Variety is the spice of life...
I have often wondered how, no matter what diet someone goes on, they see positive results of one sort or another. Until last night I always reasoned that it’s because there is no place for junk in a programmed diet.
However, tuning in to the Fasting Lifestyle Summit, I learned differently from Daniel Pompa PScD, an expert in his field. We, as humans, are amazingly adaptogenic.
In our diets, especially, we adapt to seasonal availability, monthly availability… You’ve all heard of the end of month diet haven’t you 😊… not what he meant. Although a couple of days forced fasting would never go amiss in a healthy lifestyle.
It’s this variation in our diet that is so beneficial to our gut microbiome and changing up our dietary intake when we start a new “diet” gives us positive results for this very reason.
Having just had the pleasure of staying in a 5-star establishment I struggled to get my desired quantity of daily green leaves.
Breakfast buffets in Southern Africa always have a load of fresh, seasonal and local fruit on offer, thankfully. I feasted on mono-meals of citrus, pineapple or papaya. Fortunately, I also found a gigantic bowl of undressed fresh leaves amongst the cold meats and cheeses.
Dinnertime salads are usually loaded with various cheeses or meats. Imagine my disappointment when being presented with a roast butternut salad — its only greens were a thin strip of chiffonnade rocket across the centre of a whole sliced butternut.
How different my vision was of a bowl of greens with some scattered diced roast butternut that could be ignored or eaten.
Roots to wings….
I am sitting beneath the shade of a Celtis Africana that I planted as a foot-high sapling more than thirty years ago. My youngest daughter was three years old.
Now her three year old daughter climbs that tree, watches the myriad birdlife in and out of its branches from her dream-catcher swing, jumps in the autumn leaves I rake into piles beneath it for her pleasure, and plays in its gentle shade on sweltering summer days.
That tree supports a world of life both above and below the ground. It represents a lifetime of family growth and togetherness. That family, now split between two continents, two hemispheres, two completely different climates and lifestyles.
I must embrace them both and adapt to the changing diet and seasons with confidence and joy in knowing that it is all within my grasp and nature to adapt — to grow in health and happiness.
Live well and find the happy,
Merryl @ GreenSmoothie.com
P.S. I’m reminded of this stanza from my favourite e e cummings poem:
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
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