“Just because you’re not sick doesn’t mean you’re healthy.”
—Author Unknown
In 1992, I was sitting on the beach in Portugal. Watching the waves come in and back out. My mind was occupied. Over the years, I’ve observed thousands of people practice macrobiotics—some with great success and some with none at all. I sat there trying to pinpoint what the difference was between a successful practice and a failed one. I thought about the clients who felt macrobiotics was too much, too restrictive, or too difficult. Those phrases repeated in my mind. I gazed at the water moving back and forth.
I started thinking about my past and my own journey into macrobiotics. It all started when I found a book by George Ohsawa on my bed. I am not really sure how it ended it up there, but I read the book cover to cover. The book opened up a new path and direction for me. The next day, I went out and bought brown rice, sea salt, and mu tea (Eastern herbal drink). I rushed home to cook my first meal. The taste was interesting—not good, not bad—but I felt wonderful and inspired. And so it was the start of my first ten-day rice fast as described by Ohsawa in his book.
The second day went the same as the first. The rice was—not good, not bad. I felt great. However, on that third day of my new regimen the cravings kicked in. I found myself in the supermarket, buying a half-gallon of Breyers Vanilla Fudge ice cream, a box of graham crackers, and a quart of orange juice. By the time I reached the checkout counter, I’d eaten almost everything in the cart. I was completely lost, confused, and disappointed. I knew in my heart that macrobiotics was the way of life that I had been looking for but I didn’t know how to stick to it. I realized I needed help.
As luck would have it, while having lunch at a health food store, I spotted a man with a very intense look. For some reason, I thought he might be macrobiotic and I was right. That was the day I met Stanley. As it turned out, Stanley was opening a macrobiotic restaurant. We became partners and leased space in an underground mall called Sansom Village. A few days after we signed the lease, we found out the space was not zoned for a restaurant. So instead we opened Essene Market & Café, a food market with a lunch counter.
In my partnership with Stanley, he introduced me to Rod and Peggy. We became friends and they gave me the macrobiotic diet guidelines. They suggested I eat vegetables with my brown rice. It became the advice I needed. I found myself satisfied, more energized, and the food delicious. I couldn’t believe the difference.
And even more amazing, I saw the same changes in the people coming to our store. I noticed regulars who returned every day to eat at our lunch counter looked better. Their skin was more vibrant, their eyes brighter, and their appearance quickly changed. All from just that one meal several days a week.
Splash! I came back to reality. The water moved back and forth from the beach. I sat there and it dawned on me. If one meal is that powerful then any change in your diet makes an impact. Macrobiotics needs to be more flexible and open. Teaching macrobiotics by constantly talking about what you should not do only leads to people craving their bad habits. If you have an idea in mind that health is restricting and all-or-nothing then you feel the pressure to be perfect. Perfection is not possible. The demand of perfection makes you feel hopeless and give up. Instead, it should be about adding healthy habits and meals. Lifestyle changes are hard. It is important to have flexibility and understand that changing your habits and practices happens gradually.
It has been more than twenty years since being at the beach in Portugal. But the discovery that day changed the way I have seen and taught macrobiotics. It has improved my ability to work with clients and led to me the discovery of the Strengthening Health Approach to Macrobiotics or SHI Macrobiotics as it is now known. I saw students more likely to stay with it as soon as I made it clear it was okay to start with one healthy practice and build from there. For clients, it took the pressure off of giving up everything and changing everything at once. Instead, clients would find one meal to have such dramatic results—that when they were ready, they would come back to me asking for the next step. This SHI macrobiotics method continues to grow and evolve as people and society change.
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
The concept of health is in vogue and getting more people interested in health again. However, current ideas about health lack clear direction, consensus, or guidelines about how to achieve it. If you wish to be healthy, there is still the struggle to understand the inconsistent information about diet, lifestyle, and exercise. Leaving you feeling negative, depressed, and lost. This problem became my inspiration. In this handbook are practical guidelines based on practices and patterns observed from the world’s long-standing civilizations that still exist untouched by modern diseases. And recommendations from my experience as a macrobiotic counselor, as I have adapted these guidelines to modern life. I hope to share that health is within your reach when you build easy yet powerful practices into your life and have the knowledge of what creates lasting health.
For this handbook, I wanted to identify the biggest health challenges and address each of them. These are the three major problems:
1) The Struggle to Cut Through the Confusion and Contradictory Advice
Modern diets have created confusion about health and food, and have spread misinformation about plant-based diets and macrobiotic lifestyle. That is why I wanted to dedicate the first part of this handbook to resolving food myths. The food myth section wil give you a strong understanding of food and nutrition, so you no longer have to second guess yourself and eating choices.
2) How to Start and Learn What to Do
Modern diets focus on short-term goals which lead to an all-or-nothing way of thinking. You have to cut all bad habits at once—if not you have failed. I have found that this process of restricting only leads to negativity and eventually giving up. Instead, the approach in this handbook is to build healthy habits in 7 steps at your own pace.
3) Find Food to Prepare, Take Home, Enjoy It
To help you start cooking at home, our last section has meal plans by Susan, an expert in macrobiotic cooking. She also provides you with handy tips, food lists, and recipes.
Keep in mind while reading this handbook that these guidelines are based in common sense and have certainly passed the ultimate test of time.
WHY HABITS AND PRACTICES FROM LONG-STANDING CIVILIZATIONS?
Japan has one of the highest degrees of health and life expectancy in the world.
What it really comes down to is traditional foods and simple practices that Japan continues to follow. Japan consumes three kinds of foods for longevity: a wide variety of unique fermented foods, sea vegetables, and soy products. These foods together with their lifestyle practices of making time for their meals, eating on small plates, and eating together make all the difference.
Keep in mind, Japanese Americans tend to have high rate of chronic disease but people who eat traditional Japanese food are the ones who live the healthiest and longest.
The same goes for Mediterranean civilization. People who eat a traditional mediterranean diet of grains and beans (rice, beans, lentils), vegetables, nuts, and fruits show low chronic disease. And again the Mediterranean life is focused on spending time together and taking time for meals.
All of this shows that modern diets are clearly missing foods, habits, and practices that create longevity.
HEALTH IS A CHOICE AND IS ACCESSIBLE TO ALL
We have the ability and capacity to create either sickness or health in our own lives. This is the first thing I learned from my first macrobiotic book that stopped me in my tracks and convinced me to pursue this way life. This thought that we have the capacity create our own health and happiness still echos in my mind after more than fifty years.
What if I shared with you the reality that it is in fact you, whatever your circumstance—that health is within your reach because health comes from within?
There is no thing that is going to make you healthy. It is a step-by-step reorientation and reeducation that connects you back to yourself and the entire world that you are a part of. As long as you believe that some (perhaps magical) thing is going to make you healthy, you are most likely moving in the wrong direction. We have the ability to grow our health throughout our life. At the same time, health is a journey. Each step in a healthy direction has value, no matter how small. It may even have a value that you can not even imagine. This approach is open and can grow endlessly at your own pace, if you use the principle of adding before taking away.
On the other hand, stopping harmful foods and lifestyle practices does provide benefits in the short term. But for the most part, they do not contribute to lasting health. Stopping things that we have built habits of to support ourselves can leave us feeling unsupported, unfulfilled, and even defeated if we end up going back to them. In other words, a negative can not lead to lasting health. Only a positive can do that.
ADDING VS TAKING AWAY
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
—Lao Tzu
Everyone seems to be increasingly busier these days, but it is always possible to improve our health—if we know which steps to take. This handbook has been designed to clarify those steps. As you add these practices and understanding, you will see the transformation occur and experience the benefits. This will inspire you to invigorate your practice and keep creating more health around you.
The goal is to change the percentage of unhealthy to healthy in your diet and lifestyle practices. The more you increase healthy things, you automatically decrease unhealthy. This needs to be the guiding principle for short- and long-term health. Taking away leads to restriction, dissatisfaction, and eventually rebellion. It can also lead to nutritional deficiencies because restrictions do not nourish or encourage our appetite for making healthy choices. Overall, we do not learn anything positive or gain from restriction.
The premise for much of these recommendations comes from the experience and understanding that anything you can do is better than nothing and that small, incremental steps over time provide the longest lasting benefit. If you add one new thing each week, you will be surprised at how your life can transform from one year to the next. If it is one new thing each week, you will have experienced fifty-two health-supporting practices over the course of the year. How many of those will become a habit or practice for you in your everyday life?
Health craves health. One healthy thing automatically leads to another. Healthy foods encourage healthy activity. And healthy activity in turn encourages healthy foods. Adding opens up our appetite and curiosity and healthy lifestyle practices. It also automatically provides more balanced and complete nutrition. The bright side is, there is no limit to adding: it is a lifelong process of discovering foods, cooking styles, cuisines, and meals.
The goal is not perfection, but to have a sufficient amount of health-supporting practices to continue in your journey toward health. It Is Not What You Don’t Do—It Is What You Do Do.
Incorporate as many things as you can comfortably without feeling stressed. If you start to feel overwhelmed, scale down, or back off a little bit. (The journey of 1,000 miles must begin with a single step.) Zero to one is everything. One to one hundred is easy.
Remember, the body is a self-healing organism that has evolved and adapted over millions of years. Anyone can take steps through their diet and lifestyle to improve their health. This cannot be reiterated enough. It is in what you do, not what you don’t that creates lasting health. How we regain or achieve health, and by extension, our own happiness, well-being, and peace is in our own power.
HEALTH IS A MOUNTAIN STREAM
Anything that aids good nutrition, good digestion, and good circulation helps our health.
Health is like a mountain spring, the right amount of water moving at a natural speed. Water in a natural mountain stream constantly cleans, renews, and renourishes itself. If the source is pure, great. But even if the source is not pure, if it has the right kind of activity, it is still sparkling. It can purify and renew itself. If water becomes deficient it slows down. It starts to putrefy if there isn’t enough water or power for active movement. If there is too much force behind it or if there is too much water, it becomes destructive.
Our bodies are the same. If we can have a comfortable amount of nourishing foods and proper movement our body can constantly renew itself like a healthy mountain stream. The source doesn’t need to be pure for a mountain stream to be healthy, and our nourishment doesn’t need to be perfect. We do need to have the ability to digest and circulate. Food is the source of nourishment and energy. Activity is the pump, the circulator for our bodies.
Good macrobiotic practice means good digestion, from beginning to end of the process; good circulation; and good nourishment, both quality and quantity. Good health is the sum total of our nourishment, activity, and circulation.
From my observation, practicing strengthening health macrobiotics can help improve practically any health condition you can imagine, from diabetes to heart disease to high blood pressure to cancer. Proper activity and circulation along with nourishment contribute to lasting health.
HEALTH IS AN ADVENTURE
“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Remember health is an adventure. Everything changes; we are never standing still. Each day, we are either moving toward health or sickness. Modern life currently moves us toward sickness. This is why so many people are convinced that sickness is natural, or at the very least, inevitable.
What we forget is that in many communities around the world people live long and full lives because they share many diet and lifestyle practices in common. We see a pattern of human life where people lead active, productive lives, enjoy the greatest longevity on the planet, and die not from sickness, but when they have had enough of life. The commonalities with these communities are not only a grain, bean, and vegetable-based diet but also an orderly and active lifestyle.
This handbook identifies and shares the common and adaptable habits and lifestyles from the wisdom of these communities, and how it can be applied to common lifestyles in modern life. The guidelines have been adapted and customized to confront challenging aspects of healthy, mindful living in modern society. I wanted these recommendations to be achievable even by those with a busy lifestyle, who may find it hard to incorporate healthy dietary or lifestyle practices into their routines.
On a daily basis, we can find adventure, excitement, and self discovery. Over time, we can identify and appreciate our own uniqueness and our connection to all of life.
EMOTIONS AND OUR HEALTH
“Health and cheerfulness naturally beget each other.”
—Joseph Addison
Emotions are inseparable from our health. There are natural and healthy emotions, like a mountain stream in equilibrium. We associate streams with tranquility, curiosity, joy. This is our natural emotional state. Our natural emotions, when consistent, encourage a healthy flow in our body and mind together. In an unnatural state, there is disruption. I am saying that emotions are not positive or negative, but that the state of our emotions is either natural and healthy, or disrupted. In disrupted, unhealthy states, our liquid is either stagnant or surging. Stagnancy, or lack of movement, can be expressed as desensitization, depression, or numbness. And surges, which seem like “boiling over,” can be expressed as anger, aggression, or hysteria.
Emotions specifically depend on liquids. Without liquid, we would have no emotion. We can express this culturally in a series of questions: When are we more emotional? When do we visit bodies of water, and for what reasons? How does our language express the observation of emotions in others? What kinds of liquids do we use, and for purposes of expressing which emotions? These are all interesting questions to ask; I’ll follow up with some answers, as quickly as I can.
People tend to be more emotional during the full moon. People will contemplate beside a lake, follow the path of a stream to explore, bring a loved one or a friend to the bank of a river to watch it flow, or to intake the power of the ocean. When we talk about emotions, we can refer to an overly sentimental person as sappy or wishy-washy, and at the other extreme barren or dry. It is interesting that we drink beer at sporting events, wine for intimate evenings, tea or water to relax, calm down, or meditate. The character of each of these liquids brings about different emotional states.
Water itself permeates every aspect of life, and the human body and the planet itself is composed mostly of water. Water is associated with the unconscious and is included in all types of ritual, whether something as simple as a celebration at a sporting event or a spiritual ceremony. There are ponds and lakes—places where water gathers. And there are streams, rivers, and oceans, which are places where water moves. This brings me back to the vision, or image, of health and the mountain stream’s emotional complement: healthy flow.
Emotions also depend upon temperature. Emotion expresses itself when liquid comes to the surface of the body and evaporates. This partially explains how people living in or visiting hotter climates express emotions more readily than in colder climates where we may need to be “warmed up” first. The use of fire in cooking raises our temperature. Outdoor cooking, such as barbecue, brings out a lot of emotion. Using spices, stimulants, and alcohol also raises our temperature. The opposite, cold, interferes with our ability to express emotions smoothly. Cold affects our bodies through ice, out-of-climate foods, and chemicals (especially artificial sweeteners). Extremes of both hot and cold have disruptive effects on our emotions and in turn, our physical and mental health.
It follows then that the state of our emotional health has the capacity to affect the course of our overall health, either in a more natural and healthy flow or into a more disrupted and unhealthy flow. Because health craves health, a flowing and joyous emotional state helps us flow with healthy habits. This season is a perfect time while in the company of family or friends to return to our natural state of tranquility, curiosity, and joy.
HOW TO USE THIS HANDBOOK
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
—Mark Twain
We have designed this handbook for you to start where you feel most comfortable. There are tips and information on diet, lifestyle practices, and eating habits. If you are not ready to change your diet, you can still create healthy change through your eating habits and/or lifestyle practices. The key is to go at your own pace and add more when you are ready. Even one step forward makes a difference and builds over time. We want you to feel encouraged by your progress with each step rather than feel disappointed or like a failure for not doing everything or as much as you wanted to. Any effort benefits your health. For example: making it a priority to sit down and eat with no distractions during lunch improves your metabolism, energizes you, and stimulates awareness of when you are full. Eating more slowly makes you more conscious about what you are eating and aids digestion and appreciation of food.
In-Depth Look at Your Health, Food, and Emotions: Introduction to Food Myths (p. 29)
Eating Habits: Steps 1–3 (p. 53)
Lifestyle Practices: Steps 4–7 (p. 119)
Diet: Food Section (p. 181)
Remember, how you eat and lifestyle practices are just as important as what you eat.