make a legitimate effort to find and eat organically grown food. If you can’t find real, certified organic food from a farm you know is actually real and producing organic food, then find your local farmers market(s).
Eating the freshest food, in the most organic conditions possible goes a long way to increasing bioavailable nutrition and decreasing toxicity.
2. Don’t eat more than you need to abolish hunger. People that eat poor quality food during the day often get hungrier and hungrier throughout the day. This is because they are spending resources and not replacing them. Once the body runs low on a given resource, stress signals are sent to the brain, which often trigger cravings for the foods that contain the missing nutrients.
If a person is too out of touch with their natural instincts, they tend to mistake their cravings for real food for something else, which is usually a form of junk food that they are addicted to!
By eating only enough that you don’t feel hungry, you won’t over-burden your digestive-eliminative systems, leaving more energy to detoxify and heal your body.
This is particularly important at night before bed. Eating a big meal late in the day puts a huge load on your organs through the night, giving them no rest before breakfast the next day.
By eating less, and seeking higher quality food, you will begin to feel lighter and clearer of mind. If you study my audio, Eating the CHEK Way, How to Identify your Primal Pattern Diet, you can learn several highly practical, effective methods for learning to listen to your bodies inner-needs and feeding them effectively.
3. Try a cave man diet for seven days! In my 30-year career, I’ve never had a single patient/client that didn’t feel noticeably better after a seven day cave man diet. They often have all sorts of nagging conditions clear up and feel much more vital. The cave man diet I teach is one in which you avoid all:
– Nuts
– Grains (not only gluten containing grains, but ALL GRAINS)
– Seeds (All berries have seeds in them and should be avoided during this period)
– Dairy (butter is allowed if high quality), and
– Processed table sugar or processed sugars of any type (natural sources such as honey, Canadian maple syrup, yakon syrup, Lucuma powder, raw fruit or dried fruit as examples).
– Commercial salt should be replaced with high quality New Zealand, Himalayan, French or Celtic sea salts; they have the least mercury in them.
You can eat as much vegetables, fruits, above ground or below ground root vegetables as you like, but should always proportion your meals according to your unique metabolic needs as I show in my Primal Pattern Diet Typing program.
4. Drink Water! You can go a long way to vitalizing and cleaning your body by drinking half your body weight in ounces of water daily (Your body weight in Kg x .033 gives liters/day).
Water is the best solvent we have for cleaning our body safely and effectively and there is not better solution for concentrated pollution in your body than water. I give water selection and drinking tips in the book resources mentioned above.
The amount of dangerous chemicals, and the poor quality of water in most commercially traded and consumed drinks is off the charts!
Pretty soon, everyone on the planet (save a few of us) will be drinking 5 Hour Energy drinks, Monster, or Red Bull… I Yi Yi! Shit Howdy!…
5. Get adequate movement each day. If you aren’t getting at least 30 minutes of movement daily, your digestive and eliminative systems are surely going to be backed up. This means that you are “toxic”.
Only when we get adequate movement can we have healthy organ systems in our bodies. It can simply be walking. No need to get to a gym and torture yourself. Remember, the best exercise in the world is the one you are willing to do regularly!
6. Sleep! There is nothing you can do that heals your body better, or faster than sleep. If you are tired, fighting nagging injuries that don’t seem to want to heal, lack sex energy, or your mind isn’t clear, get some sleep!
Many people suffer significant food cravings and stimulant cravings that result in the consumption of a lot of garbage that is stressful to the body-mind due to lack of sleep. Sleep is free. Take it!
If you are having a hard time sleeping adequately at night, try taking a short nap or two during the day. Even 10 minutes can really help!
The best times to take a nap are 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM due to a natural dip in our chi flow at those times. I don’t recommend napping longer than 20 minutes during the day if you have anything important to do. You can have a hard time waking up if you sleep too long, and may not want to go to bed in the evening.
Use naps to support you through the day, but make every effort to create a schedule that allows you to sleep; you have to sleep to live and if you can’t sleep, you will find very soon that you can’t live well either!
OK, that’s it from me today! Lots to do!
I hope you make some of the suggestions I’ve listed above to manage your food and stress.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
