the fundamentals of food + simple nourishment
My practice is based on the fundamentals that your body is made up of nutrients—fat + water soluble vitamins, trace minerals, amino acids, fat, protein, carbohydrates, water and salt. These are the buildings blocks. These things come from our food and water. Therefore, we are made of food and water. Or, put another way, what you put into and onto your body is what you are made up of, or destroyed by.
Then factor in your personal toxic load—antinutrients in plant foods, chemicals in your environment, personal care products, water, EMF radiation, carcinogens, stress, pollution— and activity levels, it’s easy to see which areas need work.
You also need to consider the impact of the positives you can add to your life, like your time in the sun, or outdoors in general—bonus points for walking barefoot on bare earth. Figuring out your beliefs, and where your morals lie are also crucial for psychological and spiritual health, and oftentimes even for physical health. Finally, activity levels should be considered, as well as quality of rest and sleep.
However, there is no particular order that these things need to be addressed in— if anyone tells you differently then that’s just like, their opinion, man. Since everything in your body is an interaction there’s no one way to reach health and wholeness.
I say, do what comes naturally,
work on whatever is the loudest, and
sustainably move toward balance within.
The body is a holistic system, everything interacts
Taking all of these things into account it’s easy to spot which areas need attention. These observations need only be approximations, there is rarely a need for great detail, because the body is a holistic system. Meaning that in your body everything interacts with everything else. So, when you are doing poorly on multiple points in the “checklist” above the damage compounds. In this day and age, it can be difficult to find a root cause of your ailments since there are likely multiple explanations for a “singular” issue. In the body, nothing is a singular issue. Everything interacts. All diseases begin with toxic load, and nutritional deficiencies. Which one needs to be addressed first is different for most people.
It might sound complicated, but I promise you, this is where the simplicity is.
There may be a whole slew of things you need to address, but as luck would have it [or intelligent design], the healing is quite similar for all manner of ailments when you simply look at the nutrient profiles of the things you are putting into your body, and compare that with your toxic load. Your body is made of food and water, yes, but it is also a system of systems that are working intelligently together, doing their very best to keep you alive, and ideally, thriving.
When given the appropriate tools your body needs to thrive, it seeks homeostasis. However, our bodies are also remarkably resilient, and will endure an incredible amount of pain and suffering while still managing to operate. This is where I believe most Americans are in their bodies today. Very sick, with a burdensome allostatic load. Severely disregulated, forcing their bodies to choose between functions in favor of basic survival. Which functions depends on countless individual factors unique to you.
Over 95% of diseases are a direct result of nutrition or lifestyle.
Epigenetic's tells us that genes are turned on or off based on
what we put into or onto our bodies.
When you break the body down into it’s most basic functions, and what those require it’s clear that it’s just not that complicated to nourish yourself. There is a commonality at the cellular level— we are made of water, salt, minerals, fats, and amino acids, without these we wouldn’t be able to exist. These are required and commonplace in every part of your body from the skin on in.
amino acids + proteins are building blocks
fats, carbs + simple sugars are energy + activators
water, salt + minerals are conductors, communicators + binders
the first thing we should be concerning ourselves with is re-mineralizing ourselves.
With soil erosion being what it is today, that can be a slightly more cumbersome process than it would’ve been 200 years ago, but it’s still extremely doable, and can be easily be done through food and water alone.
Once you have the minerals free flowing, your body needs building blocks. Those are found in animal fats and animal proteins and they are things like fat and water soluble vitamins and amino acids. It’s important to keep in mind that most bodies will not outright shutdown without these nutrients, at least not right away. If your body is not getting what it needs from your diet and your water then it will take what it can from whatever you are giving it before systematically shutting down systems that aren’t strictly necessary for existence and finally cannibalizing itself. This is how diet causes disease. More on disease in the next module.
Your body is magical and incredibly capable, but it can only work with what you give it.
It will do it’s best to extract the most nutrients possible out of any substance offered to it. It has systems in place to adapt to poor conditions for short periods of time [weeks for some, years for others]. We see evidence of this when we look at vegan diets, and how most people begin to feel worse and worse after roughly 2-3 years on this diet, which is about the time it takes our body to use up every last bit of vitamin and mineral stores in our tissues and cells. The longer a vegan goes without animal products the sicker they feel as their body begins storing toxins and ramping up hunger, switching to a quantity over quality state. But their body is not hungrier, it’s starving for nutrients, and trying to communicate in the only way it knows how—hormonally, or sensationally.
Our bodies are always trying to get back to homeostasis. When you are diagnosed with a dis-ease of the mind or body that is your body screaming to be taken care of. Our bodies may not have words, but they have a language. It’s crucial to your health that you learn to speak your body’s language.
Cravings are soft spoken instructions to remedy a lack or deficiency.
Pain is a demand for attention.
Disease is the loudest alarm bell your body has to ring
to alert you to the trouble within.
Food and medicine are not what heals you, your body heals itself, but if you are not providing proper nourishment it has to be picky about where to focus it’s resources. It’s a bit like paying a contractor to build you a house, but not providing them any crucial building materials, and then being surprised that all you got was a driftwood shack that blows over in the wind. Your body can’t build, repair, or function optimally without adequate resources; adequate resources come from your diet and nature intake, they are the nuts and bolts of your entire being.
Bioindividuality is core to my practice, bodies are similar enough in the way that they assimilate nutrients that it becomes less and less important what caused the disregulation, and more important what will correct it. The simplicity is in the fact that nutrient dense animal foods are necessary for a full life, as is hard mineral water, salt, daily sun exposure [the nakeder the better], barefoot grounding, and movement.
This is how humans have survived and thrived since the dawn of existence, and this is the only way forward. For this reason my work is as much about deconstructing mindsets and faulty belief systems as it is about introducing nourishment. Everything works together. Symbiosis. It’s important to build on a solid foundation.
beliefs check!
I invite you to take a closer look at your own beliefs around these topics by answering these questions:
How does this information sit with you initially?
If you have issues with anything in this section, what are they?
Do you believe that your body can heal itself? Why or why not?
Do you pay attention to the quality of your food + water?
What do you believe causes disease if not diet + lifestyle?
What about your own diet + lifestyle do you think might be contributing to your unique health issues?
Do you believe that a person with a medical degree is more capable of healing you than yourself?
Do you believe you have agency over your own choices in life? If not, who do you believe holds the power?
What are 3 ways you can become more self-sufficient this month?