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Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act

Progressive Eaters, Unite! Out nation’s food future is at a crossroads. Here’s how you can make a healthy difference. 1-4

Fork In the Road America’s eating has gone bonkers and it’s up to us to stop the madness. 5-9

The Way of the Healthy Person Good health is a life-enhancing journey. Healthy living begins with our own thoughts, assumptions and beliefs. 10-13

Vitality! Discover where the vitality well-spring originates and how you can get your share. 14-16

The Better Good Life: An Essay on Personal Sustainability Find out what nature’s lessons can teach us about creating a satisfying way of living. 17-21

Guide to HealthyLiving

www.ExperienceLife.com

October 2008 / 1 experiencelife.com

Guide to a Healthy Way of Life, Article 1 of 5

Progressive Eaters, Unite! America’s food industry is in the midst of a dramatic culture shift that's challenging everything we’ve been taught about eating. Here’s how to take advantage of this exciting new movement and eat more healthfully than ever before.By Courtney Helgoe

If, on some beautiful summer morning, you decide to head to your local farm-ers’ market, chances are good that you’ll

have your pick of gorgeous heirloom toma-toes: green zebras, Brandywines, yellow pear or sugar plum. Maybe you’ll grab a cup of fair-trade coffee to enjoy while you chat with growers. On your way back you could stop at the local food co-op for a few more staples: a carton of organic milk, some spelt pasta. Pulling up in front of the house on your bike, you gratefully contemplate how easy it is to eat well close to home.

Later in the week, however, you’re just as likely to find yourself in the center aisles of the mega-market, surrounded by bags of salty snacks and temptingly easy-to-make (and heavily processed) prepackaged meals. Your youngest child, fresh from day-care, is howling for the toaster tarts with her favorite cartoon heroes on the box. Hungry and ready to flee, you grab a frozen pizza, submit to the demand for toaster tarts, and drive home through rush-hour traffic, munching a bag of cheese curls as you go. Pulling up in front of your house, you consider how easy it is to be distracted from your goals to eat better food.

America’s food culture has never been so polarized. Locally grown heirloom crops square off with mass-produced frozen piz-zas. Organic seeds compete with geneti-cally modified ones. Pasture-fed cattle

are shadowed by crowded feedlots. While Italy’s Slow Food Movement catches on across the country, our addiction to fast food shows no signs of abating.

Clearly, our food system is heading in two radically different directions, and the decisions we make as eaters play a vital role in determining its fate. Read on for a glimpse of the current state of our food culture and some tips on how you can help create a food movement that’s moving in the right direction for your tastes.

Positive Trends, Challenging RealitiesOur industrial food system is undergoing a seismic shift. Walmart is the country’s larg-est purveyor of organic milk, and Whole Foods Market has become a household name. The number of farmers’ markets has doubled in the last decade. And demand for organic food rises at an annual rate of 20 percent.

Meanwhile, books like Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Penguin, 2008) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins, 2007) have become best- sellers. In 2007, editors of the Oxford American Dictionary chose “locavore,” a term for people who exclusively buy foods grown close to home, as their word of the year.

What’s more, the participants in today’s

food movement are not just back-to-the-land vegetarians or “health food nuts,” as your grandma might’ve called them. These movers and shakers come in all stripes — from the urban farmer to the suburban mom who can deconstruct a food label in record time. City folks are heading to the country to volunteer in community-supported agriculture (CSA) partnerships, and celebrity chefs are building public alliances with local farmers. Consumers aren’t just grabbing the local apples at the grocery store; they’re purchasing them directly from farmers at markets or through shares of a CSA.

“This is an industry born of activism,” says Whole Foods copresident Walter Robb, whose company has grown from a tiny natural foods store in Texas in 1978 into a Fortune 500 giant that grossed $6.6 billion in 2007. Robb readily acknowledges that many of the company’s directives, like its animal compassion standards and parking-lot farmers’ markets, come directly from community input and consumer demand for more sustainably produced food.

In short, consumers are playing a central role in shaping a new American food cul-ture. And they’re beginning to see how their activism is translating into better land man-agement and animal treatment, a healthier bottom line for small farmers, and a renais-sance of delicious and healthful food. ➺



That’s not to say we’ve seen the end of commodity-based industrial agriculture. The vast majority of American food pro-ducers continue to reap most of their prof-its from the sale of highly processed foods based on ingredients (like corn, wheat, soy and sugar) that spell trouble for both human and environmental health. And out-dated federal legislation continues to sup-port mass-production farming and mono-culture crops, stacking the deck against small-scale growers and sweetening the profit margin for big agricultural outfits that grow commodities instead of food.

Today, organics still comprise only 2 percent of total U.S. food production. Small, diverse growing operations remain the exception to the rule of the corporate-controlled “factory” farm. In 2005, farmers devoted 4 million acres to organic crops in the United States, while federally subsi-dized corn, the bedrock of the processed-food and fast-food industries, occupied 81.6 million acres.

And while Americans have more access than ever to fresh, whole and organic foods, those living in low-income communities have fewer options. In these areas, people without reliable transportation are forced to buy their groceries at neighborhood gas stations and convenience stores, purveyors of what Pollan calls “food products” — shelf-stable, highly refined goods that are only distantly related to recognizable crops.

This particular inequity may seem less urgent than the broader economic and political realities from which it springs, but the lack of access to fresh, healthy food is linked to some of our most worrisome pub-lic health trends. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one in four U.S. adults is medically obese, and one in three children born in the United States in 2000 will contract diet-related type 2 diabetes by 2050 — both conditions related to con-suming highly processed food.

What’s more, many of our government’s policies support the production of highly refined, high-glycemic products through outdated farm subsidy programs. The U.S. government originally subsidized farmers who grew corn and other storable crops to protect Americans against starvation after the Great Depression, but today that subsi-dized corn appears as corn syrup in almost all our processed food and, indirectly, as

livestock feed in our fast-food meals.By making these foods artificially cheap,

those subsidies effectively underwrite the obesity and diabetes epidemics. In addition, they discourage the planting of health-promoting vegetables by making corn the only crop most farmers feel they can afford to grow.

The 2007 Farm Bill contained new incentives for environmental stewardship, funding to support more farmers’ markets and urban farms, and a farm-to-school program for better school lunches — all in response to citizen demand. Subsidies for corporate farms and commodity crops remained untouched, but for the first time since the industrialization of the food system after World War II, legislation is beginning to reflect consumer desire for a healthier food system.

Time to EatThe good news is it really doesn’t take much to lend your support to the positive trends in today’s food movement. And doing so will build a healthier, more soul-satisfying relationship with your food. Here are a few simple ways you can help revolutionize our food system for the better:

1. Do Your HomeworkAs organics take off and multinational food companies acquire small producers, con-sumer research becomes more important than ever. (For a graph displaying who owns what in the organic foods industry, visit www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustry.html.) Check out labels through nonindus-try sources like the Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org) or Sustainable Table (www.sustainabletable.org) — they’ll explain which food producers uphold the highest standards of land management, labor practices and animal treatment. (See Web Extra! for more on the intricacies of the burgeoning organics industry.)

You can also take your pick of books like Kingsolver’s and Pollan’s, or Daniel Imhoff’s Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill (University of California Press, 2007). Plus, two recent documentaries — King Corn (2007) and The Future of Food (2004) — will help you better understand the dangers of monoculture crops and genetically modified seeds. For a clever, but strongly positioned, lesson about factory-

farmed eggs, milk and meat, check out the flash animation films at The Meatrix (www.themeatrix.com).

2. Get InvolvedFind your local food co-op and become a member. (You can track down the nearest one at www.sustainabletable.org.) Start a weekend ritual of visiting a nearby farm-ers’ market. Buy a share in a CSA (find one at www.localharvest.org) and get weekly deliveries of fresh produce from a local farmer; some CSAs even offer fresh eggs and chicken. (For more on eating local, see “Closer to Home: 5 Steps Toward Eating Local” in the April 2008 archives.)

Get involved with urban farming or spend a day volunteering at a nearby farm, especially great activities to do with kids. See if you can get your school hooked up with a local farm for the lunch program. Or consider donating to good food causes, like the People’s Grocery in Oakland, Calif., or the folks at Urban Farming, who are working to increase urban food security by turning empty city lots into farms (www.urbanfarming.org).

Finally, don’t be intimidated by legisla-tion — there are plenty of primers on the Farm Bill (see Imhoff’s Food Fight) that will get you up to speed on the basic issues. Call and write your legislators (www.con-gress.org) to press for a better “food bill” that supports a more sustainable food system. Meanwhile, you can continue to “vote with your fork” by shopping for local, sustainable whole foods.

3. Choose Your BattlesHere are a few modest changes that can make a big impact:• Become a “whole-food-avore.” Strive to incorporate into your diet more fresh foods that look pretty much as they did in nature, and you’ll not only be healthier, you’ll bypass many of the problems associ-ated with the food system: The worst agri-cultural sins are not committed in the name of fruits and vegetables.• Know the “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables, and buy the organic varieties. Peaches, apples, bell peppers, celery, nectar-ines, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, imported grapes, pears, spinach and potatoes carry the worst pesticide load, according to a 2007 study by the Environmental Working ➺



Group. Read more about the study at www.foodnews.org.• Stick with grass-fed dairy and meat products and avoid any food raised in a commercial feedlot. Supporting grass-fed operations is not only more humane for ani-mals and significantly easier on the environ-ment, it’s also much better for your health. Visit www.eatwild.com for more information and to find your nearest sources of pastured meat and milk.

4. Follow the Foodies When you find yourself too busy to hit the farmers’ market or weed the vegetable gardens at a CSA, you can still support a healthier food economy by choosing farm-to-table restaurants when you eat out. (The

Eat Well Guide at www.eatwellguide.org will help you find them.)

Today’s food activists are helping bring our food systems and eating habits full circle: When we eat more local, seasonal, whole foods, we are eating much like our ancestors.

“In the history of European cooking, preparing local food was more of a neces-sity,” says Mike Phillips, head chef at the Minneapolis restaurant The Craftsman, one of hundreds nationwide that support local growers of whole foods. “There weren’t means to refrigerate or ship food thou-sands of miles, so traditional cooking and preserving techniques evolved out of using foods locally. There’s also a strong pride taken in regional foods — only wine grown in the Burgundy region can carry that

name — and I want to support farmers who are developing those traditions of quality here.”

Indeed, there is pleasure and a sense of pride in knowing where our food comes from — and a deeper connection with our food is born out of appreciation for the labor that brought it to our plate. Familiarizing ourselves with what we eat and buying whole, local foods sustains our food culture and promotes dignity in food production and consumption.

This more mindful approach to food — and the food system at large — trans-forms an everyday act of consumption into an act of grace. And who doesn’t want a bigger serving of that?

Courtney Helgoe is an Experience Life senior editor.

Save the Seeds. The Web has given new life to a host of seed-saving organizations that help farmers and gardeners learn how to save seeds from their heirloom crops and to trade them with each other. This underground network is helping to protect farmer self-sufficiency and maintain a healthy variety of food crops for future generations. See www.seedsavers.org.

Farm-to-School. Forty-three states now host farm-to-school programs, where local farms supply schools’ cafeterias with fresh produce for lunches, and students learn about food production and nutrition. To find out about a program near you, visit www.farmtoschool.org.

Urban Farms. Farms are sprouting up in cities across the United States and Canada. They transform empty lots and rooftops into sources of fresh food (notably lacking in most inner-city neigh-borhoods), create local food self-sufficiency, and beautify urban spaces, which deters crime.

Organics Galore. Sales of organics are increasing by 20 percent annually. And while this rising demand can be a mixed bless-ing — the small, local aspect of organic farming often gets lost in production — it does mean a huge number of acres are being turned over to more sustainable land and livestock management.

Eat Local. “Locavore” was the Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year. More and more people are starting to see the drawbacks of food that’s built to travel and have begun to eat closer to home, building local economies as they shop and dine. You can learn about the “eat local challenge” at www.eatlocal.net.

Grass-Fed and Proud. As awareness spreads about inhumane feedlot practices and the taste and nutritional benefits of grass-fed animal products, sales are rising fast. Even some members of the fast-food industry are catching on. In 2005, McDonald’s Chipotle Mexican restaurant chain began sourcing all their pork from Niman Ranch, a cooperative for organic and pasture-fed meats.

Hopeful Signs Here are some of the positive highlights of today’s consumer-driven food revolution:



BOOKSIn Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan (Pen-guin, 2008)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2006)

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Lo-cally by Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon (Harmony, 2007)

Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill by Daniel Imhoff (University of California Press, 2007)

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Under-ground Food Movements by Sandor Ellix Katz (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007)

Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by Van-dana Shiva (South End Press, 2000)

DVDsKing Corn (2007) — Two college students follow 1 acre of corn through its food system odyssey.

The Future of Food (2004) — The encroaching threat of geneti-cally modified grains explained.

WEBwww.farmland.org— Insight on the Farm Bill, farmland preser-vation and other food-policy issues.

www.sustainabletable.org — Information clearinghouse on all things relating to sustainable food production.

www.localharvest.org — Locate farmers’ markets and CSAs in your area.

www.eatwellguide.org — To find local sustainable food sources, from food co-ops to restaurants.

www.meatrix.com — Animated video about factory farms.

At ExperienceLife.comAvailable in the “Past Issues” archives:

“Coming Home to Your Foodshed” (September/October 2002)

“Closer to Home: 5 Steps Toward Eating Local” (April 2008)

“Raise Your Food Consciousness” (December 2007)

Resources


experiencelife.com July/August 2003 / 5

Fork In the Road Wake up and smell the statistics. America’s eating has gone bonkers, and it’s up to us to stop the madness.

By Pilar Gerasimo

Have you looked at the face of America’s future lately? You might have to step back to fit it in the

frame of your viewfinder. According to James Hill, obesity researcher and director of the Colorado Clinical Nutrition Research Unit at the University of Colorado, by the year 2050, almost all Americans will be overweight.

Yessiree, if our nation’s obesity contin-ues to increase unchecked, that’s what we have to look forward to during the first century of this new millennium. But there’s no need to wait and see how things turn out. With nearly 65 percent of Americans currently overweight or obese, it’s already now more “normal” to be overweight than it is to have a healthy lean-body mass. As a raw, numerical fact, that’s disturbing, but when you stop to think of all the individuals represented by that statistic – all the lives needlessly disrupted and limited, all the families burdened by ill health, to say noth-ing of the immense public health costs – it becomes downright devastating.

It seems that, as a nation, we are at a crossroads. We can either veer onto a dif-ferent, better path, significantly changing the way we think about and relate to food, or we can stay on our current course and come face to face with our tubby destiny.

Eating Ourselves UpOnce you really stop and consider the three-ring obesity circus, it doesn’t take long to realize that the world of food has gone totally, completely nuts. Check it out: We’ve got pizza, chicken, taco and burger outfits trying to outdo each other with ever-more-outrageous fried, stuffed, cheese-encrusted, carbohydrate-enhanced, saturated-fat-oozing, super-sized offerings. We’ve got marketers trying to find ways to make sugar drinks even more enticing to small children. We’ve got lawyers and public-action groups who want to sue both the soft-drink and fast-food industries for making us fat. We’ve got people taking drugs and “stapling” their stomachs in an effort to stave off more adipose gains. And of course, we’ve got a whole raft of hucksters and diet czars sell-ing us an outrageous variety of sure-cure products and “fast fix” eating-plan gim-micks, none of which appear to be working.

Meanwhile, hordes of people continue to expand. Millions of our fellow citizens are suffering and dying – not for lack of food as in so many countries, but rather for our embarrassing excesses of it. As taxpayers and insurance-policy holders, we’re spend-ing billions on the public health costs of obesity-related diseases.

Given the enormous quantity of deaths

and diseases attributable to obesity, it’s evi-dent that we are quite literally eating our-selves to death. At least, we eat too much of some things. Meanwhile, most of us are probably not eating nearly enough of other things – like fresh, nutritious vegetables and fruits, wholesome proteins and healthy fats. Being creatures of habit and conve-nience, we’re also not eating nearly enough variety, which nutritional experts say is a critical factor in getting an adequate array of vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, phyto-chemicals and amino acids.

Instead, in the foods we turn to day after day, we get an overdose of the same handful of remixed and repackaged “com-modity” ingredients – flour, sugar, vegeta-ble oil, corn, potatoes – and we get most of it refined and processed and cooked beyond recognition.

You can slice and dice the problem any way you want. You can say we eat too much. We don’t exercise enough. We eat on the go. We eat while we watch TV. We’ve forgotten how to cook. We’ve forgotten how to farm. It’s the chemicals and geneti-cally modified organisms in our food. It’s our culture of convenience and indulgence. It’s a conspiracy of the government and food companies. It’s an economic problem. A social-class problem. A genetic problem. It’s all of the above. And it’s not going ➺



away any time soon.So what can you do? For one thing,

you can stop looking at the problem as something (or a conglomeration of things) against which you are powerless. Like it or not, in the end, what reaches your mouth is ultimately a matter of what you are willing to put into it. Yes, it’s tricky to make strides with so many factors and factions working against you. In fact, in a world that makes eating badly feel so easy and taste so darn good, eating well can be a perplexing daily challenge, at least at first. But if you’re waiting around for change to come from the outside, there’s a good chance that your pounds will pile up faster than the col-lectively brokered solutions. Net outcome: While everyone else is wringing their hands and haggling over whose fault it is, you end up just another statistic in stretch pants.

You don’t have to let this happen! You can buck the system, duck the fat, dodge the bullet! You can go your own way. But first you have to reclaim your fork from the forces-that-be, and take it firmly back into your own hands.

There, doesn’t that feel good? Now, it’s time to stand up, raise your cutlery in the air and yell: “Stop this ride – I want to get off!”

Taking Off the BlindersThe first step toward solving any problem is fully understanding it. As tempting as it may be to dive into simplistic solutions (“Just eat less and exercise more!”), doing so inevitably sets us up for trouble. For one thing, that particular bit of advice hasn’t managed to set most of us on the good path. For another, it really is a tad more complicated than that.

Rain or shine, you probably eat three to six times a day, 365 days a year. Between shopping, driving around, watching TV and going in and out of work and social situ-ations, you’re probably exposed to food, food images, food messages and food choices hundreds of times that often.

That’s a lot of different situations to navigate, and a lot of different decisions. To cope well, you need to be vigilant, dis-cerning, mindful, clever and prepared for anything (add brave, clean and reverent and you’ll qualify as a Food Scout!).

Seriously, though, if you’re not seeing things clearly and you don’t have all the information, mere platitudes and diet tips

aren’t going to do you a whole lot of good. So let’s start by looking at the problem on both a micro (individual) and macro (cul-tural) level.

Why, oh why, are we eating the way we do?

At the individual level, many of us simply have no idea how food affects us or why. For the most part, nutrition isn’t taught in schools or in our homes, so we typically get most of our information about food and diet from marketers, diet books, magazines and other popular media. Much of that infor-mation is misleading (“Lose 10 lbs. in 10 days!”), heavily influenced by commercial interests (great headlines and advertiser-friendly content only please!) or it depends on government-generated public-health guidelines (like food pyramids and RDAs) that aim for lowest-common-denominator damage control, not optimal health.

As a result, unless we seek out in-depth, holistic nutritional information from a vari-ety of educated, unbiased sources (gener-ally not the lightest or juiciest reading in the world), we tend to get a fractured and slanted story – news related to specific products for example, or sensational sto-ries about research discoveries or scientific breakthroughs that are taken out of con-text, blown out of proportion and poorly reported for maximum newsstand appeal.

One decade, fat is the villain. The next, it’s carbs. Instead of understanding the full scope of our body’s nutritional and meta-bolic requirements and dynamics, instead of seeing that all foods and nutrients have certain properties that can be desirable or undesirable under certain circumstances and in certain forms, combinations, and quantities, we simply villainize some foods and glorify others. We also tend to direct our eating by avoiding certain foods, rath-er than eating foods for the nutrition they have to offer.

Admittedly, understanding the bigger picture is a challenge. The digestive system, hormonal system, immune system, metabo-lism – they’re all incredibly complex, inter-dependent miracles of engineering. But it’s not that we’re incapable of understanding how our bodies work, it’s just that we’re mostly too busy learning other stuff (like how to download email on our palm-top comput-ers). So we look to diets and commercial “eating plan” advice to help us simplify mat-

ters. And too often, we get led astray.The cure for this problem? We have to

educate and reprogram ourselves to be more discerning and less easily influenced. That doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen by choice. You can begin by sim-ply putting on your game face when you go shopping for food or out to eat at a restaurant. Instead of eating like a kid at a county fair (“Ooh, look – corn dogs!”), you can become a “tough customer” who reads labels and ask questions (“Hmmm, I wonder how they gave this meat a two-year shelf life?”). Next time you’re at the newsstand or bookstore, look past the pretty faces and promises on the covers and try to get your hands on some real, solid information that will tell the truth and inspire you to take better care of yourself. You’ll find the truth is actually far more interesting and satisfy-ing than the “Lose 10 lbs. in 10 days!” drivel pandered by the lightweights.

A Calorie is NOT a CalorieOne of the biggest and most overlooked misunderstandings about excess weight is that it is strictly attached to caloric intake. For years, diet books and weight-loss articles harped at us that “a calorie is a calorie.” And many of us took that advice to heart, attempting to monitor our calor-ic intake while failing to understand that everything from the quality of our food to the ratios and timing of our macronutri-ent intake could have profound effects on how those calories operated in our bodies and – ultimately – whether they turned to fat or not.

We now know without a doubt that strictly limiting caloric intake without regard to nutritional and chemical considerations is counterproductive. First, when we’re limit-ing calories but not getting good nutrition – including the right balance of protein, complex carbs and healthy fats – our energy plummets. We become less active, and much more susceptible to food cravings, overeat-ing and, in some cases, ill health.

Second, if we’re using a significant portion of our daily caloric allotment for metabolism-disrupting substances like sugar and refined carbs, or stocking our diets with so-called “free” but body-stress-ing items like diet sodas and coffee, we’re setting ourselves back even further.

So forget “a-calorie-is-a-calorie” ➺



thinking. While it’s true that if you regularly consume more calories than your body can burn you’ll gain weight, you can’t forget that how many calories your body burns is also directly related to how well you eat. That’s because the nutrients attached to the calories in some foods nourish your body in a way that strengthens and ener-gizes you, speeding up your body’s fat-burning machinery. Conversely, nutrient-poor foods – especially those with lots of empty sugars and carbs – can actually help to turn your body’s fat-burning machinery to its lowest setting, robbing you of energy and vitality in the process.

Tally the caloric intake of many natural-health and nutritional experts and you’ll be shocked to find that on a daily basis, many of these slim, healthy-looking people take in twice the calories that you do (or more). While most of these people are relatively active and exercise moderately, their caloric expenditure during exercise is not what accounts for the difference. The difference, as any of them will tell you, is that they’ve learned how to eat in a way that supports their metabolism, supplies ample nutrients and encourages their bod-ies to run efficiently. In short, they’re eating lots of “good calories” – calories that carry everything their body needs to function brilliantly – and not much else. Yet they hardly ever count calories, because the way they eat, they don’t need to.

Okay, so we know that the key to eating for sustainable weight control and health involves eating in a way that nourishes the body, supports our hormonal balance and stokes the metabolic fire, leaving us feeling energetic, healthy, optimistic and craving-free. Once we accept that, the next step is figuring out why we don’t do that, and how we can.

View to an Expanding CultureThere’s no question that individual igno-rance about food and nutrition, combined with individual food issues (like emotional, unconscious and compulsive eating), are responsible, in large part, for our willing-ness to eat badly. But it’s also important to remember that if individual ineptitude and maladjustment happen to blunt and dull the tines on our forks (making them work better as shovels), we still have our culture to thank for providing a giant drawer full of

giant, lackluster cutlery for us to work with.In his book, Fat Land: How Americans

Became the Fattest People in the World, journalist Greg Critser traces the influences that certain political, economic and social shifts have had on our eating habits over the past 30 years. Covering the same time period of our increasing girth and deterio-rating health, Critser exposes how sweep-ing policy changes in agriculture, education and health have all contributed to making obesity America’s No. 1 health problem.

Predictably, a lot of it comes down to money. According to Critser, it all start-ed in the 1970s with Americans insisting on cheaper food during a brief time of scarcity and price escalation. The Nixon and Ford administrations responded with policies (including fencerow-to-fencerow planting, free-trade rules and food-regula-tory flexibility) that created huge surpluses and made some foods (especially some industrial sugars and fats) so darn cheap that food companies began using them in everything. They began cranking out their “new and improved” foods in huge quanti-ties – and at very attractive prices. Lower grain prices also resulted in lower meat and dairy prices, ending shortages, but also making it tougher for local farmers to make a living farming wholesome foods in a sustainable manner. Agribusiness picked up the slack.

It was, in a sense, a permanent solu-tion to a temporary problem, and it gave birth to the double-headed quality/quan-tity monster we face now.

The first head to show its face was “quality”: As cheap ingredients flooded the market, calorie-dense convenience foods, TV dinners, fast foods and an astonishing variety of snacks and novelty items began springing up everywhere. Most of them were full of industrial sugars and fats (like corn syrup, fructose and hydrogenated palm and soybean oils) that could be com-bined to create many appealing sensual properties (aroma, color, mouthfeel).

These ingredients offered great value and long shelf life (a food manufacturer’s best friend). Many also turned out to have exceptional propensities for stimulating appetite and encouraging insulin-resis-tance and obesity. But back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, obesity wasn’t nearly the con-cern it is today. Food manufacturers knew

what consumers wanted – convenience and low prices – and they gave it to them.

By combining these ingredients with flavor additives and putting them through innovative cooking processes, the food industry had found a seemingly magic formula for creating prepared-meal and snack products that American consum-ers loved. Such manufactured foods and snacks quickly took on a bigger and more central role in many busy consumers’ diets, replacing more nutritious and less-refined homemade fare.

It didn’t take long for the monster’s sec-ond head – “quantity” – to emerge. As food technology improved to make the best use of the glut of inexpensive raw materials, and as food manufacturers ended up with gobs of product on their hands and an increasing amount of competition in the marketplace, marketers got savvier and more aggressive about promoting their wares.

They needed to sell more stuff. So por-tion sizes got bigger and the offers got more tempting. Meanwhile, commercial flavor-and-texture enhancing became a fine art. Funny thing – you just couldn’t get enough of these new foods! Don’t worry, said the manu-facturers, “we’ll make more!” And they did.

Initially, manufacturers and restaura-teurs had to concoct a way of nudging us past our preconceived notions of “normal” portions. They had to devise strategies for getting us to eat twice as much without making us feel like gluttons.

It didn’t take them long. Value-meal deals and super-sizing was born. Well, of course: We weren’t piggish, slovenly and gluttonous – we were thrifty, pragmatic and powerful! The bargains and offers became irresistible.

In the past few years, satiety studies have demonstrated that the amount of food it takes to satisfy our appetites is directly proportional to the amount we’re served. But we didn’t know that then. As a result, there was basically no stopping us, and no turning back.

For the American food industry, the news was all good. It was spending less on raw ingredients and making more than ever on its finished products. For average Americans, as Critser points out, the con-clusion to this story was largely inevitable: “A plenitude of cheap, abundant and tasty calories had arrived. It was time to eat.” ➺



Feeding the American LandscapeEven as the food industry’s overuse of con-centrated forms of fructose, hydrogenated fats and other new-fangled ingredients were, as Critser puts it, “skewing the nation-al metabolism toward fat storage,” its outlets for these ingredients were multiplying.

Fast-food outlets and convenience stores started springing up everywhere. Back in the inconvenient ‘50s, finding food involved going to a grocery store, a restau-rant or (gasp!) home. Corner markets were few and far between. But by the ‘80s, you could grab a snack anywhere, anytime.

Drive-thru windows became ubiquitous and made swinging in for a burger and fries easier than ever. Gas stations and conve-nience stores remodeled to create space for whole aisles of snack foods, also making them highly visible and largely unavoidable.

Vending machines became standard issue in most schools and offices. All kinds of foods were repackaged and reformulat-ed to make them microwaveable, portable, bite-sized and generally easier to eat “on the go” – which really meant anywhere but at the table (while driving, watching TV, working at your desk, etc.).

The sheer number and variety of snack foods also increased dramatically. In his research, Critser discovered that the num-ber of new candy and snack products, which had remained stable throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s at about 250 a year, began to rise dramatically in the ‘80s. By the mid-1980s the food industry was turning out 1,000 a year; by the late ‘80s, it was closer to 2,000. In 1999, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a chart that showed this trend closely mirroring the rise of obesity.

Meanwhile, of course, thanks to the technology boom, we became less active in our work and entertainments, and more inclined to munch. It’s tough to feed your face while you’re playing sports, collecting stamps or making birdhouses. It’s easy while sitting in front of a video monitor or home-entertainment center. This is particularly true if you have a microwave, which makes preparing and eating a thousand-calorie snack such a fast proposition you barely have to think about it. Still hungry? Just hop up and make another batch of micro-wave popcorn – it only takes 30 seconds.

We all intuitively understand that eating was healthier back when people personally prepared what they ate and then sat down as a family to eat it. But we don’t always realize how much difference our culture of convenience has made in our eating habits. When you cook something on the stove, you have to get up and assemble and prepare the ingredients. You have to think about what you’re doing. You get to stir and taste it while it cooks. Your appetite has a chance to adjust, your senses have a chance to take it all in. When you eat, you know exactly what you are eating, how it was prepared and how much of each ingre-dient is in there.

None of this is true with prepared food. You get the urge to eat, and the food can be in your hand and down your gullet before your conscious mind can register it.

There’s no time for second thoughts and no time for the craving to pass. The food is right there in front of you. There’s no “please pass the salt” necessary. The salt and sugar are already in it. No need to ask for a second helping. The second, third and fourth servings are right there in the bag, box, or freezer, waiting.

Stopping the MadnessCan we blame the government or the food industry for this sorry state of affairs? Sure, but government will tell you it only sets policies, distributes funding and influences trends in reaction to the voice of the voter (that’s us!). The food industry, meanwhile, will tell you it has a revenue-maximizing mandate from its shareholders (who might also be us).

And then of course, there’s the fact that most of us think we’ve got better things to do than cook. Kraft’s “latest effort to respond to consumer demand for conve-nience” is a product called Easy Mac. As the Kraft Web site explains: “This innova-tive product requires only the use of a bowl and a microwave, so today’s older kids can ‘cook’ Kraft Macaroni and Cheese on their own, independent of their busy parents.”

This, we are told, is precisely what we want. On the other hand, if these “you asked for it” answers don’t satisfy you, you’re not alone. To date, the federal gov-ernment has let most of its food-related decisions be guided much more powerfully by big-business interests than by public-

health concerns. And, even if you do hold some measly amount of stock in a soda- or snack-food company, you are probably not the one directly pressuring them to find the cheapest possible ingredients or the one getting enormously rich off their profits. But you do have a voice, and your voting and investing choices will be noted if you let them be heard loudly enough.

Many big-name food companies are now spawning or acquiring smaller, health-ier labels (H. J. Heinz currently owns 20 percent of Hain, the “healthy-foods” group that owns dozens of health-oriented and organic brands including Health Valley, Arrowhead Mills, and Garden of Eatin’). After more than a year of consecutively falling monthly profits, even McDonald’s has started testing healthier items (like Premium Salads) on its menus. This spring, ironically, it also launched a new “Winning Time Game.” It offers “Ultimate Prize Packages to Help Consumers Enjoy Their Time More.” As noted, probably not a good idea to look to business for the solutions.

The government, meanwhile, has finally recognized the enormous fiscal costs of having 60-plus percent of its population wearing plus sizes and has finally declared obesity a full-scale epidemic. It is now funding obesity-fighting research and cast-ing about for ways to educate and empow-er citizens to take better care of them-selves. It’s even lending a polite (though not terribly open) ear to experts like Yale University’s Kelly Brownell, who’d like to see a state-levied “fat tax” on unhealthy food items to help fund a public-awareness cam-paign promoting healthier eating habits.

But again, don’t hold your breath. According to Critser, “the trend in most state capitals, increasingly beholden to special interests, has been in exactly the opposite direction.” So what can you do? You’re doing it now! Understanding what you are up against is really the first and most important step.

Keep your eyes and ears open. The cul-tural forces at work are strong, but once you know what to watch for, you can become a much savvier consumer and citizen. You can also get more vocal about asking for what you really want. (If you’re not sure, compare and contrast the core agendas of, say, www.slowfoodusa.org with its restaurant- and food-manufacturer-sponsored nemesis ➺



— the dubiously named www.consumerfree-dom.com.)

And then, finally, there is the power of you and your mighty fork! Once you’ve got a grip on it, you’ll find it a powerful tool. You can use it to draw a line in the sand. You can use it as a divining device to tell

you which foods are edible, nourishing and satisfying, and which are merely for sale. You can wield it to slay double-headed monsters of all kinds.

And when you want to, of course, you can put it down.

Pilar Gerasimo is Experience Life’s Editor in Chief.

• Respect your body. Understand the role your food choices play in your health. Ask yourself: Where are poor food choices showing up in my health, energy or appearance?• Start seeing food for what it is. Most restaurant and pack-aged foods are the same six or seven cheap ingredients com-bined different ways. Most of those ingredients are not ones you want to be eating in any quantity. Notice how food is marketed and advertised. What are the tactics the company is using to get you to buy it? What emotional/ social benefit are they implying?• Don’t try to eliminate all the things you love. But do reduce the frequency and/or portion size of the ones you know aren’t good for you. Also look for healthier options, and try new things now and then!• Learn to cook for yourself and your family, and do it together – often. It is possible to whip together a fine, fresh dinner in under 30 minutes. You can do breakfast or lunch in five!• Choose foods less for what they don’t have in them, and more for what they do have to offer your body, both in terms of quality and effectiveness. If the food isn’t based on healthy, nu-tritious ingredients, even if it doesn’t have anything really “bad,” you can choose better.• Go for basic goodness. The closer to the original form of a food, the more it has to offer. Taste, satisfaction, nutrients all peak in fresh fruit, for example. Frozen fruit, a bit less so, and canned the least. Choose fresh, locally grown food whenever it is ripe and available.• Don’t assume that fresh and organic are necessarily more ex-pensive. That’s not always the case! If you think you can’t afford it, figure out how much you spend now on eating out, sodas, processed foods, etc. It’s a matter of priority: If we stuck to fresh foods, eliminated the sweet beverages, snacks and prepared convenience foods, most of us could afford the best produce available and have money left over.• Look at long-term cost savings of eating healthy (reduced health problems and medical costs, less money spent on weight reduction, weight camouflage, etc.) As with waste-management and energy-production-cost questions (where environmental and disposal costs are rarely figured in), people often forget to calculate the total costs associated with their food choices.• Be label-smart. Ingredients are listed in the order used. Sugar assumes several disguises, such as fructose, sucrose, and other “ose” endings. Be especially wary of high fructose corn syrup.

• Beware of refined fats. Trans fats are not currently listed as such, but anything that contains hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil will contain trans fats in similar proportion.• Be cautious of foods that proudly trumpet that they are “fat-free” or “sugar-free.” If they don’t have good stuff in them, it doesn’t really matter. Also watch out for “made with whole grain!” marketing messages. The product may have just a little whole wheat mixed in with mostly refined. (Currently, only 5 percent of grains consumed by Americans are whole grains.)• Resist all-you-can-eat offers, and avoid restaurants that trade on “bottomless bread baskets.” Also be wary of food products or menus that use words like “giant,” “colossal” and “extreme” to flaunt their wares. Real quality is likely not a prior-ity here. Keep in mind that most U.S. restaurants are simply not very good at vegetables, fruits or whole grains. They are good at industrially produced proteins, fats and refined grains. • Get peeved. If you are in a restaurant and can’t find anything to eat, tell the management you’re disappointed and find a new restaurant. Same goes with finding organics and healthy items at your local grocery store.• Work the menu. Recombine ingredients at will. Ask to have the pasta sauce put over grated vegetables. Have your sandwich fillings rolled up in a large lettuce leaf or tossed with salad greens. Have your steak with mashed cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes.• Cut yourself off. If you have trouble with portion control, don’t take an open bag of snacks with you while you do some-thing mindless. If you’re served a large plate at a restaurant, immediately ask to have half of the portion put in a doggy bag for another meal.• Portion control is far easier when the food is healthier! Whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables produce greater satisfaction and don’t initiate “gotta have more” cravings the way many processed, sweetened and artificially flavored products do.• Feed yourself for health first, then indulge your desires. If you eat your entire meal and still want the bread, have a slice. But if you start with the bread beforehand, you may fill up on it.• Carry a stash of healthy snacks and “convenience foods” with you. Get a good, easy-to-carry cooler and some portable, reusable food storage containers. Know what and where you are going to eat each day – before you leave the house.

Your Tummy or Your Life A short guide to making better, smarter, more empowered eating choices.


experiencelife.com January/February 2006 / 10

The Way of the Healthy PersonGood health, at core, is less a destination than life-enhancing journey. But if there is any clear path toward the promised land of healthy living, it begins not on any treadmill or diet plan, but on the fertile ground of our own thoughts, assumptions and beliefs. By Experience Life Staff

So, you’ve resolved to adopt a healthy way of life. You’ve decided to com-mit yourself to an exercise routine,

to stock your fridge with fresh fruits, veg-etables and other whole foods and to take a daily multivitamin supplement. You’ve decided to lay off the soda, drink more water, get more sleep and stop making excuses. We say, bravo!

But before you dash off into the blind-ing dawn of the new-and-improved you, let us offer a word of advice: While you’re busy changing your life, don’t forget to change your mind.

It’s not that your virtuous, practical endeavors aren’t valuable in and of them-selves, but that they are much like the individual plants and trees within a larger, more vibrant landscape — one that repre-sents a complete, integrated approach to a healthy way of life. Each component of that landscape matters, because each repre-sents a tangible piece of your bigger health picture. What you may not be able to see at first glance, though, is that all of those plants are ultimately rooted in the land-scape by acres of mental topsoil: thoughts, attitudes and perspectives that can make or break your efforts toward healthier living.

Now, the soil in a landscape typically doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s just sort of there — and largely invisible under plant cover. But the point of all that good, fertile dirt is that it supports, connects and nour-

ishes everything that’s growing out of it. Without it, all those plants would be history. And the landscape would be bleak, indeed.

In exploring and evaluating your own health landscape, it may be easiest, at first, to appreciate the importance of this tree or that flowering shrub — to get your head around refining a specific habit or choice. However, when it comes right down to it, you’re probably going to have to pay some attention to the mental ground you’re standing on, too. And that may require you to do a little digging.

In many cases, to really get the lay of the land, to find what’s growing where in our lives and why, we have to consciously choose to see what was all but invisible to us before — such as the social forces and psychological influences we’ve never bothered to question.

We put this article together to help you make your own big picture of health clearer, to help you identify ways you can make your mental soil healthier and to make the process of mapping your way through that landscape a good deal easier.

Some of the ideas and suggestions gathered here might be useful and appli-cable to you right now. Others might take a while to sink in. Take your time and trust your instincts about which areas are most important for you to explore first. Remember, there’s no single “right way” to health, and no idealized destination you have to reach. The important thing is that

you find your way, and your own happy, healthy acre of ground.

There’s a reason that so many people are having such a hard time getting and staying healthy right now — or, rather, there’s an astonishing array of reasons. Some roadblocks are cultural, social, com-mercial, collective. Others are personal, internal, individual. But even the most motivated, health-oriented among us are impeded by some of them, at least some of the time. Here are just a few:

1. Please, Don’t Get Up A sedentary lifestyle is perhaps the leading cause of disease in America. Too many of us spend most of the day on our duffs, sitting in traffic on the way to work, slouching in front of a computer at the office and loll-ing in front of the TV at home. We choose passive entertainments (movies and video games, for instance) rather than active ones (ice skating, Frisbee golf). And most household tasks that once required physical labor have been largely automated.

Holistic health and fitness expert Paul Chek, author of How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! (C.H.E.K Institute, 2004), remembers his father sweating over a push mower and his mother washing laundry by hand during his childhood. “Yard work and housework were work back then,” Chek says. Today, he notes, many of us do little more than press appliance buttons, or we ➺

January/February 2010 / 11


experiencelife.com

hire others to do our physical labor for us.

2. A Healthy-Food FamineHave you tried finding a healthy snack in a convenience store or vending machine lately? Good luck. The least nutritious foods are generally the most accessible, while fresh, whole foods (the kind naturally burst-ing with the nutrients, water and fiber your body needs to stay healthy) typically require a special trip to the supermarket, co-op or natural-foods store. And then they might require washing, chopping, refrigeration or (gasp!) maybe even cooking.

Whereas people once ate seasonal foods that they farmed or gathered them-selves and then prepared by hand, today most of us rely on the food industry — food manufacturers, grocery-store chains and restaurants — to put food in front of us. All too often, that food comes in nutrient-poor, giant-sized servings available all year long, wherever we happen to be. Unhealthy foods are always easy to find, easy to con-sume. And the food marketers spend plenty of money to make sure we keep consuming.

“To satisfy stockholders, food compa-nies must convince people to eat more of their products instead of those of their competitors,” notes author and nutritionist Marion Nestle, PhD, in her book Food Politics (University of California Press, 2002). She explains how the food industry uses power-ful advertising and government lobbying to make sure that their products remain front-and-center on grocery-store shelves. Meanwhile, well-paid public-relations experts dismiss nutritionists’ criticisms of junk foods and paint all attempts to limit their promotion as “attacks on consumer choice.”

3. Fix Me Up, Doc During the course of the past century, advanc-es in pharmaceuticals, technology and medical knowledge have improved longevity and dis-ease treatments. But they’ve also put doctors and pharmaceutical companies — and not us — in charge of taking care of our bodies.

Feeling a little sluggish? Call your physi-cian! Got a symptom? Take a drug! As a soci-ety, we’re eager enough to embrace dramatic interventions after diseases have taken hold, but we’re far less motivated to undertake preventative measures that might eliminate or reduce risks before problems arise.

Instead of monitoring our daily stress

and fatigue and taking time out for a nap, for example, we push ourselves far beyond our limits, end up with some sort of cold or infection, and then rely on costly drugs to keep us functioning. Insurance companies will foot the bill for bariatric surgeries (a.k.a. stomach stapling) to treat obesity; they’ll supply motorized mobility carts for those whose bodies become too heavy for their bones and joints to support. But they’re slow to fund programs that promote healthy eating and exercise.

Like most of us, writer and health advo-cate John Robbins grew up believing that health comes from the doctor, the drugstore and the hospital. “But over the years,” he writes in Reclaiming Our Health (HJ Kramer, 1998), “I have come to realize that while doctors and medical technology have an important role to play in health care, they do not hold the ultimate secrets to health. Taken together, factors such as the food we eat, whether and how we exercise, the way we give voice to our feelings, the attitudes we hold, and the quality of the environment in which we live are far more important to the quality of health we experience than even the most sophisticated medical technologies.”

4. Health: Half a DefinitionFused with our belief that medical pro-fessionals are the true keepers of our health is another misguided notion: that “good health” is defined by the absence of symptoms, rather than by the presence of vitality. That’s wrongheaded, says Pamela Peeke, MD, author of Body for Life for Women (Rodale, 2005). “We need to go beyond avoiding and preventing disease and instead reach for something higher, a sense of energy, vitality and life,” she says.

Good health, Peeke says, is more than the sum of favorable physical factors like low cholesterol and nice muscle tone. “If you’re in good health, you should pop out of bed with a smile on your face,” she says. “You should be able to eat a meal and really savor the flavors, or take a walk with a friend and fully revel in the conversation. But for doctors, measuring such a thing is difficult: How do you grade ‘vitality’?” Just as important, how does one go about diag-nosing and treating an absence of vitality without resorting to medical means? These are simply not questions that most disease-minded medical professionals are trained to

answer with much subtlety.

5. Social Support That’s NotYour family and friends might love you dearly, but they could still be some of the biggest impediments to your pursuit of a healthy way of life. “If you’re over-weight and you’re a smoker, chances are good that your friends are overweight and they’re smokers, too,” explains Christiane Northrup, MD, author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom (Bantam, 1998).

Our life activities and choices typically revolve around other people, she explains: family, friends, coworkers, spouses, kids. So trying to change your habits may require some readjustment of your social environ-ment, too. There’s a possibility that your spouse may resent the fact that you’re going to bed earlier; your friends may heckle you for drinking less beer.

“Here in Maine, where I live,” says Northrup, “we have a saying that when one crab climbs over the edge of a bucket to look at what’s outside, the others will drag it back down.” Usually, she adds, those “crabs” are the people who know you best — and the ones with the most influence over you. They may not mean you harm, but that won’t prevent them from derailing your health and fitness plan faster than you can say “seafood gumbo.”

6. Apathy Kills Action If you’re feeling unhappy, unmotivated or generally uninvested in your life, it will be challenging to adopt a health-centric mindset, and tougher still to find the ener-gy for developing healthy new habits. At one time or another, nearly all of us have found ourselves wandering, a bit lost, in a “why bother?” desert or a “poor me” peat bog. But without a prevailing sense of direction, or the skills to reframe our view of reality, it’s easy to stay stuck for far too long — and too easy to settle for less hap-piness than we deserve.

When we’re down in the dumps, we’re more easily drawn into self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviors, and we’re more easily dissuaded from our own best inter-ests. Of course, optimistic thinking and an upbeat attitude alone won’t make you lean and strong, but by reducing your stress, they will help you stay healthier in general. And your healthy efforts are far more likely ➺



to succeed if you can at least picture your own future happiness and invest some committed energy in that vision.

Pick Your PerspectiveEven if you can’t shift the attitudes of the medical establishment, the food industry or the people around you, you can still change your own mindset. In fact, mustering a positive, hopeful attitude is the first step in building the road that will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

A clear understanding of your own inten-tions can sometimes be your most powerful motivator in achieving a healthy way of life. “To get patients thinking positively,” says Northrup, “I ask them to imagine what their life would look like if anything at all were possible, quickly, easily and now.” Once that vision is clear — to lose 10 pounds and keep it off, to dance, to run a marathon — she urges them to keep that as a touchstone as they move onto the road ahead.

“Expect to hear from your doubting Thomas,” Northrup counsels. “Say to him, ‘Good to hear from you again. Thanks for sharing.’ And then take another step for-ward toward your goals.”

With that persevering attitude in place, you’re ready to take on the remaining mental shifts:

1. Change Your Food ’TudeSometimes we eat for entertainment or to deal with emotions. At other times, we deny ourselves food in the hopes we’ll shed a few pounds before that week on the beach or that upcoming high school reunion. Either way, however, those views of food aren’t particularly healthy.

Health-minded folks think of food as essential fuel for the body: Food is the source of the protein, carbs, fat, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and fiber you need to keep your body working properly. The macro- and micro-nutrients found in food facilitate digestion, regulate your blood-sugar and hormone levels, support your immune system, and keep your skin, hair and nails looking healthy. Good nutrition also gives you the energy and vitality to pursue all your fitness efforts and to ensure that your body responds to them optimally.

A healthy approach to eating centers less on weight loss and more on the feel-ings of energy and satisfaction that come

with a well-rounded, nutritious diet. “Most diets focus on one number: pounds lost,” write Michael Roizen, MD, and Mehmet Oz, MD, in You: The Owner’s Manual (HarperCollins, 2005). “Many people are obsessed about being overweight, about fitting into jeans, about impressing the casting director…

[but] we’re concerned about making you feel better, helping you live younger, and slowing the effects of aging. We feel it’s more important to regulate other numbers and feelings in your life — things like your blood pressure, your cholesterol and inflam-mation numbers, and your energy level.”

2. Merge Entertainment and Activity Reduce the hours you devote to passive entertainments, such as watching TV, and replace them with active, participatory ones. If possible, get outdoors for at least a little while each day, even when winter or not-so-nice weather require you to bundle up. It’ll provide fresh air and open up new possibili-ties: You never know what sort of cloud for-mation, astronomical event or other natural marvel you’ll encounter while out-of-doors.

Eve A. Wood, MD, author of Medicine, Mind and Meaning (In One Press, 2004), suggests including a friend in your plans for a bike ride or a visit to a Pilates class. Instead of going to a movie, toss a Frisbee or rent a canoe with your buddy for a couple of hours. “You’re more apt to do the activity if you involve a friend, because there’s another dimension of pleasure in the experience,” Wood says. “You’re con-necting.” Combining entertainment and daily physical activity will also lessen the time crunch you might otherwise feel in your schedule, because it saves you from always having to schedule separate slots for recreation and workout activities.

The most important thing, though, is that you get away from any assumptions you have about exercise and activity being hard or uncomfortable. It really can, and ought to be, fun. Your physical activity should be something you want to do: walking, bad-minton, gardening. “It doesn’t have to be a structured, regimented fitness protocol,” says Steven G. Aldana, PhD, author of The Culprit & The Cure (Maple Mountain Press, 2005). “In fact, it’ll probably be more sustainable if your program plan is not overly structured.”

3. Claim Your Birthright to a Healthy Body Let’s be clear: Unless you’re the subject of some weird scientific experiment gone awry, you’re probably living in the very body you were born with. It’s aged a bit, sure, and gone through a few wringers, perhaps. But it has somehow found a way to survive all the mishaps and abuse you’ve subjected it to. And buried there, beneath the surface scuffs (and perhaps a little extra padding), a brilliant health-promoting sys-tem persists intact: gigantic data banks of body intelligence, an outrageously complex electrical and metabolic system, and an astonishing chemical lab designed to start returning you to your best possible health from the very moment you quit throwing wrenches into the machinery.

Seriously, your body is your friend. It wants to be healthy. But it’s also pleading with you like the desperate, frustrated, title character in Jerry Maguire: “Help me help you!” it’s saying. And if you do, it will be only too happy to get busy repairing years worth of damage.

It’s true: You may never achieve the willowy profile of a supermodel or the car-diovascular endurance of Lance Armstrong, but there’s no reason why you can’t have the very best body that’s at your disposal. In health, as in all aspects of our lives, each of us can choose to live either at the high end or the low end of our potential. So imagine yourself as you might realistically look and feel at your own personal best. If nothing else, the pride that comes with living the healthiest life you can live will inspire you to stand straighter and to hold your head high.

4. Patient, Heal Thyself There’s certainly a place for medical profes-sionals and other healers in our lives. But when it comes to monitoring and upholding your health on a daily basis, there’s virtually no expert who can do it as well as you can. So take regular inventory of your bodily and energetic fluctuations. Take an active inter-est in your health and the things that alter it: If you’re feeling rundown, examine the circumstances that got you there. Have you been getting enough sleep? Are you eating right? Are you under stress at work? What health-supporting things aren’t you doing that you know you should be?

There’s increasing evidence that a healthy lifestyle can reduce your vulnerabil-ity to virtually all the most common killers. ➺



And if you’re recovering from a bout with illness, appropriate nutrition and activity can speed your healing.

Chart Your CourseNow you have a sense of where you need to go. But how do you get there? Start right where you are. Know that very few people succeed in changing their entire way of life overnight. And what you are going for is sustainable change — the kind that lasts.

1. Take Inventory What healthy habits have you already devel-oped? What are some good-to-do things that lie within reach? Among the habits you might cultivate, which ones would yield the biggest payoffs in your pursuit of a healthy way of life? Pick one of those items (perhaps the easiest to achieve) and then make a list of the resources, informa-tion and support you might need to move forward with it. (For more suggestions on developing an action plan, see “Resolutions Workshop” in the January 2006 archives at ExperienceLife.com)

2. Narrow the Scope of Your Ambitions “Most people do too much at once,” says Northrup. “They decide that they’re going to lose 10 pounds, get strong, get flexible, earn a million dollars a year and declutter their closets in the first week of January.”

Instead, commit to making just one or two changes, and put your energy into those efforts. Replace soda with water, or if that seems too tough, limit yourself to just one serving of soda, along with an extra glass of water, each day. Stop watching your least favorite TV show and start doing just 20 minutes of activity during that time every week. Get to sleep a half-hour earlier. Take the stairs at work. Start parking at the far end of the lot. Eat just one additional serving of green vegetables a day. ˙

What’s miraculous about little changes like these is how attempting them and actually succeeding can spontaneously catalyze more and bigger changes. Go for the small wins to begin with, and see where that gets you.

3. Face Your Resistance — and Learn From It Everybody stumbles. Everybody gets stuck. So don’t beat yourself up when it happens to you. And don’t set yourself up for failure by swearing to “always” this and “never” that.

“If you swear that you’re never going to eat X, then the minute you eat a bite of it, you’re done,” explains trainer Gunnar Peterson, author of G-Force: The Ultimate Guide to Your Best Body Ever (HarperCollins, 2005). Instead, if you wind up skipping a workout or botching an eating plan, he advises, “Just figure out what happened, learn from the experience, then move on.”

It’s most useful, he notes, to see each and every slip-up, every unwelcome surprise, as a learning opportunity. In situations where you find yourself stumbling, try to take stock of what’s really going on: How did you end up eating those fries? How did you end up not going to the gym? What can you do dif-ferently to avoid that problem in the future?

Also be on the lookout for emotional resistance (fear of change, for example), and be aware that your resistance may very well show up in disguise. Do you always get exhausted or “come down with something” just when you were planning to go to the gym? Are there triggers that always seem to deflate or distract you? Circumstances “beyond your control” that really aren’t? Take a closer look at those things. Ask some probing questions. Getting intimate with your resistance may be the best way to move beyond it.

4. End Vicious Cycles If you are low-energy, stressed or depressed, it’s important to recognize that this is often part of a vicious cycle — one worth breaking sooner rather than later. The less you move and the more poorly you eat, the worse you’ll feel emotionally. The worse you feel, the less you’ll move, and very likely, the more poorly you’ll eat. And so it goes, round and round, heading steadily for the drain.

Stress, in particular, can lead to a down-ward spiral in health. An excess of stress-induced cortisol breaks your body down, depletes your immunity, increases your chances of weight gain and depresses your mood even further. It also leads to increased risk of hypertension, high cholesterol and heart disease, as well as increased susceptibil-ity to allergies, infections and, some believe, cancer. In short, stress can lead to health problems that only result in more stress.

So, even if you aren’t feeling particularly great about yourself and your life, even if it seems like there are just so many other things calling for your attention right now,

even if you don’t feel like setting foot inside a sneaker or a health-food store, do some-thing positive for yourself anyway. Make at least one small overture in the direction of bettering your health. When that cycle reverses course, you’ll be glad you did.

5. Bask in the Glow As you begin to make small changes to your life, habits and attitudes, you will begin to experience the rewards. You’ll feel it in your body and your mind. Chances are good that your entire system will respond with more energy, clarity and vitality, more motivation for even more positive changes. Once you see the direct impacts, it will become a no-brainer to do more good stuff. But don’t let that stop you from taking time to thoroughly enjoy and celebrate how far you’ve already come.

There’s a real value in pausing to acknowledge what you’ve already accom-plished. Once you begin to integrate the experience of your success, that success will become a lasting part of your identity.

“You’ll start to have a psychological shift,” Aldana says. “You’ll hear yourself saying, ‘This is something I’m committed to doing for me.’ As a result, you’ll become more disciplined, your self-esteem will improve, and you’ll likely see social rewards as well, because you’re happier and more confident.”

One last thing: Keep in mind that even the most fertile soil won’t produce steady crops without proper maintenance. So if a healthy new habit doesn’t appear to be taking root, stop and ask yourself why that might be. Then stop and ask if you might like something else better. Because if you don’t like what you’re doing, it probably won’t last.

As Aldana points out, “This is not some diet that you go on and go off. This is a per-manent change in the way you live your life. Lots of people ask, ‘How long do I have to do this?’ And the correct response is, ‘How long do you want the benefits?’”

The benefits of a healthy way of life are worth hanging on to for the duration, of course. So if the road to better living isn’t bringing the fruits of happiness, pleasure and satisfaction into your life, take another look at that landscape. Reorient yourself. Retill your soil — and then plant again.


experiencelife.com June 2007 / 14

Vitality!Has modern life depleted your vitality?

By Catherine Guthrie

You know vitality when you see it: the effervescent 75-year-old grandmoth-er who swims two miles a day; the

inspired florist whose passion for daylilies has you buying them by the dozen; the empa-thetic friend whose centered, calm demeanor seems to radiate inner peace. People with vitality overflow with that special some-thing, and they stand out from the rest like shiny pennies.

All of which leads one to wonder: Why do some people have more vitality than others?

Since vitality is often broadcast via physical traits — sparkling eyes, radiant skin, an energetic demeanor — it’s tempt-ing to chalk it all up to good health. But there’s more to vitality than robust physiol-ogy. Not all clinically healthy and ostensibly fit people seem particularly vital, after all. And some physically frail individuals still manage to emanate an extraordinary life force and joie de vivre.

To be sure, good health is a vitality enhancer, and healthy choices generally lead more directly to vitality than unhealthy ones. But in many ways, the physical body becomes a mere display case for vitality’s many treasures. Good physical health can help signify vitality — but it can’t deliver all of vitality’s goods.

So where do those goods come from, and where do they go? Do certain habits

or circumstances make us more vulnerable to losing our vitality over time? And, if so, what’s the secret to sustaining our vitality — or to getting it back?

Compelling questions about vitality abound. But before we go searching for answers, perhaps we should spend at least a little time contemplating the nature of vitality itself.

Vitality: East Meets WestThe general concept of vitality is universal, but it is expressed quite differently from culture to culture. In the West, vitality often refers to a strong supply of physical energy, vigor and resilience, but in the East, what the Chinese call “chi” and healers in India call “prana” refers more generally to an ineffable life force whose currents suffuse and sustain both the physical and non-physical aspects of every living thing.

The popularization of yoga, tai chi and meditation has begun offering more Americans a taste of practices that can help us understand and cultivate this sort of vitality. But we still tend to compart-mentalize it as something found in spas, exercise regimens, special diets and the like — rather than as a core component and determiner of our everyday existence.

In America, vitality is the frosting on the cake of life — and not, as in Eastern cultures, its main ingredient. In the ancient

traditions of China and India, as well as in the traditions of many other indigenous cultures, vitality-related concerns encom-pass everything from environment and attitude to personal integrity and spiritual purpose.

Western medical experts who persist in categorically lumping “health” and “vital-ity” together further feed our confusion about vitality’s true foundations, says Monica Reed, MD, author of The Creation Health Breakthrough (Center Street, 2007) and the CEO of Florida Hospital Celebration Health Center in Orlando. “As a society,” she says, “we judge our health by what we don’t have; so if you don’t have high blood pressure or diabetes, [we figure] you must be healthy.”

What most Americans fail to understand, she notes, is that “if you have clean arteries [but have] a life without purpose, you’re still missing a key ingredient for vitality.”

The Deeper MeaningWe haven’t always been so confused about the overlapping territories where health and vitality meet. The World Health Organization’s constitution, dating from 1946, defines true health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of dis-ease or infirmity.”

Unfortunately, since this definition ➺



was committed to paper, much of the conventional health field appears to have vastly underestimated the importance of most of the nonphysical components of that vitality prescription.

Reed recruits two Greek words for life to describe the symbiotic relationship between health and vitality: “bios,” mean-ing physical life, and “zöe,” loosely trans-lated as a person’s essence.

Bios, the root of the word biology, refers to the body’s nuts and bolts — the organs, arteries, cells and chemical processes. Western medicine is very comfortable with these elements of vitality, she notes, but tends to be far less so with matters of essence. That’s too bad, she says, because vitality requires careful stewardship of both biological needs and less tangible essen-tials. It’s this latter category of concerns, she notes, that moves us beyond mere survival toward satisfaction, meaning and quality of life.

Reed describes zöe as “the internal motivator that keeps us pushing forward.” It is, she says, “what makes our biological life worth living.”

Where Vitality LivesCynics might dismiss Reed’s “internal moti-vator” as unscientific, but they’d probably change their tune if they met Dan Buettner. Buettner has spent the past decade explor-ing human longevity with the support of the National Institute on Aging and Allianz Life. He travels the world looking for people who live extraordinarily long, healthy lives. In other words, poster children for vitality.

Buettner, who pens his findings for National Geographic magazine, believes the two concepts of bios and zöe go hand in hand. He describes vitality as the “holy grail of aging,” and he takes care to note that vitality seems to have as much to do with social, emotional and mental health as it does with physical habits and characteristics.

Buettner and his team have identi-fied and studied four vitality pockets or “Blue Zones” of successful aging: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Loma Linda, Calif.; and the rural village of Nicoya in Costa Rica (see “Ageless Vitality,” in the July 2006 archives at ExperienceLife.com).

The average Okinawan, Buettner notes, lives seven years longer than the average American. In Sardinia’s Nuoro Province,

men reach 100 years old at up to 10 times the rate of those in most developed coun-tries and largely avoid the heart disease, diabetes and cancers that kill most people in the United States. And while diet and activity patterns play a big part in the underpinnings of these folks’ vitality-gen-erating lifestyles, Buettner notes that things like a sense of life purpose and balance, solid spiritual practices, family bonds, and community ties also play very significant roles — not just in how long they live, but in how vital they remain as they age.

The Disease of DisconnectionIn more deeply understanding how we build vitality and how we lose it, it can be helpful to look to the teachings of cultures — par-ticularly native cultures — where vitality is seen through a more holistic lens.

That’s how healing-arts educator and author Constance Grauds, RPh, learned what she considers the fundamentals of vitality maintenance.

After decades of dispensing prescrip-tion medicines as a conventional pharma-cist, Grauds was disappointed and disil-lusioned with the results she saw those drugs producing. Convinced there was a better way, she took a continuing education course that brought her into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon jungle.

There she met and was treated by a traditional medicine man — a shaman. Within days of her first treatment, she was overcome by a sense of calm, renewed energy — and an intuition that shamanic medicine offered many of the answers she was seeking.

Grauds ended up spending the next 10 years as the medicine man’s apprentice, ultimately becoming a shamana (female sha-man) herself, an experience she chronicled in her first book, Jungle Medicine (Center for Spirited Medicine, 2004). During her decade-long training, she underwent her own deep healing, and adopted the sha-manic perspective that all human disease and suffering is caused by disconnection — whether from nourishment, self, community, nature or a spiritual source.

But the root of all such disconnec-tion, Grauds came to believe, is a core fear. Known as “susto” by the indigenous people of Central and South America, this sort of fear typically originates — at least in their

culture — with a major life trauma, shock or near-death experience. And once properly attended to, susto dissipates. What struck Grauds’s medicine-man mentor, though, and what Grauds knew to be true from her own experience, was that most Americans seemed to be chronically afflicted by susto. They lived in the grip of one type of fear or another virtually all the time.

The shaman suspected that this excess susto had something to do with chronic anxieties, pressures and “little fears” that Americans face every day: job stress, money worries, social pressures, relationship trou-bles and so on. Grauds was inclined to agree. “Our anxiety-ridden society pushes us into a fear state,” notes Grauds, “whether we’ve faced death or not.”

The net outcome of all this fear-based disconnection? One massive vitality drain. Grauds points out that the No. 1 health complaint in American doctors’ offices today is a basic lack of energy and that two of the top 10 best-selling prescription drugs are antidepressants.

From a shamanic perspective, both depression and fatigue, like all disease, manifest from disconnection. “Do some people need antidepressants? Absolutely,” says Grauds, who still feels that Western drugs have their place and purpose. But, she adds, many people need passion, meaning, emotional connection, spiritual grounding and a sense of purpose every bit as much, or even more, than they need pills.

Grauds ultimately returned to the United States determined to share what she’d learned about the shamanic approaches for reclaiming lost vitality by restoring total health — a body of wisdom she shares in her recent book, The Energy Prescription (Bantam, 2005).

That prescription, predictably, calls for plugging “energy leaks” and building con-nections to the things that energize and sustain us. These comprise what Grauds calls the “eight gateways to energy,” includ-ing meditation or prayer, healthy food, loving relationships, and mindful exercise. “Energy and vitality come from the joyful things we can do in life that are simple, free and right under our noses,” she says, “like petting your dog, watering your garden and taking a few deep breaths.”

“Vitality is a measure of the life force within you,” she says. “When we’re ➺



connected to our sources of vitality, not only do we have more energy to be more active and get more done, but we’re engaged, we’re present. We feel that flow of life force pumping through us.”

Knowing What We’re MissingThere is at least one area of vitality-related knowledge about which Western medi-cine has become quite expert, and that’s studying symptoms of depleted vitality. Researchers at the National Institute on Aging noted that chronic stress prods the body to churn out elevated levels of fight-or-flight hormones that damage cells, tis-sues and organ systems. Over time, the toll can shorten a person’s life expectancy.

A study by the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston showed that getting inadequate sleep increases a person’s odds of suffering from heart disease, a leading 21st-century killer

(see “Getting to Sleep” in the November 2004 archives at ExperienceLife.com).

We’ve also learned that a lack of close social ties can disarm the immune system (see “Community Matters” in the June 2007 archives at ExperienceLife.com) and that positive human interactions can bol-ster it.

It seems that Western medicine is just beginning to comprehend what practitio-ners of Eastern medicine and indigenous cultures have known all along: that our vitality is directly determined by a complex mix of interconnected factors — not just concrete variables like diet and exercise.

We’re also getting clearer that vitality is something we must value more deeply, or risk losing at our peril. Because, as Reed puts it, “with a decrease in vitality comes an increase in disease.”

Thus, Reed recommends taking stock of your vitality as often as possible. A daily or

weekly vitality review would be ideal, but even scheduling check-ins every six months or so is a great way to stop major vitality seepage before a trickle becomes a torrent.

Start by finding a place of stillness, Reed advises. Consider meditating, journaling, praying or just walking in the woods. Ask yourself how you are doing, feeling — and what you are missing or longing for. Listen for the signals that say connections may have come loose, and that others may be pulling on you too strongly.

“We don’t live in a society that encour-ages stillness, yet that’s what allows us to truly understand what we are feeling and to return to equilibrium,” says Reed. “The secret to vitality is to stay in a state of aware-ness, to slow down and to fill the gaps.”

1. Get outside. The high-vitality elders that Dan Buettner studies in Okinawa, Costa Rica and other pockets of longevity enjoy an ac-tive life surrounded by nature. To learn how time spent outside can help sustain and energize you, read “Nature Quest” in the June 2006 archives at ExperienceLife.com.

2. Cultivate community. A lack of close relationships has been shown to weaken our immune systems and sap our vitality. Main-taining strong social ties with others improves many aspects of both health and happiness. So does volunteering. For more on the benefits of being part of a strong community (see “Community Matters” in the June 2007 archives at ExperienceLife.com).

3. Be a lifelong learner. More education leads to longer, healthier lives. A 2003 study published in the journal Neurology found an inverse relationship between how many years of formal education Alzheimer’s patients have and how quickly they suc-cumb to the disease.

4. Calm down. Chronic stress releases hormones that can damage cells, tissues and organ systems, all of which can shorten your life expectancy. Learn more in “Putting Stress in It’s Place,” available in the March 2007 archives at ExperienceLife.com.

5. Honor your promises. Each time you break a promise, whether it’s to a loved one or to yourself, you lose a sense of connection with your own values. Keep your promises and you gain integrity and self-respect, two main ingredients for vitality.

6. Plug your “energy leaks.” Notice where you are losing en-ergy. Reevaluate lifeless jobs, negative relationships, poor eating habits, sedentary patterns and other parts of your life that drain your energy.

7. Don’t skimp on sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation increases your odds of suffering from both heart disease and diabetes. And it reduces your immunity and your ability to cope produc-tively with everyday challenges.Ranch, a cooperative for organic and pasture-fed meats.

7 Ways to Enhance Your Vitality

The Vitality CompassTo help people assess their vitality, explorer Dan Buettner’s Blue Zones project offers what they call the “Blue Zones Compass,” a 33-part questionnaire designed to map the state of a person’s body, mind and lifestyle. The compass includes questions about diet, sleep, exercise, career fulfillment, social ties, stress and more.

Fill it out and let the computer calculate the probability that you’ll surpass your life expectancy and, if so, by the number of years. The program, sponsored by Allianz Life, also offers tips for augmenting your vitality. You’ll find the compass at www .bluezones.com/com-pass (registration is free).

A wholesome diet and regular exercise are the cornerstones of a healthy life. To take your vitality to a higher level, keep these tips in mind:


experiencelife.com April 2009 / 17

The Better Good Life: An Essay on Personal Sustainability When we hear the word “sustainability,” we tend to think in terms of the environment and natural resources. But sustainability principles are equally relevant to other parts of our lives, including our health, happiness and collective well-being. For those of us seeking a more satisfying and sustainable way of life, nature’s lessons about what works — and what doesn’t — can help point the way.

By Pilar Gerasimo

Imagine a cherry tree in full bloom, its roots sunk into rich earth and its branch-es covered with thousands of blossoms,

all emitting a lovely fragrance and contain-ing thousands of seeds capable of produc-ing many more cherry trees. The petals begin to fall, covering the ground in a blanket of white flowers and scattering the seeds everywhere.

Some of the seeds will take root, but the vast majority will simply break down along with the spent petals, becoming part of the soil that nourishes the tree — along with thousands of other plants and animals.

Looking at this scene, do we shake our heads at the senseless waste, mess and inefficiency? Does it look like the tree is working too hard, showing signs of strain or collapse? Of course not. But why not?

Well, for one thing, because the whole process is beautiful, abundant and pleasure producing: We enjoy seeing and smelling the trees in bloom, we’re pleased by the idea of the trees multiplying (and producing delicious cherries), and everyone for miles around seems to benefit in the process.

The entire lifecycle of the cherry tree is rewarding, and the only “waste” involved is an abundant sort of nutrient cycling that only leads to more good things. Best of all, this show of productivity and generosity seems to come quite naturally to the tree. It shows no signs of discontent or resentment

— in fact, it looks like it could keep this up indefinitely with nothing but good, sustain-able outcomes.

The cherry-tree scenario is one model that renowned designer and sustainable-development expert William McDonough uses to illustrate how healthy, sustainable systems are supposed to work. “Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem,” he writes in his essay (coauthored with Michael Braungart), “The Extravagant Gesture: Nature, Design and the Transformation of Human Industry” (available at www.mcdonough.com).

Rampant production in this scenario poses no problem, McDonough explains, because the tree returns all of the resources it extracts (without deterioration or diminu-tion), and it produces no dangerous stock-piles of garbage or residual toxins in the process. In fact, rampant production by the cherry tree only enriches everything around it.

In this system and most systems designed by nature, McDonough notes, “Waste that stays waste does not exist. Instead, waste nourishes; waste equals food.”

If only we humans could be lucky and wise enough to live this way — using our resources and energy to such good effect; making useful, beautiful, extravagant con-tributions; and producing nothing but nour-

ishing “byproducts” in the process. If only our version of rampant production and consumption produced so much pleasure and value and so little exhaustion, anxiety, depletion and waste.

Well, perhaps we can learn. More to the point, if we hope to create a decent future for ourselves and succeeding generations, we must. After all, a future produced by trends of the present — in which children are increasingly treated for stress, obe-sity, high blood pressure and heart disease, and in which our chronic health problems threaten to bankrupt our economy — is not much of a future.

We need to create something better. And for that to happen, we must begin to reconsider which parts of our lives contrib-ute to the cherry tree’s brand of healthy vibrance and abundance, and which don’t.

The happy news is, the search for a more sustainable way of life can go hand in hand with the pursuit of a healthier, more reward-ing life. And isn’t that the kind of life most of us are after?

In Search of Sustainability – and SatisfactionMcDonough’s cherry-tree model repre-sents several key principles of sustainability — including lifecycle awareness, no-waste nutrient cycling and a commitment to “it’s-all-connected” systems thinking. And it ➺



turns out that many of these principles can be usefully applied not just to natural resources and ecosystems, but to all sys-tems — from frameworks for economic and industrial production to blueprints for individual and collective well-being.

For example, when we look at our lives through the lens of sustainability, we can begin to see how unwise short-term trade-offs (fast food, skipped workouts, skimpy sleep, strictly-for-the-money jobs) produce waste (squandered energy and vitality, unful-filled personal potential, excessive material consumption) and toxic byproducts (illness, excess weight, depression, frustration, debt).

Conversely, we can also see how healthy choices and investments in our personal well-being can produce profoundly positive results that extend to our broader circles of influence and communities at large. When we’re feeling our best and overflowing with energy and optimism, we ˙ tend to be of greater service and support to others. We’re clearer of mind, meaning we can identify opportunities to reengineer the things that aren’t working in our lives. We can also more fully appreciate and emphasize the things that are (as opposed to feeling stuck in a rut, down in the dumps, unappreciated or entitled to something we’re not getting).

When you look at it this way, it’s not hard to see why sustainability plays such an important role in creating the conditions of a true “good life”: By definition, sustain-ability principles discourage people from consuming or destroying resources at a greater pace than they can replenish them. They also encourage people to notice when buildups and depletions begin occurring and to correct them as quickly as possible.

As a result, sustainability-oriented approaches tend to produce not just robust, resilient individuals, but resilient and regen-erative societies — the kind that manage to produce long-term benefits for a great many without undermining the resources on which those benefits depend. (For a thought-pro-voking exploration of how and why this has been true historically, read Jared Diamond’s excellent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed [Penguin Group, 2005].)

The Good Life Gone BadSo, what exactly is a “good life”? Clearly, not everyone shares the same definition, but most of us would prefer a life filled with

experiences we find pleasing and worth-while and that contribute to an overall sense of well-being.

We’d prefer a life that feels good in the moment, but that also lays the ground for a promising future — a life, like the cherry tree’s, that contributes something of value and that benefits and enriches the lives of others, or at least doesn’t cause them anxiety and harm.

Unfortunately, historically, our pursuit of the good life has focused on increasing our material wealth and upgrading our socioeco-nomic status in the short term. And, in the big picture, that approach has not turned out quite the way we might have hoped.

For too many, the current version of “the good life” involves working too-long hours and driving too-long commutes. It has us worrying and running ourselves ragged, overeating to soothe ourselves, watching TV to distract ourselves, binge-shopping to sate our desire for more, and popping prescription pills to keep troubling symp-toms at bay. This version of “the good life” has given us only moments a day with the people we love, and virtually no time or inclination to participate as citizens or com-munity members.

It has also given us anxiety attacks; obe-sity; depression; traffic jams; urban sprawl; crushing daycare bills; a broken healthcare system; record rates of addiction, divorce and incarceration; an imploding economy; and a planet in peril.

From an economic standpoint, we’re more productive than we’ve ever been. We’ve focused on getting more done in less time. We’ve surrounded ourselves with tech-nologies designed to make our lives easier, more comfortable and more amusing.

Yet, instead of making us happy and healthy, all of this has left a great many of us feeling depleted, lonely, strapped, stressed and resentful. We don’t have enough time for ourselves, our loved ones, our creative aspirations or our communities. And in the wake of the bad-mortgage-meets-Wall-Street-greed crisis, much of the so-called value we’ve been busy creating has seem-ingly vanished before our eyes, leaving future generations of citizens to pay almost inconceivably huge bills.

Meanwhile, the quick-energy fuels we use to keep ourselves going ultimately leave us feeling sluggish, inflamed and fatigued. The

conveniences we’ve embraced to save our-selves time have reduced us to an unimagi-native, sedentary existence that undermines our physical fitness and mental health and reduces our ability to give our best gifts.

Our bodies and minds are showing the telltale symptoms of unsustainable systems at work — systems that put short-term rewards ahead of long-term value. We’re beginning to suspect that the costs we’re incurring could turn out to be unacceptably high if we ever stop to properly account for them, which some of us are beginning to do.

Accounting for What MattersDefining the good life in terms of pro-ductivity, material rewards and personal accomplishment is a little like viewing the gross domestic product (GDP) as an accu-rate measurement of social and economic progress.

In fact, the GDP is nothing more than a gross tally of products and ser-vices bought and sold, with no distinctions between transactions that enhance well-being and transactions that diminish it, and no accounting for most of the “exter-nalities” (like losses in vitality, beauty and satisfaction) that actually have the greatest impact on our personal health and welfare.

We’d balk if any business attempted to present a picture of financial health by simply tallying up all of its business activity — lumping income and expense, assets and liabilities, and debits and credits together in one impressive, apparently positive bottom-line number (which is, incidentally, much the way our GDP is calculated).

Yet, in many ways, we do the same kind of flawed calculus in our own lives — regarding as measures of success the gross sum of the to-dos we check off, the salaries we earn, the admiration we attract and the rungs we climb on the corporate ladder.

But not all of these activities actually net us the happiness and satisfaction we seek, and in the process of pursuing them, we can incur appalling costs to our health and happiness. We also make vast sacrifices in terms of our personal relationships and our contributions to the communities, societies and environments on which we depend.

This is the essence of unsustainability, the equivalent of a cherry tree sucking up nutri-ents and resources and growing nothing but bare branches, or worse — ugly, toxic, foul- ➺

➺



smelling blooms. So what are our options?

Asking the Right QuestionsIn the past several years, many alterna-tive, GDP-like indexes have emerged and attempted to more accurately account for how well (or, more often, how poorly) our economic growth is translating to quality-of-life improvements.

Measurement tools like the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), developed by Redefining Progress, a nonpartisan pub-lic-policy and economic think tank, factor in well-being and quality-of-life concerns by considering both positive and negative impacts of various products and services. They also measure more impacts overall (including impacts on elements of “being” and “doing” vs. just “having”). And they evaluate whether various financial expendi-tures represent a net gain or net loss — not just in economic terms, but also in human, social and ecological ones (see “Sustainable Happiness,” right).

Perhaps it’s time to consider our per-sonal health and well-being in the same sort of broader context — distinguishing pro-ductive activities from destructive ones, and figuring the true costs and unintended con-sequences of our choices into the assess-ment of how well our lives are working.

To that end, we might begin asking questions like these:

Where, in our rush to accomplish or enjoy “more” in the short run, are we inadvertently creating the equivalent of garbage dumps and toxic spills (stress over-loads, health crises, battered relationships, debt) that will need to be cleaned up later at great (think Superfund) effort and expense?

Where, in our impatience to garner maximum gains in personal productivity, wealth or achievement in minimum time, are we setting the stage for bailout scenarios down the road? (Consider the sacrifices endured by our families, friends and col-leagues when we fall victim to a bad mood, much less a serious illness or disabling health condition.)

Where, in an attempt to avoid uncer-tainty, experimentation or change, are we burning through our limited and unrenew-able resource of time (staying at jobs that leave us depleted, for example), rather than striving to harness our bottomless stores of

purpose-driven enthusiasm (by, say, pursu-ing careers or civic duties of real meaning)?

Where are we making short-sighted choices or non-choices (about our health, for example) that sacrifice the resources we need (energy, vitality, clear focus) to make progress and contributions in other areas of our lives?

In addition to these assessments, we can also begin imagining what a better alterna-tive would look like:

What might be possible if we embraced a different version of the good life — the kind of good life in which the vast majority of our choices both feel good and do good?

What if we took a systems view of our life, acknowledging how various inputs and outputs play out (for better or worse) over time? What if we fully considered how those around us are affected by our choices now and in the long term? ˙

What if we embraced more choices that honor our true nature, that gave us more opportunities to use our talents and enthusi-asms in the service of a higher purpose?

One has to wonder how many of our health and fitness challenges would evapo-rate under such conditions — how many compensatory behaviors (overeating, hiding out, numbing out) would simply no longer have a draw.

How many health-sustaining behav-iors would become easy and natural choices if each of us were driven by a strong and joyful purpose, and were no longer saddled with the stress and dissatisfaction inherent in the lives we live now?

Think about the cherry-tree effect implicit in such a scenario: each of us getting our needs met, fulfilling our best potential, living at full vitality, and contrib-uting to healthy, vital, sustainable communi-ties in the process.

If it sounds a bit idealistic, that’s probably because it describes an ideal distant enough from our current reality to provoke a certain amount of hopelessness. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely unrealistic. In fact, it’s a vision that many people are increasingly convinced is the only kind worth pursuing.

Turning the Corner Maybe it has something to do with how

many of our social, economic and ecological systems are showing signs of extreme strain. Maybe it’s how many of us are sick and tired of being sick and tired — or of living in a

culture where everyone else seems sick and tired. Maybe it’s the growing realization that no matter how busy and efficient we are, if our efforts don’t feed us in a deep way, then all that output may be more than a little misguided. Whatever the reason, a lot of us are asking: If our rampant productiv-ity doesn’t make us happy, doesn’t allow for calm and creativity, doesn’t give us an opportunity to participate in a meaningful way — then, really, what’s the point?

These days, it seems that more of us are taking a keen interest in seeking out better ways, and seeing the value of extending the lessons of sustainability beyond the natural world and into our own perspectives on what the good life is all about.

In her book MegaTrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism (Hampton Roads, 2005), futurist Patricia Aburdene describes a hopeful collection of social and economic trends shaped by a large and influential subset of the American consuming public. What these 70 million individuals have in common, she explains, are some very specific values-driven behaviors — most of which revolve around seeking a better, deeper, more meaningful and sustainable quality of life.

These “Conscious Consumers,” as Aburdene characterizes them, are more carefully weighing material and economic payoffs against moral and spiritual ones. They are balancing short-term desires and conveniences with long-term well-being — not just their own, but that of their local and larger communities, and of the planet as a whole. They are acting, says Aburdene, out of a sort of “enlightened self- interest,” one that is deeply rooted in concerns about sustainability in all its forms.

“Enlightened self-interest is not altru-ism,” she explains. “It’s self-interest with a wider view. It asks: If I act in my own self-interest and keep doing so, what are the ramifications of my choices? Which acts — that may look fine right now — will come around and bite me and others one year from now? Ten years? Twenty-five years?”

In other words, Conscious Consumers are not merely consumers, but engaged and concerned individuals who think in terms of lifecycles, who perceive the subtleties and complexities of interconnected systems.

As John Muir famously said: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds ➺



it attached to the rest of the world.” Just as the cherry tree is tethered in a complex ecosystem of relationships, so are we.

Facing Reality When we live in a way that diminishes us or weighs us down — whether as the result of poor physical health and fitness, excess stress and anxiety, or any compromise of our best potential — we inevitably affect countless other people and systems whose well-being relies on our own.

For example, if we don’t have the time and energy to make food for ourselves and our families, we end up eating poorly, which further diminishes our energy, and may also result in our kids having behavior or attention problems at school, undermining the quality of their experience there, and potentially creating problems for others.

If we skimp on sleep and relaxation in order to “get more done,” we court illness and depression, risking both our own and others’ productivity and happiness in the process and diminishing the creativity with which we approach challenges.

At the individual level, unsustainable choices create strain and misery. At the collective level, they do the same thing, with exponential effect. Because, when not enough of us are living like thriving cherry trees, cycles of scarcity (rather than abun-dance) ensue. Life gets harder for everyone. As satisfaction and well-being go down, need and consumption go up. Our sense of “enough” becomes distorted.

Taking Full AccountThe basic question of sustainability is this: Can you keep doing what you’re doing indefinitely and without ill effect to yourself and the systems on which you depend — or are you (despite short-term rewards you may be enjoying now, or the “someday” relief you’re hoping for) on a likely trajec-tory to eventual suffering and destruction?

When it comes to the ecology of the planet, this question has become very pointed in recent years. But posed in the context of our personal lives, the question is equally instructive: Are we living like the cherry tree — part of a sustainable and regenerative cycle — or are we sucking up resources, yet still obsessed with what we don’t have? Are we continually generating new energy, vitality, generosity and per-sonal potential, or wasting it?

The human reality, in most cases, isn’t quite as pretty as the cherry tree in full bloom. We can work just so hard and consume just so much before we begin to experience both diminishing personal returns and increasing degenerative costs. And when enough of us are in a chronically diminished state of well-being, the effect is a sort of social and moral pollution — the human equivalent of the greenhouse gasses that threaten our entire ecosystem.

Accounting for these soft costs, or even recognizing them as relevant externalities, is not something we’ve been trained to do well. But all that is changing — in part, because many of us are beginning to real-

ize that much of what we’ve been sold in the name of “progress” is now looking like anything but. And, in part, because we’re starting to believe that not only might there be a better way, but that the principles for creating it are staring us right in the face.

By making personal choices that respect the principles of sustainability, we can inter-rupt the toxic cycles of overconsumption and overexertion. Ultimately, when con-fronted with the possibility of a better quality of life and more satisfying expres-sion of our potential, the primary question becomes not just can we continue living the way we have been, but perhaps just as important, why would we even want to?

If the approach we’ve been taking appears likely to make us miserable (and perhaps extinct), then it makes sense to consider our options. How do we want to live for the foreseeable and sustainable future, and what are the building blocks for that future? What would it be like to live in a community where most people were over-flowing with vitality and looking for ways to be of service to others?

While no one expert or index or coun-cil claims to have all the answers to that question, when it comes to discerning the fundamentals of the good life, nature con-veniently provides most of the models we need. It suggests a framework by which we can better understand and apply the prin-ciples of sustainability to our own lives. Now it’s up to us to apply them.

Sustainable HappinessNot all growth and productivity represent progress, particularly if you consider happiness and well-being as part of the equation. The growing gap between our gross domestic product and Genuine Progress Indicator (as represented below) suggests we could be investing our resources with far happier results.

Data source: Redefining Progress, rprogress.org. Chart graphic

courtesy of Yes! magazine.



Learning From Nature What can we learn from ecological sustainability about the best ways to balance and sustain our own lives? Here are a few key lessons:

1) Everything is in relationship with everything else. So over-drawing or overproducing in one area tends to negatively affect other areas. An excessive focus on work can undermine your rela-tionship with your partner or kids. Diminished physical vitality or low mood can affect the quality of your work and service to others.

2) What comes around goes around. Trying to “cheat” or “skimp” or “get away with something” in the short term gener-ally doesn’t work because the true costs of cheating eventually become painfully obvious. And very often the “cleanup” costs more and takes longer than it would have to simply do the right thing in the first place.

3) Waste not, want not. Unpleasant accumulations or unsus-tainable drains represent opportunities for improvement and reinvention. Nature’s models of nutrient cycling show us that what looks like waste can become food for a process we simply haven’t engaged yet: Anxiety may be nervous energy that needs to be burned off, or a nudge to do relaxation and self-inquiry exercises that will churn up new insights and ideas. Excess fat may be fuel for enjoyable activities we’ve resisted doing or haven’t yet discovered — or a clue that we’re hungry for something other than food. The clutter in our homes may represent resources that we haven’t gotten around to sharing. Look for ways to put waste and excess to work, and you may discover all kinds of “nutrients” just looking for attention.

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