Day 14 - Take control of your Energy - Change your diet, change your life!

Day 14 – 87 days left

It’s a pity that human babies don’t arrive with a ‘user manual’ in this world! Every piece of equipment we buy comes with a ‘user manual’, so that it may be cared for appropriately. But babies don’t: they are completely at the mercy of whoever God sent them to. Or are we overlooking something? Read on to follow me on a ‘mind-race’ from breastfeeding, to the time when women were considered part of the ‘spoils of war’ to right across the vegetable garden!

Looking at technical equipment, the more sophisticated it gets, the more ‘intuitive’ it is and the less you need a user manual. Since human beings are the ‘crown of creation’ they are obviously the most sophisticated piece of ‘equipment’ ever created by anyone. So maybe it makes sense that they are handled intuitively, and not with a user manual. The Afrikaans language which is a European language, grown on African soil, has a way of describing things in very down-to-earth idioms. So the question of how to care for a human baby, is answered with: ’Keep wet at the top and dry at the bottom’…

While, in principle, this is true, in practice the ‘what to feed a human’ is a critical part of the equation. ‘Nature’s way’ is really ‘God’s Way’. Just looking at mother’s milk and reading at how carefully this has been formulated, makes me stand in awe of God’s incredible wisdom. So, in principle, feeding the human baby is not the challenge: God generally delivers the food together with each baby. Even more fascinating: because mother’s milk feeds the baby in a different manner than formula does, babies feeding from the breast need milk more often than those feeding from the bottle – so in this way God is ensuring that human babies get a lot of intimate attention from their moms, which in turn helps develop their brains too!

But what about grown up humans? What were we designed to eat?

I only realized later in life that the Bible is really God’s ‘User Manual’ for human beings and that, if we refer to it often, it actually gives us an incredible amount of information on how to lead healthy and successful lives. Just looking at the story about when human beings were created, after telling them what is expected from them, in Genesis 1 verse 29 God explains what they should eat: seed-bearing plants and fruit with seed or in modern shorthand ‘grains, nuts, fruit and veggies.’ I had never taken the Old Testament of the Bible with its many laws very seriously, since as a Lutheran Christian my focus has always been on the New Testament, on the ‘summary’ of all God’s Laws – love God above all, love your neighbour as you love yourself – and the gospel of salvation through grace. But as I have learnt to better understand how to read the Bible, I realize that in the Old Testament there is so much wise and wonderful knowledge that can be applied to our benefit, even in this modern day and age. I’ve also learnt that the various translations of the Bible are always ‘coloured’ by the culture and times for which they were intended, and that often this ‘cultural bias’ results in some misinterpretation, which becomes clearer when one starts comparing different translations.

‘What on earth does this have to do with learning to master your energy?’ you may ask!

Everything, really.

Because in focusing our attention on the ‘ideal’ menu for human beings, God is pointing us right in the very first chapter of the Bible to the foods that scientifically have been proven to have the most easily digestible vitamins, minerals and other nutrients for the human body. He knew that having food is one of the most important things in a human beings life.

Since that time, human nutrition has always been of main concern throughout the ages. In times of hunger and war, just about anything would go. In times of peace and abundance, the focus would be on weight-loss and the negative impact of food on health. With mass media shaping our opinions of beauty since the advent of the 20th Century, and industrialization focusing on processing and producing ‘fast-food’ food for the masses, the focus during the previous century was more on either marketing highly processed or ‘fast’ foods, or on remedying the ill effects of this type of diet through ‘scientifically researched’ chemicals sold as ‘diet meals’ or ‘meal replacements’. To counter the effect of this artificial diet, vitamin and mineral supplements have hit the supermarket shelves in a big way. While this certainly makes sense if our diet consists mainly of artificial and processed foods, these pills are a sign that we are moving further and further away from ‘nature’s way’.

As in all the ages before our own, war had a most devastating impact on human behaviour. After millions of men were forced into war and too often lost their lives in the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th Century, women were drawn into the workplace, producing army supplies. Once the wars were over, these women were instrumental in rebuilding their countries, because their husbands, fathers, brothers and lovers had fallen in the wars. Compared to the centuries past, where women were generally considered ‘loot’ by the victors of war and often dragged off into faraway lands by their conquerors, this mass modern exodus of women away from their households and families into paid employment has certainly brought more power and independence to women. But when we look at the statistics of broken homes, ‘fatherless’ children, dysfunctional families, deserted elderly in old-age homes, increasingly obese kids, teenagers that ‘escape their life’ into media and drugs, and other issues our modern society is faced with, it is easy to see that throughout the 20th Century Western society was still recovering from the ill effects of those two terrible wars.

But now we are in a new era. We women can raise our heads from our working desks or factory production lines and ask ourselves the question: ‘Quo vadis?’ (Where to from here?).

And that is why I started writing this series on ‘Taking control of your life’ for women. And it is the reason why I am starting this series by focusing on the first basic human need: food.

The impact of our food on our wellbeing is immense!

By committing to eating as many fresh fruit and vegetables as we can, we are able to start turning the wheel away from the self-destructive and environmentally destructive habits of the 20th Century towards a more conscious lifestyle to create more love, greater beauty and abundance in the 21st Century.

I am just comparing my lifestyle with that of my mother’s, my grandmothers’ and my one great-grandmother that I still had the privilege to encounter as a small girl. They were ‘20th Century’ women who had managed to avoid the ‘draft’ into the workplace and were proud managers of large farm-based households.

I certainly have a life which has given me fantastic opportunities for self-development, but while I was travelling the world through lucrative consulting assignments, I increasingly felt that there is a missing piece: the homemaker piece. I associate ‘abundance’ with the extensive vegetable gardens, fruit orchards and home-baked bread and cakes that I remember from these women’s lives. No visitor would leave their homes empty-handed: fresh vegetables or fruit in season, plant seedlings, freshly cut flowers, a loaf of home-baked bread, a bottle of home-made jam…

And then I ask myself the question: why can’t I have both – the fascinating, successful career AND create the abundance these amazing homemakers did?

Someone once said:”To change a person, change their diet.” We all have the ability to ‘shift our shape’ towards a new way of being. Changing our diets to replace some of the stodgy carbohydrates and meat overload to more fresh vegetables – raw or lightly cooked –gives a huge boost to our energy levels! Reminding our minds that veggies are chock-full of vitamins and minerals that help to maintain our organs, brain and muscles, is a good way of convincing ourselves to take this step. Teaching our tongues to loooove vegetables is a great way of waking up our consciousness in general. And by ‘waking up’ in this way, we may just see the door open to a new lifestyle which includes everything we have ever dreamt about…

I’m not saying that we all need to go back to rural lifestyles and plant our own vegetables. No, if we would just put more of those fresh veggies into our supermarket trolleys and walk past the canned and processed food sections, that already would be a huge improvement on our lifestyles, because it forces us to focus on the food we put into our bodies, since we have to prepare it personally.

So in starting to take control of your life, start to take control of your diet. Make sure that as fruit forms your breakfast, vegetables form the largest part of your other two main meals every day. You’ll be surprised at the snowball effect this will have on the other areas of your life!





PS: Release yourself from the bondage of commuting to work on congested high-ways, which simply is a waste of your precious time and energy! Instead, use the Internet to start a business which you can do from home, thereby having more time to care for your loved ones, your home and your garden. Thousands of people worldwide are waking up to this new possibility, starting an Internet Business on a part-time basis, while still working, until they earn enough to say ‘goodbye’ to their boss. Listen to some of their stories on http://www.reinedelarose.com.