chapter 5
HOW TO LIVE WILD*
(*In an Urban or Suburban Jungle)
“Live in the sunshine.
Swim in the sea.
Drink the wild air.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Finding your wild isn’t just about what you eat. Though that’s a major piece, tapping into a lifestyle that brings you joy, satisfaction, and peace is equally important for your well-being. You can’t choose one or the other and expect to live a long, healthy life. When I think about my relatives in Greece—from my youngest cousins to my grandparents—what always comes up is how much fun they have. And they balance that with finding moments of quiet, connection, and rest. Who needs the gym when you can approach the world with childlike curiosity and a spirit of play? Who needs mood-enhancing drugs when you can get a good night’s sleep and have stress-coping outlets? And who needs, well, anything else, when you’re part of a community that supports and uplifts you?
Also, bringing the stresses and pleasures of life into balance is necessary for good gut health. Beneficial bacteria surround us all the time. (Especially when we’re out in nature, which we’ll talk about in much more detail later in this chapter.) Japanese researchers believe that when we breathe in good, clean air, we’re also inhaling beneficial bacteria, which in turn produces plant-derived essential oils that fight off harmful microorganisms and negatively charged ions. The more we breathe them in, the happier and healthier we become. These helpful bacteria are referred to collectively as phytoncides, literally “plant-derived exterminators,” or scrubbing bubbles for our guts. However, these guys can’t do their job if your GI tract’s circulation turns sluggish. In fact, sitting for long stretches can negatively affect your gut health. To get these microorganisms moving, you have to move, too. Walk, run, jump rope, climb trees, paddle a canoe, dance or whatever you’re inclined to do. Moving your body doesn’t just burn calories—it keeps your forgotten organ’s circulation working properly. Another strong vote for finding a form of exercise you like and doing it often!
Managing stress is also crucial for optimal digestive health. When you let yourself be consumed by worry, anxiety, or overwhelming thoughts, those emotions go directly to your gut. It’s true: Your brain and your gut are in conversation with each other. If you need proof of that connection, think about how you feel sensations in your stomach when you experience dread or excitement. Or consider that the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there. This road goes both ways, too. Just as your mood and stress can wreak havoc on your microbiome, an unhealthy microbiome can affect your mood. So it’s critically important to find healthy ways to deal with life’s demands.
This chapter is devoted to helping you achieve a healthy balance with your gut, from the outside in, whether it’s finding an enjoyable movement routine, being out in nature, creating a stronger social network, getting a good night’s sleep, or even having more sex (most excellent for the gut!). It’s time for you to discover the bigger, wider, more wild world that surrounds you and learn how it can help you feel healthier and more vibrant.
Adopt a Childlike Perspective
A big part of finding your wild—including moving more and adopting a more positive, gut-nurturing outlook—is facing life with an open, imaginative attitude. “The Spaghetti Problem” competition is a great example of how that kind of free-spirited thinking helps us solve problems and feel better about ourselves. It’s a seemingly simple exercise designed by Peter Skillman, one of the tech world’s leading user-interface designers. Teams are given eighteen minutes to work with two pieces of spaghetti, tape, some string, and a marshmallow. The group that crafts the tallest structure that supports the weight of the marshmallow wins.
Skillman has tested engineers, computer programmers, MBA students, and tech executives. But the most successful group of all? Kindergartners.
The MBAs spent precious time discussing who would take on which roles. The engineers drew up plans and wouldn’t let them go even when they didn’t work. Invariably, the kindergartners jumped in, tried things, and started failing immediately. Their system was simple: Build, fail. Build again, fail. Rebuild, fail. They didn’t plan, they didn’t fret about egos. They all just worked together until they succeeded. And they enjoyed themselves while they did it. In the meantime, the “professionals” ended up grumbling and defeated.
Children are fearless. They excel at play and live in a world fueled by imagination and creativity. Kids allow wonder to lead them to endless discoveries. They live in the moment. They aren’t afraid to ask foolish questions. They have the capacity for pure joy.
It’s hard to retain those qualities in the process of growing into a supposedly sophisticated adult. But the villagers back in my hometown keep that spark of childlike curiosity alive. They argue good-naturedly. They ask questions and express emotions in an authentic, unrestrained way. As a result, they have a healthy aura of youthfulness about them. When they throw parties in their village, everyone dances and sings and no one worries about looking foolish. This ability to be present and in the moment is as much a key to their longevity as eating their daily greens.
I admit, that for a while, I forgot this important lesson myself. Like a lot of people, after I graduated from college, I felt as if I had to fit a certain mold. There’s no dearth of love in a big Greek family—whether you live in Greece or in the States—but there are also expectations about how you should behave and what your role should be in life. It took me years to realize that I am still Stella, the little girl who fearlessly gutted a fish at age three, who loved to play in the earth and the sea and asked questions about everything. It was a relief to realize this. In many ways, I feel younger today than I did years ago, in part because I learned to reconnect with that youthful energy and sense of abandon.
You may not see the direct connection between your physical well-being and having a good time, but it’s there—because every time you do something that frees your body and your spirit, you’re coming that much closer to the health and vitality we all deserve.
Just Play
In life, attitude is everything. Kids just want to have fun. Think back to your favorite childhood activities. Mine always involved horses, climbing trees, or swimming with my favorite tunes blaring nearby. Maybe you were in your element singing into a hairbrush or camping in the backyard. Reach back to those moments and access that childhood spirit. Here are some ideas:
- GO ON ADVENTURES. Pack a picnic and go for a hike. Take the dog to an off-leash park on the other side of town. Scope out local event listings and hit one you’ve never been to before, such as an art gallery opening or a planetarium show.
- DANCE. Find a local dance night featuring your favorite style of dance—or one you’ve always wanted to learn. Salsa, anyone? You can always dance at home. One of my very favorite YouTube channels is www.youtube.com/user/DanceTutorialsLIVE, which includes tutorials on dance moves from salsa to traditional Greek dance. Opa!
- SEEK OUT LAUGHTER. Get friends together for a night at a comedy club. Go on an open-mic night and challenge one another to go on stage.
- COLOR. Adult coloring books are all the rage. Feel free to go outside the lines.
- STARGAZE. Connect the stars to make images or use the Night Sky app to explore constellations.
- SING. Find a place that offers karaoke or add a lip-syncing competition to your next party.
Move More—and Make It Fun
When was the last time you had a good time working out? Or did something simply to find out what your body was capable of? Think about the ways you incorporate exercise in your adult life. Kids get their exercise just by running around the playground, climbing trees, and making endless trips up a ladder for the thrill of riding down a slide. I did that, too. But by the time I got to college, I fell into the “adult” idea of a workout: making monotonous trips to the gym just because I thought I should, hitting plateaus doing the same old routines. I was a personal trainer for a while, so I have nothing against gyms, but after years of working out, don’t you sometimes ask yourself, Why am I doing this? Now I ask my clients the same thing. Are you doing it just to lose or maintain a certain weight? To be able to check it off a list? What if your exercise involved an activity you actually looked forward to? The biggest payoff is that you’ll do something you actually like more, which means more circulation-boosting, gut-balancing benefits for you!
Get Out in Nature
Have you noticed that you feel better and healthier when you hike a nature trail or take a seaside stroll? You may have thought it was just being away from an urban center, the calming effect of a beautiful view or the lulling sound of water. But it turns out, scientists believe that getting outside in nature is actually good for your gut, and therefore has a powerful impact on your overall health.
Humans, like animals, gain nutrients from their surroundings by breathing them in or absorbing them through the skin. The GI tract then processes these nutrients. Our surroundings help to feed the “circulation” of our digestive tract by helping to shift nutrients to our organs and cells. Our digestive system takes in nutrients, breaks them down, and delivers them to our organs, then takes away organ waste and disposes of it. This process is so critical that one-fourth of your body’s cardiac output is dedicated to your GI tract’s circulation.
Technology can be a wonderful thing, but it can also rob us of elements that contribute to our quality of life in an important way. Humans were not meant to be indoors all day, nor were we intended to sit for long stretches. Yet, the average American spends nearly five hours a day doing just that. So put down your phone. Go outside. Move your body and get your circulation going. Take in a long breath and love your gut.
Manage Your Daily Stress
Stress is tough on every part of your body, including your gut. Yet stress is a constant companion in our industrialized world. The key to stress is not what causes it, but rather how you respond to it. The longest-living people learn to manage their stress in positive ways, which in turn, encourages good digestive health.
In my practice, when clients first come to me, they tell me their responses to stress include binge eating or reaching for junk food, smoking, drinking alcohol to excess, procrastination, sleeping to avoid dealing with issues, or zoning out in front of the TV—all gut busters.
Take my client Robert, who is one of those people who “have everything”—a handsome guy with great wealth, a strong marriage, a healthy family, and a high-powered career that involves a lot of international travel. Like many of my male clients, he is a Type A perfectionist. He leads a highly regimented life, hitting the gym daily and eating the same nutritionally undiverse meals almost every day to closely regulate his caloric intake.
He was referred to me by his doctor, and when I read the results of his GI panel along with his other lab work, I could understand why. The person sitting in front of me looked healthy but internally, something else was going on. His tests showed high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), which indicated extreme inflammation in the body. When something harmful or irritating affects a part of our body, it triggers a biological response. Inflammation, specifically acute levels, signals that the body is trying to heal itself. In Robert’s case, it’s possible that his elevated stress levels may have made his immune system less effective because stress itself can elicit an immune response, causing the body to release pro-inflammatory cytokines. And this can lead to dysbiosis, or imbalance in the gut, which has far-reaching negative health implications.
I asked Robert to fill out a survey about his habits. He estimated his stress level as a nine out of ten. When people are that stressed, adjusting diet alone isn’t enough.
I told Robert that if he wanted to work with me, he had to make some serious changes to his lifestyle as well.
“When was the last time you did something spontaneous?” I asked.
He looked at me and laughed. Then his face turned serious when he realized he couldn’t come up with an answer. I explained my views on the human need for play. As we worked together, he learned he had to modify not only his diet—which we adjusted to include Wild Mediterranean staples, kicked off by a pre-tox and detox—but more important his routine; because if his stress levels continued to soar, then his immune system would continue to suffer, no matter how well he ate. He needed to make having fun a priority. Now he is taking surfing lessons and often goes salsa dancing with his wife. His health is remarkably improved—no medication required.
Stress Busters
Starting the day with something you love to do puts you into a positive frame of mind, which in turn creates a more healthful environment for your digestive system. Play fun music or a compelling audiobook or podcast on your commute rather than listening to the news. The point is to greet the day with the best mind-set possible so you’re able to challenge and conquer the world—or at least your small part of it.
Technology is great when it helps you find unique ways to start your day off right. One startup in New York offers an early-morning dance party providing fresh juices, organic espresso, farm-to-table foods and, of course, music. When I first saw the press release, I thought, This is genius!
If whatever you choose to do is fun and childlike, then you’re on the right track. Here are some possibilities:
CONSIDER GETTING A PET. It’s a fact: Dog owners live longer and are happier than non-pet owners. They’re less likely to develop heart disease, perhaps because dog owners tend to walk more every day than people who have no pets. Pets calm us and positively impact our metabolic systems. In one study, a group of people with high blood pressure and jobs they described as “very stressful” agreed to adopt a dog or cat. Six months later, they reported feeling significantly less pressure at work. Pets can teach us something special, as John Grogan said so wonderfully in his book Marley and Me: “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things—a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight . . . A dog doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.”
My dog, Apollo, is so excited to see me when I get home that he makes me feel like a rock star meeting up with my number-one fan. Unconditional love is powerful. Laughing at a dog chasing its tail or a cat trying to pounce on a shadow is fun and good for you.
TEND A GARDEN. Growing plants can be deeply rewarding. Whether it’s a field of greens or a couple of bonsai trees, gardening is one of the most common practices among the oldest-living people. Even keeping a collection of houseplants offers the benefit of adding oxygen and cleansing the air and may help your concentration.
EXPERIENCE FARM LIFE. Remember when I talked about breathing in phytoncides in nature? Farms offer a natural abundance of these beneficial bugs, and visiting working farms is one of my favorite pastimes. The Santa Ynez Valley in California—home to some of California’s many olive groves—has become a special place for me. I jog in its vineyards, visit apple farms, ride horses, buy local olive oil, and meet up with friends for dinner, where we drink great wine. To me, this epitomizes the Wild Mediterranean way. Reconnecting with the land provides a terrific way to shake off the mental dust of a dreary or demanding day.
LAUGH. Do you remember the last time you really laughed? It felt good, right? Laughing out loud reduces stress hormones such as cortisol, and produces health-protecting hormones. I tape late-night talk shows and Saturday Night Live just to watch the opening monologue and laugh my you-know-what off, especially on days when I need a boost. Those cat videos that people share on Facebook? One university studied the effects of laughing at them and found they reduce feelings of anxiety and boost serotonin levels in the brain, which is the natural equivalent of popping a Xanax. So the next time you’re caught watching one, just say, “It’s medicinal!”
REDUCE STRESSFUL SCREEN TIME. Researchers found that looking at other people’s seemingly perfect lives on Facebook can cause feelings of anxiety or inadequacy. Trust me, no one has a perfect life. Give yourself permission to unfriend or hide “friends” whose updates bug you. TV shows can cause stress, too, particularly the nightly news, crime shows, or all that pointless bickering on Real Housewives. Save your TV time for shows that educate, inspire, or make you laugh.
SAY “NO” TO GUILT. A common source of stress is taking on too much simply because saying “no” makes you feel guilty. But taking on too much is a common stress instigator, whether it’s in your social or your professional life. Give yourself permission to determine your limits and learn to stick to them. Saying “no” to guilt also includes refusing to feel bad about what you eat. The beauty of the Wild Mediterranean lifestyle is that it accommodates—even demands—balance. Of course, you have to be honest with yourself as to whether you’re truly doing your body a service with the foods you’re feeding it, but stepping off the path now and then is not worth stressing over—consider it one more nice thing you can do for your gut!
AVOID TOXIC PEOPLE. Perhaps a friend pushes your buttons, or you feel routinely manipulated by a self-involved colleague. Some people are just a drag to be around. Toxic people are like the bad bacteria in our gut—you’ve got to strengthen your social immune system and kick them out of your life. There’s a saying, “Letting people go is not an act of cruelty; it’s an act of self-care.” If you can’t ditch someone from your life, then limit your time and exposure to that person to contain the damage. Spend more time with upbeat, active friends who make you feel good about yourself.
MANAGE YOUR TIME. Time is life’s great equalizer. Everyone gets the same amount of hours each day. Randy Pausch, the famed Carnegie Mellon professor, said it best: “Being successful doesn’t make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful.” This applies to everything, from getting enough exercise and sleep to eating well to spending quality time with family and friends. Most Americans have a strong sense of “time poverty,” and focus on having too few hours each day. Shift that perspective and instead focus on what’s good enough or important enough to take up your precious time. What makes you happy to be alive? What gives your life a sense of purpose? Who do you truly want to spend your valuable hours with?
ACCEPT WHAT YOU CANNOT CHANGE. Sometimes, we just have to deal. Put things in perspective. When you take a hard look at what’s going on in the rest of the world, just how difficult are the challenges you are facing, really? In his amazing book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle states that there are three solutions to every problem: Accept it, change it, or leave it. If you can’t accept it, change it. If you can’t change it or leave it, accept it. Once you begin looking at life this way, you no longer feel the burden of attempting to fix what lies beyond your power.
BANISH BOREDOM. Surprisingly, a boring life can be stressful. Being bored is best described as feeling weary because you’re unoccupied or lack interest in your current activity.
Unsurprisingly, boredom is perceived by your brain as negative, associating it with depression and aggression. Bored people, or those who don’t engage in the things happening around themselves, often die younger than those who make an effort to feel energized most of the time.
Researchers discovered a connection between unhealthy eating, obesity, and boredom. What do you typically do when you’re bored? Reach for a snack? Turn on the TV? Waste time online? In those moments, consider boredom a valuable signal. The next time you feel disengaged, make a list of things you’ve been meaning to do, such as hitting that museum exhibit you keep hearing about, going to a nursery to pick up a new houseplant, or even reorganizing your closet.
If you’re bored at work, maybe it’s time to consider a change, or to find a way to alter that job. I admire Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon.com. Bezos believes most employees would be surprised to discover that their bosses want them to try new things to make a business better. Amazon’s staff review process favors employees willing to try something new and fail, rather than those who play it safe. It goes back to the spaghetti test at the start of this chapter: “If you double the number of experiments you try in one year,” Bezos says, “you double your potential for inventiveness.” Want to be inspired? Watch Shark Tank and listen to how many people have developed their new businesses to get out of unsatisfying jobs.
PLAN FUN ACTIVITIES. People who work in the happiness business (think: Disney) know that anticipating something positive is a boon to our bliss quotient. Having something fun to look forward to helps us decompress from daily stress. Just anticipating a social event, or a vacation, or a play you have tickets for is so important; looking forward to it can make you as happy as the event itself.
Keep Calm and Sleep
The human microbiome is affected by sleep, although researchers aren’t sure exactly how. They do know that disrupting your circadian rhythm—your body’s internal time clock—can devastate a healthy gut. The resulting dysbiosis causes inflammation of the central nervous system. Your unsettled gut’s microbes impact your sleep quality and how you react to stress in a complex set of “answer and call” interactions among the endocrine glands.
We spend one-third of our lives sleeping . . . or at least we should. It’s easy to put off sleep. With much to do, it’s tempting to burn the candle at both ends, but do so at your peril. Getting enough sleep may be the single most important factor in predicting longevity, and is possibly more influential than diet, exercise, or your genes.
A lack of sleep also affects your weight. Sleep helps maintain a healthy balance of ghrelin, the hormone that make you feel hungry, and leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full. When you don’t get enough sleep, your level of ghrelin goes up and your level of leptin goes down. This makes you feel hungrier than when you’re well rested.
One of my clients, Brenda, is a beautiful, cheerful, and busy woman in her mid-sixties. She and her husband of thirty-five years travel extensively, both in the US and internationally. When she arrived in my office a few years ago, Brenda wasn’t overweight, but she was interested in trimming down her body fat. “There’s also something going on with my sleep,” she said. “Something’s not right.”
In addition to her GI tests, I ordered a salivary panel. It showed her cortisol levels were totally off. When cortisol, a stress hormone, spikes, the body shifts into a “fight or flight” response, stimulating the sympathetic nervous system and adrenal glands. If the body remains in a state of constant stress, it burns out the adrenal system, strains the digestive tract, and causes cells to age more rapidly.
Cortisol levels should be at their highest in the morning to help you wake up and prepare to take on the day. They should be at their lowest at night, so you can wind down and sleep. Brenda’s were almost the opposite.
I recommended that Brenda take an adaptogenic herb supplement (discussed in Chapter 2) to help balance, restore, and protect the body’s systems. Adaptogenics are also particularly helpful in reducing and readjusting cortisol levels. I also had her monitoring her blood sugar levels to see if they were dipping too low at night (which could be remedied by having a bite of protein and fat). Turns out the Wild Mediterranean program is perfectly suited to support the adrenal glands and regulate blood sugar, which will in turn help you get a better night’s sleep.
Create a Strong Social Network
We are social creatures. People with strong social networks tend to be healthier and live longer. In fact, the breadth of our social relationships may be one of best indicators of how long we’ll live. The most social people, the ones with the most friends and acquaintances, live the longest. Being a loner, having a small circle of friends, or making social media your only pal can be as harmful to your health as smoking cigarettes, abusing alcohol, or being obese.
Having a strong sense of purpose can add years to your life, which is something I see firsthand when I go back to Greece. Everyone in the village, including the elderly, has a role and it’s a factor in the impressive longevity of people who live on the island of Ikaria in Greece all the way to the inhabitants of Okinawa, home to the greatest number of centurions in the world.
Being generous can boost your health and lengthen your life, too. Generous people cope better when life throws them a curveball, such as a serious illness or the death of a family member. One year-long study logged the hours people spent helping others by running errands, doing housework or looking after their children. Those who spent the least time helping others were the most likely to suffer serious health problems or even die following a stressful situation.
You’ll be glad to know that being social can strengthen your gut health, too. A study discovered chimps transfer bacterial colonies among themselves, helping to diversify their microbiomes. That same team plans to study humans to see if that’s one of the reasons highly social people outlive wallflowers. So go out there and mingle. Your microbiome will thank you.
Get Wildly Beautiful
When I was about twenty years old, I visited a small seaside town in southern Italy. When I saw a fisherman walk by carrying a box of the most incredibly fresh and sweet-looking baby shrimp, I followed him into a nondescript seafood tavern. I got a seat looking out at the water, and next to me was a breathtakingly beautiful woman. She had perfect skin and gorgeous, shiny, thick black hair. She wore no makeup. I was studying nutrition at the time, so I of course observed what she ate—sardines, a platter of braised vegetables, and a glass of wine. We ended up chatting and I asked her about her lunch—was that what she usually ate? “This is what I was brought up on,” she said. “We didn’t have much money, so we ate whatever vegetables were fresh and a lot of fish.” It was the first time I made the connection between diet and appearance. It makes sense: The better you eat, the better you look. That’s the biggest beauty secret of Mediterranean women, and it’s why following a Wild Mediterranean diet is more beneficial than any lotion or potion you could buy in the store.
That said, self-care is still an important part of life, which includes what we use on our skin. I’m not talking about beauty or self-care because of vanity. This part of your life is just as important as exercising and sleeping well, because your skin is your largest organ, and what you put on it enters the body and can affect your gut health. Making good choices about personal care products and cosmetics is important because many of them contain damaging chemicals.
Additives such as phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and oxybenzone can be found in everything from cosmetics to fragrance, hair products, soaps, and sunscreens; and animal studies show these chemicals interfere with the body’s endocrine system, throwing our hormones out of balance. One study showed that even a short break from makeup, shampoos, and lotions with these chemicals can reduce the hormone disruption your body experiences.
The good news is that it’s simple to create your own products with all-natural, inexpensive ingredients—and they work better than most of the expensive packaged stuff you can buy. Here are a few to get you started.
