Keeping Body and Mind Well
Today, I want to talk to you about something more “down to earth”, but which is really important if we want to look after ourselves: eating a healthy diet. What should we eat and why? To my mind if we don’t eat a healthy, balanced diet, we can’t enjoy good health. We should eat good seasonal products with a balanced intake.
Only natural foodstuffs contain important intrinsic elements which our bodies need to be able to keep healthy. It’s far preferable to follow a nutritious diet and choose the “right” foodstuffs if we want ideally to avoid pharmaceuticals by eating correctly. Conversely, a bad diet can very easily take a heavy toll on our health.
Food (of vegetable or animal origin) is a source of life, but it may also endanger life. Indeed, apart from the environment, the main source of our diseases is food. This may be because of disease caused by biological agents, disease caused by (toxic) chemicals or even disease caused by the nutrients found in our food; however, many people pay this little attention. There’s a saying which goes “Eat well, live better” – so let’s eat well and do all we can to always eat well! To achieve this, it’s important that we follow the cycle of the seasons: to eat properly we have to be in tune with the fruit and vegetables nature gives us. This means that our diet will change as the year progresses so that eating the same thing in January as in August is unthinkable. We’ve absolutely got to get rid of routine when it comes to eating.
A healthy body in a healthy mind isn’t necessarily a cliché; on the contrary, the food we ingest can transform us. This means thinking, and being mindful, about what we eat, and giving our body the right nutrients, while also remembering to make food a pleasure, in particular by combining flavours and different textures.
“Let food be thy medicine, and let medicine be thy food.” (Hippocrates)
In what I call healthy cuisine, plants should form the basis of your diet, equivalent to about 80%, including legumes (lentils, chickpeas, etc.). To complete this plant basis, we need to add cereals, rice, buckwheat, millet, quinoa and so on, followed by fats. Try and use vegetable oils from first cold-pression oilseeds (walnut, hazelnut, pumpkin seed, sunflower and rapeseed, all rich in omega). Next come dairy products and animal proteins (preferably local). Personally, I don’t eat much of them, and I’d recommend that you look into this carefully and learn to listen to your body!
To get the full goodness and enjoy the many health benefits of fruit and vegetables, we shouldn’t underestimate how important it is to eat them quickly to ensure that we make the most of their nutritional qualities. But this isn’t easy if these products come from the other side of the world… which means it’s all the more important that we remind ourselves that nature is clever and that we should trust in nature.
Because nature really has thought of everything to meet our nutritional needs right throughout the year. In winter, when we’re suffering from the horrendous cold and lack of sunlight, our bodies require more nutrients. And winter is the very season when we get vegetables full of minerals and citrus fruit packed with vitamin C! Summer is the season for fruit and vegetables full of water (tomatoes, melons, courgettes, etc.), at the very time when our bodies most need to keep hydrated! What’s more, fruit and vegetables produced out of season are often treated with pesticides, very widely blamed for their negative impact on our health, for example cancer, infertility, etc.
Finally, in my opinion it’s vital that we enjoy cooking and eating and for that we really don’t need to get tangled up with complicated recipes. Pleasure equals simplicity. “Cooking well involves stacking all the odds in your favour so that your dish turns out well, avoiding any surprises while you’re making it, and not overestimating yourself – for me cooking and pastry cooking are and should be great ways of learning modesty and humility.”
My personal thoughts « Feeding our consciousness»
Still looking at things from this “mindfulness” perspective, I believe that it’s important to do a sport which satisfies your needs. So, you have to find the ideal sport for you, one which makes you feel good and lets you empty your mind. For me, to achieve a balanced lifestyle doing the right sport is just as essential as learning to eat better.
I’d like to talk to you about yoga, because for me yoga is food for the mind. I also recommend “being mindful” at mealtimes as a way of being able to steady our minds and of being more in harmony or in touch with ourselves. Being mindful of the food we eat and the silence which should be part of this moment, also enables us to “find ourselves” and concentrate on ourselves… It’s a way of focusing on our food at the very moment when we’re eating it. Yoga, too is about letting go as we move, about concentrating on what we’re actually doing in the moment rather than thinking about the movements we’re making. In the end, it’s a bit like going inside a bubble.
Often this silence is associated with food products chosen and eaten with care, for example, food specially selected for its life energy – and for its freshness as it has been produced locally. What’s more, we can also gear our choices to include eating foodstuffs as raw and unadulterated as possible so that we appreciate just how they really taste. Another point that definitely shouldn’t be overlooked, is to always chew our food properly and slowly. We can interpret this as practising yoga while we eat. The repetition of this act enables us to develop our awareness that eating isn’t just about keeping our bodies alive, but it’s about allowing our minds to live too.
It’s also important to eat moderately and always plan our meals more in terms of quality than quantity. Feeding ourselves is a real act, almost a whole approach to life, so that piling too much food onto our plates would simply be counterproductive. It’s far better to give our bodies enough time to absorb everything that has just been eaten – this applies equally to nutrients, flavours and quantity.
Finally, let’s be open to sources of inspiration, because learning about different ways of thinking and living can be extremely interesting. But most importantly, let’s take our inspiration from all those who try to eat healthily. Of course, this can also be viewed from an ethical point of view. So yes, yoga is a rich discipline and I can assure you that it makes us both aware and mindful.
To me, yoga seems to create a real urge to understand how to eat properly. Although as yet we don’t have “yogic ” food, yoga can take credit for having created a different approach to eating by extolling food as being a driving force, and healthy eating as an act in itself. A deliberate, mindful act, which leads to the conclusion that everything in yoga – from poses to stretches as well as the flow of movements – is intimately connected to what we put on our plates.
My recipe of the month:
Carpaccio of Salt-Crusted Cooked Beetroot RECIPE
My wild pickings: Wild garlic
Wild garlic, which appears in springtime, is used to bring down blood pressure and to stimulate blood circulation. It is also recommended for people suffering from atherosclerosis, arthritis or rheumatism and is effective against intestinal disorders such as stomach ache and bloating.
Anyone who loves wild garlic will be delighted to see its fragrant leaves appear in the forest in spring, but please take great care: not everything that looks like wild garlic is necessarily wild garlic! Often, there are toxic plants, autumn crocus (Colchicum speciosum), which grow close to genuine wild garlic, to which we hardly given any thought because they don’t flower at this time of year. However, colchicum contains colchicine, a very powerful mycotoxin, and it takes only 1 mg/kg body weight for it to endanger human life. So pick your wild garlic only once the flower buds start to appear, and if in any doubt, err on the side of caution and seek advice from an expert.
My nutritional advice
Onions
Onions have many nutritional benefits, in particular they’re high in phosphorus, calcium and vitamin C. What’s more, they offer many other health benefits by having an anti-cancer, glucose-lowering and anti-thrombosis effect and by improving artery health. However, not all types of onions are equally beneficial, with white onions being the less health-giving ones. Yellow onions provide the most quercetin and red onions, which are milder and therefore easier to eat raw, turn out to have the most anthocyans. Onions – but also garlic, shallots and leeks… are alliaceous vegetables which belong to the Allium family and are packed with lots of goodness. In particular, these super foods are said to help protect against digestive cancers of the stomach, intestines and colon.
RED ONIONS STUFFED WITH GOAT’S CHEESE RECIPE
Carrots
Apparently carrots make us lovable – so we should eat them as much as we can whenever we can!
The health benefits of carrots are due mostly to the beta-carotene they contain. Beta-carotene is a powerful anti-oxidant that fights free radicals responsible for aging. Which means eating carrots improves the condition of our skin by helping it to regenerate and heal. Raw carrots are mainly composed of water (88 %) with 7.6% carbs on average. Carrots have a greater concentration of carbs than other vegetables. On the other hand, they contain little protein (0.6 %), and hardly any lipids. At 2.7%, carrots contain more fibre than the average vegetable. What’s more they are very rich in vitamins and minerals, including mainly provitamin A or beta-carotene, vitamins B9, C and E, potassium and calcium.
TIPS AND ADVICE
Do you enjoy eating munching on crunchy carrots? I certainly do, it’s how I most enjoy carrots. So, you need to do something to stop your carrots from going limp! Fortunately, my grandmother had a fail-safe trick for keeping her carrots crunchy as long as possible. To keep them nice and fresh, all you have to do is chop off the tops and wrap the carrots in newspaper. The newspaper will protect them from damp. The tops and leaves tend to dehydrate the vegetable root and may even draw off all its vitamins. But please don’t throw the tops away, because thoroughly washed and chopped they’ll make a great base for a delicious soup.