I only started eating fruits and vegetables about 10 years ago. I am 39 now.
For the first three decades of my life I lived on what I now call "cartoon food". You know, pretty much all that stuff outside the produce aisle in your local grocery store. My diet in my 20's was primarily pepperoni pizza, garlic knots, Lagunitas IPAs, and Camel Filters. Water? Pffft. Only when hungover in the middle of the night and that shit was cold as ice. If you know the feeling it is truly second to none.
Now I'm vegetarian. No booze. No smokes. No coffee. I eat mostly raw natural food. I drink lots of water at room temperature out of a copper container. Dinner I still get nuts two or three times a week and get pizza with garlic twists; dare I say with a diet Coke too!?
While vegetarian, mastering food and balancing it with physical activity has been one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. Want to start lifting weights a few times a week again? All that time you spent perfecting your yoga diet completely goes out the window. Running or surfing today? Same shit.
Wait, bananas have more carbs than bread? No wonder putting peanut butter on that shit instead is making me feel worse. I thought all fruit was just good for you. Traveling somewhere? You're fucked. Everything in sight is literally garbage and granola without added sugar ceases to exist. Love that kombucha everyone in the west says is healthy? Guru dude says you're an idiot and it costs more than a beer at a bar. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has an agenda. Natural and raw doesn't always equate to healthy. It's fucking confusing.
I got to a really good place with everything over the last year and a half but there were still some slight imperfections I was trying to work out. The end goal is to just feel good and energized all the time from ingest to exit and do whatever I want physically in between. I played with gluten free. Sporadic full day fasts. There were slight improvements but it still wasn't getting me there.
Recently I tried switching to two meals a day like they do at ashrams. 10am and 7pm on the dot every day. Sit on the floor. Bow to the food and say thanks. I cut out Kombucha too.
Initially, there were a lot of amazing things about it. From a practical and time-saving standpoint, having your day structured like that is incredible. You have a whole nine hour block of sunshine without having to wonder what food your going to eat and where. By the time you make it to dinner you're ready to fucking feast and all that green tastes incredible. Eating food became far more of a sacred act. Some nights quite profound to the level where eating felt like making love.
I took this photo in the backseat of my car thinking the caption would inevitably read "The World's Saddest Candlelight Dinner" but in actuality it ended up being the most romantic meal I've ever eaten. This dude knows what I'm talking about.
Downsides? I was hungry most of the day and kind of out of it. While coming back to prayer position from the backwards bending part of sun salutation I would almost pass out. I actually fell to the ground once. I could tell my blood sugar levels were all out of whack and I'm not what they call diabetic or even pre. I pretty much just forgot my dick could do anything other than piss. I thought if I stuck with the routine my body would just eventually adjust over time. After about a month of waiting for that moment to arrive it never did and I started to lose track of what I even used to feel like before I got myself into this experiment.
I found myself somewhat delirious in a parking lot seriously contemplating getting a 20-piece nugget from McDonald's. My body was feinding for nourishment so bad but my heart couldn't bring myself to start eating our winged friends again. Instead, I went and got a big bag of Cheetos at Safeway and it felt fucking incredible to scarf that whole thing down. The next morning I woke up feeling like my old self again.
Now I'm a few days back on three meals a day, gluten, and kombucha and I'm like, dude, what was I even thinking?
What started as a quest to simply improve the way I feel started becoming about ego and wanting to feel like I could compete or fit in with eastern yogic culture. I've become super ashamed of how we treat food here in the states and due to that immense pain there's a strong impulse to want to completely reject everything we do here. It's also made me become serious about food in a way that I never was before.
When I was a kid I never even thought about this stuff and I felt great. Froot loops and frosted flakes galore. Things just got dicey when I started overdoing it on those IPA's and getting all serious.
Lessons learned...
Listen to your body. Not a clock. Not another person. Not a science. Not a culture. Not your ego.
Cold kombucha make your body feel better than hot water with cinnamon, honey, and cloves? The latter may look and smell way better in your nice new spiritual mug but fuck it.
Cheetos get you psyched and actually improve your digestion more than any other "healthy" snack you've tried? Yo, I might end up with an orange mustache like my dad after all.
It's about how you feel, not what it takes to get you there. Everyone inhabits a different body with it's own unique needs and sometimes this stuff can be super counterintuitive. A lot of the times the overthinking and stress can be more damaging than the food itself. When on the fence, simplicity now supersedes all for me and this eating thing is supposed to be fun. There are energetic truths that transcend nutrition science and ayurveda.
Also, coconut water sucks. Edamame is magic. And watermelon is God.
I'm still staying conscious but I'm going back to having fun with food again. No schedules. Cartoon food here and there. Maybe a fucking snack for once?! I've come far enough where I can let go of the trauma response and transferring of my perfectionism to food.
I was toying with the idea of writing this post for a few days but put it off. Then, I put in the wrong directions on my phone this morning and stumbled across this mural of the homie Chester before I had to hang a u-turn. It was eerily similar to that one of blue dude I have seen many times before and I knew what time it meant that was✍🏼
Once I started waking up I thought it was super sad that the closest things we had to deities growing up were mostly corporate mascots. But maybe it turns out it's not so sad after all?
Om Namah Cheetahya!
p.s. I know my bio says I'm an infinite blissful void but why does it make me more uncomfortable to publicly say that we're kind of on speaking terms now? I'm not special, anyone else can be too; homie's multidimensional like Yeshua. I'm not sure whose next but I can't wait and I share this merely to normalize.
More on all that at a later time.
Peace 🕊️