You Are What You Eat!

If I go by the conventional medical wisdom then I should be taking four medicines a day, lifelong, after my heart attack and angioplasty in Jan 2011. However, I have gone completely medicine free since 2014, and so far so good, though there remains a lurking fear whether I am pushing my luck too far!

My decision to go medicine free was influenced by the works of the celebrated medical doctor and author Dr Andrew Weil, a strong advocate of alternative medicine, who had described how to discover and enhance our body's innate healing powers to maintain and heal itself in his renowned book 'Spontaneous Healing' (1995). 

Then in Jan 2012, I had the opportunity to join my wife Vasantha Unnikrishnan in a 14-day naturopathy treatment program for her autoimmune disease called Sjogren's syndrome for which allopathy says there is no cure but only symptomatic treatment. In naturopathy practice food is regarded as medicine. It says ‘you are what you eat’! 

Foods are considered best in their natural state, obtained locally, and eaten seasonally. A few popular aphorisms about food informs us:

"What you eat in private, you wear in public!"

"Eat your food as medicine as otherwise you have to eat medicine as your food!"

Now I have more reassuring news from the unconventional research of Dr Ellen Jane Langer, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books including 'Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility' (2009). Langer doesn’t accept as necessarily true any of the medical wisdom regarding the courses our diseases must take. 

Recognizing the limitations of medical science today, she looks for ways to surpass what seems impossible in the medical field. She calls it the psychology of possibility: finding out what’s possible in the realm of health. She recommends, 

"We shouldn’t fully trust doctors with our health diagnoses and treatments." 

The author believes that virtually all of us are ‘mindless’ almost all of the time and that being ‘mindful’ is a simple process of noticing new things in our routine activities. This process puts us in the present and makes us sensitive to context and perspective. It’s a process of engagement; the essence of what we’re doing when we’re having fun. It can lead us to being less judgmental and to be less concerned about other people judging us. 

After 40 years of research, she concludes how mindlessly we accept limitations and give away our control over our health and other aspects of our lives. She says, that limits our choices, reduces our chances of success, and further shrinks our boundaries. 

“It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us but rather our mindset about our physical limits. We can change our physical health by changing our minds.”