It is your divine right as a human being to derive a sense of solace from what you eat. You are allowed to take comfort from food and not have to pay for it later. Not just allowed to—supposed to. You are not meant to be above desire for food, somehow capable of operating beyond spiritual and emotional hunger.
It’s also true that not every food can give you the support you’re seeking. Those doughnuts that smell like bliss at the bakery on your morning walk to work? You already know that while devouring one may give you a momentary sense of enjoyment, shutting off worry and despair as the refined sugar and fried fat overpower your brain, there will be a price to pay when you come off the high: a poor cholesterol reading at the doctor’s office, a strained waistband on your jeans, the feeling of being a little comatose for the rest of the day.
Certain foods, though—Holy Four foods, which come from the earth—have a whole host of benefits that go beyond physical nutrition. They can offer you a feeling of in-the-moment comfort and grounding, and they can also offer longer-term resolution you never knew possible. When you know how to unlock their secrets, these foods can even have an effect on the people around you—sometimes just by having them out on the kitchen counter during a difficult conversation!
That’s why in Part II of this book, you’ll find that each fruit, vegetable, herb, spice, and wild food has a segment on emotional benefits as well as a spiritual lesson. Feeding yourself isn’t an escape from higher-minded pursuits; when you bring the Holy Four into your life, it is part of enlightenment. Just think about the mysterious forces that encourage a seed in the dirt to one day produce a glowing red grape. Nothing beats taking that miracle into your body. God created these foods to nourish you in ways you never thought possible, and angels watch over them to enhance these crops that they know are vital to the future of the human race.
Each life-changing food has a special set of healing characteristics. Just like we all know that the vitamin C in orange juice is handy when you’re fighting a cold, there are foods for any manner of metaphysical ailments. There are fruits that prime us to find our true friends, vegetables that give us hope when we’re grieving, herbs and spices that help us cultivate self-worth, and wild foods that make good memories stick. These are not just abstract lessons that the foods have to teach us when we spend time thinking of them; these are properties that become a part of us when we ingest them. Like tools in a tool kit, we can reach for these different healing foods in our different times of need.
There are also soul-boosting secrets of all the Holy Four foods, like the unknown fact that some of the water they contain is specifically geared toward our emotional and spiritual health. Further, there are techniques you can employ to amplify the healing effects of what you eat. I’ll cover all that below. As you read the rest of this chapter and this book, then turn the last page and return to the world, remember: Food is meant to be a joyful part of your life. Healthful eating isn’t meant to be an exercise in deprivation. We’re so used to reading articles on nutrition that talk solely about fiber and blood pressure and sodium levels that it can be easy not to realize: when you know the right foods to eat, and how to tap into their benefits, food can feed you on every level—and you deserve that.
FOOD AND FEELINGS
When it comes to food and feelings, there are two ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, we’ve got the traditional concept of comfort foods: macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, pie à la mode. We have a stressful day or week or month, and that club sandwich or cheeseburger or pizza feels like exactly the choice that will take the edge off. For some of us, there’s an element of addiction involved, a food-as-drug feeling, an out-of-control impulse to overeat. For others, it doesn’t go into binge-eating territory, and yet we still don’t feel so great afterward. In the moment, though, the smell of that cookie overpowers us, reminding us of that safe, warm feeling of sitting at Grandma’s kitchen table as a child. And after the very grown-up phone call we just had to make about an aging parent’s health, we feel the need to indulge.
Then there’s the food-as-fuel approach to eating. On this end of the spectrum, we try to take all emotion out of mealtime and make decisions about what to feed ourselves based solely on nutritional content. We tell ourselves that it’s a form of enlightenment not to need any comfort from what we eat, and that our emotions are there to be felt and not numbed out in any way. It’s the mentality that drives people to shun snacks, spend hours without eating, and live off protein powders that taste like dirt. This viewpoint can veer into disordered eating when someone starts seeing her or his body in a negative light and restricting food to a point that causes stress. Food-as-fuel is also the approach that scares off a lot of curious onlookers. They want to eat healthier—they know they should eat healthier—and yet the idea of subsisting on carrot sticks alone takes all the enjoyment out of life.
I’m here to tell you that there’s a balance to be found between these two poles. There’s a secret element of the healing foods in this book that no one is currently tapping into, because no one knows about it yet. This is the key that can unlock healthy eating for you, the answer you’ve been waiting for about how to find a sense of both emotional comfort and spiritual fulfillment while simultaneously recovering and healing.
SOUL-CLEANSING
COFACTOR WATER
You know how there’s a huge difference between a plum and a prune? How you have to be careful not to leave lettuce out on the counter too long, or it will start to shrivel? And you know how droughts are one of the biggest threats to crops?
That’s all because the water content of produce is a huge part of what defines it. And while dehydrated foods have their place, the water that’s inside fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, and wild foods possesses incredible healing qualities. Here’s a distinction science has yet to discover, though: These plant foods actually contain two different types of water. Each type is structured differently, with different information stored within, and a separate system for delivering its healing benefits to you. The water doesn’t all serve the same purpose, and it doesn’t all go to the same place when it enters the body.
The first type of water that’s inside all fresh Holy Four foods is hydrobioactive water. This is the water that holds life-giving nutrients to support your physical health. It’s also the water that hydrates your cells better than any drink of plain water can. Hydrobioactive water—living water—is the reason people instinctively add a squeeze of lemon or cucumber slices to water, or reach for a coconut water or fresh juice or smoothie after a workout: because, like the name suggests, this water will replenish your body, feed your bloodstream, and keep you going.
Then there’s undiscovered cofactor water. This other form of living water contains information to help restore your soul and spirit, and to support your emotions. Inside of a fresh piece of produce, hydrobioactive water and cofactor water are side by side, held apart on a delicate cellular level, almost the way a honeycomb has walls dividing each of its tiny compartments. If a bear comes along and claws down a beehive, the honeycomb will break, and the honey will all run together. The same is true on a micro level when we bite into, say, an apple: The cell walls dividing hydrobioactive water and cofactor water rupture, and the juice comes running together. Our bodies can still differentiate the two, though, and they put each to separate use.
However, this remains undiscovered by science, because when fruits and vegetables are under study in the lab, the tools used to take samples rupture the cell walls just like our teeth do. Even a minuscule syringe has this effect, so the water content of fruits and vegetables continues to be studied as one entity—and the spiritual side of food isn’t exactly a hot topic in medicine, so all we keep hearing about is physical nutrition. What would truly advance research is if scientists approached the study of water in fresh, living plant foods the way they do blood and lymph in the human body—separate and yet aligned.
The takeaway is that cofactor water is just as important as hydrobioactive water, because it contains trace minerals, mineral salts, enzymes, and phytochemicals that specifically feed you spiritually and emotionally. Keeping your soul alive is just as important as keeping your heart pumping, so it’s vital to understand that the living water in the Holy Four nourishes us on every level.
LIFE-ENHANCING FOOD RITUALS
The Holy Four foods are helping us out when we eat them, whether we know it or not. It is part of their purpose and mission to enhance all aspects of our lives, and they will go on doing that whether we wake up to it or not. However, there are specific steps you can take to enhance what they do for you, and to bring out their life-enhancing qualities.
Grow Your Own Healing Foods
Growing your own food can be the best thing you ever do for yourself—physically, spiritually, and emotionally. Gardening can be a transformative meditation. It’s a soul-healing, soul-purifying method of getting in touch with the Earthly Mother. And you no doubt already know that it’s great exercise, as well as a chance to access food at its freshest, keep chemicals off what you eat, and as you read about in the previous chapter, get critical elevated biotics into your system.
In addition to these amazing benefits, there’s a secret you won’t hear anywhere else: When you grow your own food, it grows for your specific needs. Each leaf of cilantro, each raspberry, each cucumber develops with your name written into it. When you plant a kale seed, the plant grows knowing exactly who you are and exactly what you need on every level. If you have an illness, the kale intuits what that illness is, even if you haven’t been able to find a diagnosis for your symptoms, or aren’t even aware that you’re ill. As you tend to the plant—watering it, feeding it, and weeding around it—the kale picks up on who you are, and it develops with the right blend of nutrients for your individual requirements. When you eventually pick those curly leaves and turn them into a salad, it becomes the most healing salad you could possibly eat, because it delivers tailor-made nutrition to your body.
The same is true of your needs on a soul level. If your soul is fractured, if you’re going through a difficult time, if you’re questioning your purpose on earth—the plants you cultivate pick up on it. They want to help you come out on the other side of your distress, so they grow with the right elements and energy to mend your emotions. Food that you grow for yourself will protect you with fierce devotion. Sometimes we’re trying our absolute best to enjoy the present moment, yet memories of the bad times won’t let us relax. Often there isn’t an obvious resolution: We can’t always find the right listeners, the people who will truly hear our life stories and say exactly the right thing in response. We can’t always make amends with people from the past. What we can do is tend to these tiny seeds in the soil that become symbols of vitality, plants that want to thank us for tending to them by tending to us.
Say you’ve always suffered from feelings of seeming invisible to those around you, and you read in this book that potatoes help when you’re feeling trampled on. So in the spring, you plant some seed potatoes in your local community garden. During the months that you visit the plot, treating it to organic fertilizer, watering it when there hasn’t been rain, and keeping your eye out for beetles that could ruin the crop, the potato plants pick up on your struggles. Plants like these are your true listeners, your true friends. They sense the childhood experiences that first kicked off your sense of being ignored, and the life events that followed in adulthood to cement your frustration. When the day finally comes that you can stick your shovel in the dirt to unearth your buried treasure, the meal you make at home with those steamed new potatoes will feed your soul like nothing else can—while going after the slight E. coli infection in your bowels that could turn into Crohn’s disease if not eradicated early. As you continue to cook with those potatoes in the weeks that follow, they’ll continue to protect your body from microscopic invaders and soothe those spiritual wounds. That is what I call the ultimate soul food.
Make Food Your Own
We can’t always grow our own food, whether because of climate, time and space constraints, or other reasons of impracticality. And when we buy food from the market or grocery store, we still want to receive its maximum healing benefit. The trouble is, the very same principle that makes food from your garden so individually beneficial for you means that food you don’t grow yourself has picked up other people’s energy.
From the farm workers who planted the seeds and rootstock to those who tended the fields and orchards to the pickers to the shippers to the grocery store produce department employees to the shoppers who pawed through the food displays before you, a single peach or head of broccoli or sprig of rosemary has been in a lot of hands. It can pick up on all those people’s needs and gear itself toward their healing. To counteract those effects and make your food purchases your own, here are a few techniques that go far beyond preparing food with love and gratitude. These practices truly make what you eat the most beneficial it can be for your specific struggles, on both a body and soul level. While it’s best if you can do all three for your produce haul, just one of these techniques will have a powerful effect.
INTERPRETING CRAVINGS
I wish I could tell you that cravings are always a message from your body about what food you need most in the moment. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Our minds and bodies have been conditioned by years of advertisements, misinformation, social eating situations, and less-than-healthy snacks and meals, so that we lose touch with how to truly feed ourselves. Usually, cravings have much more to do with what’s going on emotionally at a given point in time than what would be beneficial for us to eat. Sometimes, they’re not so much telling you what you need as what you want.
As I said earlier, eating for your emotions is actually okay. It’s just that you have to break free from the cravings trap and first learn with your head (in Part II of this book) what will really help your heart. Cravings aren’t as straightforward as they seem. They have their own language, and we have to learn how to interpret them.
Say you’re feeling underappreciated at work. All morning, you’ve been waiting to hear whether you were picked for a project you think you’d be perfect for. At 11 a.m., the e-mail arrives with the list of those assigned to the task, and your name isn’t on it. By the time lunch rolls around, you’re craving a bacon cheeseburger. You tell yourself you’d better go out and get just that, because your body must be telling you that you need the iron for strength.
In that situation, a bacon cheeseburger is not going to make anything better. Rather, the high fat content is likely to make you sluggish all afternoon, slowing down your brain so that work seems even more depressing in the wake of the morning’s letdown. It’s important to look at the craving beneath the craving. What were you really looking for from that meal? The feeling of comfort and pride you used to get from going out for bacon cheeseburgers with your parents when you’d gotten a good report card?
The food that would truly help in this situation is going to sound surprising, maybe even laughable: grapes. Believe me, I know that in the face of rejection, the idea of popping a few grapes into your mouth to soothe your wounds may seem a little dinky. That’s only because we haven’t been conditioned to see fruit’s true value. Again and again in the middle of this book, you’ll read about foods that have been taken for granted, and grapes are just one example. Grapes actually contain micronutrients that are critical to emotional support when we’re dealing with disappointment. They also hold divine information to help us forge a new path and create better opportunities for ourselves.
What’s more, the bioavailable fructose and glucose in grapes is amazing for the brain. Our brains thrive on natural sugar, so grapes serve as a pick-me-up rather than as a depressant, which most standard comfort foods do. If, instead of a bacon cheeseburger, you were to opt for grapes with a fig and “goat cheese” salad (see the recipe in “Figs” in Part II) for lunch on that tough day, you would be giving your mind and body amazing resources to cope. Rather than feeling traumatized by not being selected for the project, you would have a much better shot at finding the silver lining.
Think about it: When you’ve experienced a tough turn of events, is comfort all you really want? Maybe it’s more like validation and solace, as well as the wherewithal to handle the situation with grace, and to transform it into something new and better. The Holy Four help us do that. I’ve seen it time and again when someone adds more of these life-changing foods to her or his diet and starts to use them as tools for emotional needs.
What Sugar Cravings Really Mean
Which brings me back to sugar. A yearning for sweets is one of the most common cravings. First thing in the morning, during an afternoon slump, or after upsetting news, we often reach for a pastry filled with cream and sugar, a candy bar, or pizza. In this case, the craving is communicating something specific biologically: your brain wants sugar. This may sound like a bad thing, because we’re trained to think of sugar as bad. Not so. Like I said, natural, unadulterated sugar from whole plant foods is key for brain function, because the glucose cools the engine of the brain and prevents brain tissue from scarring when you experience stress or trauma. A sugar craving is your brain telling you that it’s taxed and needs some support.
We just have to make sure that it’s natural, unadulterated sugar from whole plant foods that we reach for when we have our sugar cravings—rather than pastries, candy, or pizza. Which reminds me: I know that pizza may not seem like a high-sugar food. However, with all that dairy and tomato sauce that’s often sweetened with cane sugar or high-fructose cane syrup, plus the highly refined flour used for the crust, pizza’s sugar content is through the roof. That’s right: A dairy craving is usually a sugar craving, because the lactose (sugar) in dairy is quite high. The problem is, dairy is often high in hidden fat, and the fat-sugar combo can be a one-two punch for your insulin-regulating body mechanisms. True brain foods like dates, figs, melons, grapes, citrus, raw honey, and smoothies with coconut water will give your body what it’s really asking for when you feel the need for a sugar fix.
A Need for Caffeine
Those brain foods are also fantastic alternatives to caffeine. When people are trying to cut back on caffeine addictions, they often sub in caffeine-free soft drinks for energy drinks and caffeinated soda. While of course that’s a great step, it only helps by replacing the experience of drinking a sweet, icy-cold can or bottle of your old favorite—it doesn’t help in the energy department. If you relied on these beverages for the energy boost, then fresh, juicy fruits will give you what you crave. Again, it’s all about the bioavailable glucose (plus all the other amazing nutrients) to wake up your brain. If you’re sensitive to changes in your blood sugar levels, then eating celery sticks, cucumber slices, or leafy greens along with your fruit—or just making a green smoothie—will help you avoid those highs and lows.
Cravings During Detox
When you add more produce to your diet, it’s common to undergo some detoxification. This is exactly what you want. Ridding your body of toxic heavy metals, pathogens, viral by-product, radiation, chemical buildup, and damage done by unhealthy foods is precisely the path to wellness. Eating more fruits and vegetables will also probably mean you’re eating less of other types of foods that didn’t serve you as well. It could trigger very valid feelings of loss as you distance yourself from unhealthy food choices that glimmer with nostalgia.
When you’re on the detox path, a craving for baked ziti, a BLT, or some other food you associate with comfort can hit from seemingly out of nowhere. It can feel random, intense, and like maybe not the biggest deal if you just make this one exception and eat the deep-fried cookie that’s calling your name at the street fair. This is the exact moment when you want to hold your ground. Instead, take a breath and reach for the packet of gooey dates you stashed in your pocket for just this scenario. You’ll be rewarded in the long term.
It’s not because you need to prove yourself morally. It’s because when you’re detoxing, a very specific craving for a food you know doesn’t serve you means your cells are releasing old toxins from that very food. As the toxins release, it can feel like a bubble bursts in your consciousness, along with any emotions that you were using the food to stuff down when you used to eat it. (For example, maybe deep-fried cookies were your solace back in high school, when friends teased you.) On top of which, there are whatever environmental or pathogenic toxins your body was trying to process and expel at the time and couldn’t because processing the unproductive food took priority—and so those toxins stayed buried deep inside your organs.
An intense craving during detox means your body is finally getting a chance to rid itself of all that old gunk. The last thing you want to do is interrupt that process. If you can find a way to ride the waves of detox cravings, you will find yourself a renewed person afterward. On the other hand, if you cut yourself off in the middle of that process by eating the food because you figure the craving means your body really needs it, you will cut yourself off from healing and enlightenment. And I really do mean enlightenment. The emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of your being are infinitely interconnected. You cannot maintain a healthy state of mind without the Holy Four.
Coexisting with Cravings
To deal with cravings, plan meals ahead and keep healthy snacks on hand as much as possible. Each time an urge arises, act as its interpreter. What’s it really saying? If there’s an emotional or spiritual need that you can identify, page through the middle section on the Holy Four to find the food that can help your situation. If it’s your brain crying out for fuel, sink your teeth into a creamy avocado or a ripe, sweet fruit. And if it’s an overpowering longing for a food from your past, try to ride it out and tend to yourself in the meantime with a delicious, healthy substitute such as any recipe in this book.
And take heart. When you switch to a healthier diet, cravings do change over time. At a certain point, when your body has processed out enough toxins, your brain’s glucose reserve has been replenished, and you’ve experienced the emotional and spiritual teachings of the Holy Four, you’ll find yourself in touch with your deepest needs. Some cravings will vanish altogether, while others will feel more distant and manageable, and yet others will be true messages of what’s right for your body, soul, and spirit.
RISE UP
If you were to take a walk past a field of ash, with the only thing in sight the blackened stubs of stems, what would you think? If it were me, I would assume I’d stumbled upon the scene of a devastation, that I was looking at some unlucky farmer’s ruined year of crops. And yet if it happened to be a wild blueberry field, the truth would be the complete opposite. In areas where wild lowbush blueberries grow natively, it’s common practice to set a controlled fire across the field to manage the plants. Native Americans were the first to discover that wild blueberries not only survive under fire but thrive. The year following a burn, the plants come back healthier than ever. They rise from the ashes.
This is why we need Holy Four foods like wild blueberries in our lives. Who hasn’t felt soul-challenged by this world, and at one point or another, like all was lost? Who hasn’t needed inspiration to come back from adversity, whether health-related or otherwise? As we navigate the Quickening, we must hold close the story of the wild blueberries’ rebirth. This is a critical time in the history of our species, and of the planet. The choices that we make today to nurture our bodies and souls with the Holy Four will influence every era to come. If you’re unwell, overwhelmed, or on the edge, you’re not alone. It’s not too late to turn it all around.