As a journalist, you get to meet people from all walks of life. Over the years I’ve met some wonderful souls, been welcomed into people’s lives in the name of a story, learned many things and questioned much.
In the 15 years I’ve been doing this, there have been a few incredible people who have, just by their very nature, etched their message into my heart—some, albeit few, have even influenced me to change my life.
Once such interview was about five years ago: “Come along and meet this guy, he’s amazing,” the publicist promised. She was talking about Don Tolman, a guy from Utah known fondly by many as the Indiana Jones of Wholefoods. I’d never heard of him, or his message.
His message, I soon learned, is simple: live with nature, by nature and from nature. Understand what foods benefit particular body functions and eat them. Stop putting chemical pills and potions into your mouth. Drink fresh spring water. Stop brushing your teeth with fluoride. Listen to your great grandmother and use her natural remedies. Know that your body’s symptoms are your body’s cures. Eating meat causes putrification and dis-ease. Question everything.
A 30-minute meeting with the Stetson-wearing cowboy felt like five minutes. His message spoke directly to me, as if what he was saying I already knew on some deep level. I’d already been following some of his recommendations, purely on instinct, such as never taking a pill to relieve a headache or antibiotics to fix an ill, and no longer eating red meat.
If you haven’t had a chance to hear Don Tolman speak, below is an interview he did with Samantha Backman. I hope you enjoy hearing his message, as much as I always do.
Why it’s great: Packed with a gold mine of information that will change the way you look at your body and the food you put in it, forever. Tolman also talks about how every wholefood has a signature that corresponds to parts of the body, such as an avocado, which looks like a pregnant woman and takes nine months from blossom to ripened fruit. If a woman eats just one avocado per week, she is helping prevent cervical cancer.
Who’s watching it: Health care professionals, university lecturers and doctors who are realising the Western way of healing with pharmaceuticals doesn’t work. Also anyone who is interested in honest-to-goodness nutrition and how it greatly improves life through diet and exercise.
What you’ll learn: How your body actually works, why disease is not a mystery and how wholefoods, water, sunshine and clean air can prevent just about any disease.
Want to know more? See www.dontolmaninternational.com
Photo by Wheeloflife.tv
1. Start with you. While scientists once believed we were separate from everything else on earth, we now know that couldn’t be further from the truth. We human beings are made up of the same stuff that makes up the stars we gaze at, the grass we walk on and the very food we eat. Spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra says it best: “At some point in our lives, the realization dawns upon us that freedom does not come from external situations or circumstance. All of creation, everything that exists in the physical world, is the result of the unmanifest transforming itself into the manifest. Everything that we behold comes from the unknown. Our physical body, the physical universe — anything and everything that we can perceive through our senses — is the transformation of the unmanifest, unknown and invisible into the manifest, known and visible. The physical universe is nothing other than the self curving back within itself as spirit, mind and physical matter.”
With this in mind, how we think about ourselves, treat ourselves and feed ourselves becomes a whole new ball game: every negative thought we hold and reaffirm to ourselves is also reaffirmed to the universe, every bad diet choice directly affects the health of universe, every unkind action or thought towards another has a direct affect on the universe and so on. Making conscious, educated choices every day is the first and most important step in healing the earth. A great place to start the education is with inspirational author and teacher, Louise L Hay and her bestselling book You Can Heal Your Life
2. Change your diet. While the meat and dairy industries do everything in their power to ensure consumers believe meat and dairy help us grow healthy and strong, there is much evidence to the contrary. Besides the undeniable health risks of eating meat and dairy that can no longer be ignored due to the rise-and-rise of cancer cases, there’s another reason it’s important to reassess the amount of animal products in your diet—and that’s the detrimental impact meat production has on the planet. A 2006 United Nations report found that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the SUVs, cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined. When asked by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) what personal change people could make to help the environment, ex-Beatles star Paul McCartney answered, “I think the biggest change anyone could make in their own lifestyle would be to become vegetarian.” Find out how here.
As with anything, it’s about being kind to yourself during the process if you decide to give up meat and dairy. Do your research to ensure you do things at a pace that works best for your body and lifestyle. An important thing to remember: vegetarianism and veganism are not diets in the common sense of the word, or religions for that matter. Rather they’re a lifestyle choice—an action resulting from understanding how everything on the earth is deeply connected, and how what we put in our mouth has a profound effect on everything we are and do. That means taking it all one meal and day at a time, so leave any feelings of guilt or failure at the door. Every step you take towards making a difference adds up. Be proud of yourself and tell yourself often.
3. Stop buying plastic water bottles, shopping bags or containers. We’ve all certainly heard it before: buying water in plastic bottles and getting plastic bags at the supermarket isn’t a good choice for the environment. Treehugger.com has an article that gets straight to the point detailing what is known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” or “trash vortex”: (it’s) essentially a floating expanse of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean now covering an area twice the size of the continental U.S. Believed to hold almost 100m tons of flotsam, this vast “plastic soup” stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. Gotta see it to believe it? Watch this.
As said before, being kind to you, also means you’re being kind to the world around you. Plastic water bottles contain the cancer-causing chemical known as Bisphenol A, which leaches from the bottles to the water you consume. Step one: buy a reusable water bottle. Step two: fit a reverse osmosis filter to your kitchen tap (same goes for the shower: many municipal water supplies are not only highly chlorinated, but also contain high levels of pharmaceutical drugs—such as antibiotics, oral contraceptives etc—which get ingested through the skin, which is the body’s largest organ. Read more here.
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Each time I visit the supermarket, especially the big chains, I remind myself that every product I buy is an endorsement for that particular brand, the company’s values (or lack thereof) and the quality of food inside the packaging.
I’m often amazed that much of the produce on the shelves (in NZ) is shipped in from China, the US and beyond. Most of these are gassed or treated in some way to stop vegetables from sprouting, fruit from spoiling etc. So customers are not only buying pesticides with their “food”, but also other chemicals used to preserve the produce for the boat ride across the big blue. Of these chemical-laden loads, one only then has to wonder which ones were born in a laboratory … nutrient-deficient genetically modified imposters. Wannabe apples, if you will.
But the great news is, the more people who buy organic, locally-grown produce, the more supply there will be. Additionally, the more people who choose to eat this way, the less dis-ease there will be. Whether we consumers want to believe it or not, we can turn things around, every time we line up at the register. Every beep of the scanner is a vote.
Buying food as nature intended may hurt the hip pocket more than the mutant kinds that currently fill many supermarket shelves, but the vibrant health that can result from eating healthily means fewer doctors appointments and hospital visits in the long run. It’s also a beautiful way to contribute to the restoration of the planet. It’s a win-win for all.
Before I became vegan, I didn’t really give much thought as to what was organic and what wasn’t. Fast forward a couple of years and I won’t eat anything else. I know it’s the best thing for my own health and the health of the planet (not to mention the farmers who aren’t spraying toxic chemicals).
Since leaving the US, I’ve been astounded at how tricky it is to buy organics. Big chain supermarkets in New Zealand only offer a very limited selection — hardly enough to fill a dinner plate. I won’t even talk about how astronomically expensive they are.
So the question remains, how do we bring real, affordable organics to the masses while keeping the big corporations honest? It’s the big businesses that threaten the future of organics, because they come at it from a money-making point of view—not from what’s best for the consumer. Get it out quick at as little cost as possible to them. If it looks like an apple, it’ll sell as an apple. Who cares what the nutrient content is.
Science has helped these corporations meddle with nature, with genetically modified produce on supermarket shelves just about everywhere. Studies have shown such meddling is at a huge cost to human health. Big corp organics could be mutant potatoes that resist anything nature throws at it. It may have grown without pesticides and without a scratch, but it won’t mean it’s healthy to eat.
Organic Nation TV caught up with The Environmental Working Group‘s President Ken Cook (see video below) to chat about the potential issue of big corporations hijacking organics, threatening its quality and the current standards.
Host Dorothee Royal-Hedinger asked Ken to talk about the anxiety some consumers and activists feel about the trend of big corporations taking over organic brands as well as the tension between making organic food affordable and maintaining the standards on which organics were founded.
He was interviewed at Kickapoo Country Fair held by Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative of more than 1,300 organic family farmers nationwide, in LaFarge, Wisconsin.
Courtesy of organic.org, I’ve included a top 10 list of reasons to grow and buy organics, as well as why we all can benefit from supporting the organic industry, regardless of where you live in the world.
1. Reduce The Toxic Load: Keep Chemicals Out of the Air, Water, Soil and our Bodies
Buying organic food promotes a less toxic environment for all living things. With only 0.5 percent of crop and pasture land in organic, according to USDA that leaves 99.5 percent of farm acres in the U.S. at risk of exposure to noxious agricultural chemicals. Our bodies are the environment so supporting organic agriculture doesn’t just benefit your family, it helps all families live less toxically.
2. Reduce if Not Eliminate Off Farm Pollution
Industrial agriculture doesn’t singularly pollute farmland and farm workers; it also wreaks havoc on the environment downstream. Pesticide drift affects non-farm communities with odorless and invisible poisons. Synthetic fertilizer drifting downstream is the main culprit for dead zones in delicate ocean environments, such as the Gulf of Mexico, where its dead zone is now larger than 22,000 square kilometers, an area larger than New Jersey, according to Science magazine, August, 2002.
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I recently blogged about how important it is to cleanse between the full and new moons, so that’s what I did this month: armed with the how-to from Andreas Moritz’s The Amazing Liver and Gallbladder Flush. Without going into too much detail, the six days of drinking a litre of organic apple juice a day, before the the seventh day of the flush, were well worth the time invested.
I consider myself to be a very healthy gal, although my carefree 20s likely contributed to some of the toxins released during this all-important health-boosting cleanse. Also being around household cleaning chemicals, hairspray, dousing myself with the latest hip fragrance and eating animal products would have definitely added to my toxicity.
A day after the flush and I feel light, positive and have a mental clarity that wasn’t quite there before.
According to many religions and spiritual cultures, particularly Native Americans, Shamanism and Wicca, the New Moon represents new beginnings and is a great time to perform rituals and cleanses.
See my original post here.
Speaking of new moons, the actress who’s replacing Rachelle Lefevre (who played Victoria in the first two Twilight installments) is Bryce Dallas Howard (below). Bryce had been a vegan before switching to vegetarianism during pregnancy. She went vegan after watching the Joaquin Phoenix-narrated documentary, Earthlings.
Not that long ago, I used to work as a magazine beauty editor. A seemingly glam job to the outside world (particularly to 20-something girls who have a love affair with make-up and mascara). But for me, it was one of the most toxic gigs I could have signed up for.
A lot of these beauty products are loaded with chemicals, and some, perhaps most (depending on whether it’s listed on the label or not), are tested on animals. So it’s a no-win situation for beauty addict or animal.
When I went vegan, I stopped putting chemicals into my body and onto my body. Buh-bye beauty products. So long moisturiser, ta-ta deodorant (regarding the latter, if you’re eating a raw, organic wholefood diet and drinking fresh spring water, the need for covering up smelly pits isn’t needed, because you simply don’t smell anymore. Who knew!).
Besides the fact that what you put into your body reflects on the outside, there are some great beauty tips and tricks that I use, sourced from my very own kitchen cupboard. No animals or beauty buffs harmed in the process. Here’s just a few:
Moisturiser: Mix two parts water, one part olive oil in a spray pump. Shake and spray all over after a bath or shower for a moisture infusion.
Facial scrub: Mix a small amount of baking soda and water together to make a smooth paste. Lightly rub over the face and rinse.
Toner: Add half vinegar, half water to make a pore-tightening toner.
Bath salts: For a great detox, sprinkle a cup of epsom salts in your bath water.
Smoothing dry heels: Cut a lemon in half and apply.
The golden rule I live by? Never put anything on your body that you can’t eat.
Pic courtesy martinhoward, Flickr Creative Commons.
