The Fundamentals

My Journey Begins

To embark on your own journey to authentic wellness, it will be helpful for you to understand the milestones I found on my own path.

The founding and ongoing changes that became New Life and the New Life Food Plan are two significant milestones to discover. When I started New Life, there were limited activities. The principle and virtually sole objective was weight loss. For the first few years, there wasn't even hiking.

In the mid-1980s, I started hearing guests talk about wanting to reduce stress and create a healthy lifestyle, but their continued impression was that weight loss was the way to do this. Late in the 1980s, I introduced an increased emphasis on health and the mind-body connection. These changes in emphasis were based mostly on my own cumulative knowledge, professional experiences, and observations of New Life guests' experiences.

Weight loss was still the underlying reason guests came to New Life, but my interaction with guests made me sense that their faith in the value of dieting and weight loss was waning.

Indeed, the early 1990s broadened the focus of health beyond weight loss to lifestyle change. By the turn of the century, I was finally hearing guests say, "Diets don't work." And through their New Life experience, they wanted to acquire a deeper understanding of what a healthy lifestyle could be and to transfer the practices presented at New Life to their lifestyles to approximate their New Life experience. They were letting go of what I call "institutional dieting." As discussed throughout this book, my reference to "institutional dieting" encompasses any of the endless, usually commercial versions of structured, frequently programmatic responses to changing your relationship with food. Institutional dieting regimes range from mere fads to intricately prescribed behaviors and foods.

Although in my view the transition away from institutional dieting is becoming a major step toward a progressive and effective path to health, only in the last few years has the concept embodied by the term wellness become a true guest objective. The inspiration burning in the heart of New Life had always been about wellness. In contrast to weight loss, New Life preferred the pursuit of wellness more comprehensively through subjective lifestyle adaptation as it relates to food and other wellness considerations.

Evidence of the consistency and ongoing pertinence of New Life's food philosophy is the persistence of New Life's food ratio. When I started New Life, Black River Produce opened in the same year. The business included two guys and a station wagon. At the time Black River introduced a unique service that offered a wide range of fruits and vegetables that were available by the piece and not by a one-case minimum. All the institutional kitchens at which I worked during the 1970s ordered only limited produce amounts that typically included iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, onions, lemons, and grapefruits.

I have been buying produce from Black River for the last forty years. Since its opening day, the biggest bill that I pay every month to feed the guests at New Life comes from Black River Produce. The second biggest bill I pay every month is to a health food co-op company for healthy grains and other items.

I have witnessed the progressing emphasis on healthy food. In the contemporary health food store, there are so many choices, many of which are more expensive. Learning to navigate a health food store or health food section will teach you that most of the products just have overpriced sugar, fat, and salt while usually having less chemicals added. I will talk about this phenomenon more in the health food section.

The third biggest bill is for commercial food and comes from an institutional food distributer. I would venture to say that any restaurant, including all the ones I have ever worked in and you have gone to, would not have the New Life purchase food ratio. More likely, a restaurant's biggest purchase amount would come from an institutional food company. When I was a cook, I remember reading a magazine titled Volume Feeding. I always thought that was so funny, realizing we often think more about the volume of food rather than quality and nutrition.

These purchase ratios will be relevant to your wellness oasis. You'll notice the locations in the grocery store where you spend time and where you select food for purchase. You should also be aware of your choices at health food stores, convenient stores, restaurants, and social events in your life. There will be more about how to do this in later chapters.

During the last forty years, I have dealt with many different food plans and diets, while never changing my New Life food philosophy. At its start, New Life was to be a new life for me, a summer during which, instead of eating unhealthy food in the institutional kitchen's where I had worked, I could prepare healthy food in the New Life kitchen and provide for myself and the guests, be active, and heal myself and others.

I chose to change my environment to change my health. You will not have to start your own business to do the same. Once you see the underlying principles involved, you will be able to customize and continually refine your approach. Eventually, you will be living a new life without thinking about it so much. The key to this transformation is to get beyond thinking about it and rather simply practice and live the lifestyle.

When I lecture, I do a little dieting trivia and ask, for example, which diet advocated that you eat large amounts of animal fat but prohibited you from eating a tomato. Then I ask about the one where you were only allowed fruit until noon and prohibited eating a potato whenever you were eating chicken. I then would ask guests to think of themselves as the managers of a produce section in the grocery store. Suddenly, the only thing people wanted was grapefruit. Like so many diets the "grapefruit diet" was one of many fad diets. Over time this lecture came to be called "Decades of Dieting Insanity."

I had to deal with all these different diets that people wanted to serve as their magic bullets. But I have maintained the same food philosophy since the day New Life opened with the message "diets do not work." If a diet appears to be working for you, it's because you are not eating the foods or nonfoods that made you feel that the diet was the solution in the first place. The diet is short term. You want to be done with it as soon as possible. It is like holding your breath for a week. The benefits are short term. There is little left in place as a foundation for long-term changes. Your thinking has not changed. Your environment is the same. Your behavior has not changed. You will remember that I have termed this and continue to refer to it as "institutional dieting."

Who Was Nathan Pritikin?

Nathan Pritikin became my hero. He was a wealthy inventor with many credited patents. He was diagnosed with a heart condition in 1957 and began to do extensive research on his situation. Unlike anything I could hope to do at that time, he examined eating habits scientifically. In the mid-1970s, he developed an institute in California, where a person could go to his twenty-eight-day retreat. His staff of doctors and research scientists did blood work to create a complete diagnostic workup while examining a participant's personal lifestyle. He and his team wanted to prove scientifically that what you ate could heal your body.

A salad bar of fruits and vegetables and some whole grains combined with a small amount of animal protein was the institute's residents' main fare, and fat was almost totally eliminated. This concept became the foundation of the New Life cuisine.

Through research and the assessment of the diagnostic workup before and after his program, he proved that what one eats and continued eating matters. Pritikin had sound science behind his claims. In his program he also had guests exercise by walking up and down the beach. Many of his residents who came to the institute and were hardly able to walk in the front door on their own were jogging along the beach twenty-eight days later.

When Pritikin first started making these claims, his work was extremely controversial. I have seen television interviews with him during which his findings were very much disputed and dismissed as scientifically unproven. When Pritikin died, his New York Times obituary called him the most profound nutritional thinker of the twentieth century.

The Pritikin approach taught me so much and validated what I was trying to do. I wanted to reach potential guests who wanted to get healthier so they wouldn't find themselves in life-threatening situations like Pritikin's early guests. This is what my life's work, New Life and authentic wellness, is all about.

I developed what I called a modified Pritikin plan. I continued to modify the cooking over the years and made a cuisine that resembled Pritikin's, but my adaptation had enough food to accommodate a lot of exercise. In doing this, I sought to demonstrate how we can modify our food environment. The means to modify your food environment involved a completely different approach to eating that limits nonfood and prescriptive dieting relationships with food. Authentic wellness involves the creation of a new paradigm for every aspect of your twenty-first-century relationship with your food, fitness practices, and wellness environment. Calorie counting, dieting, or the body mass index, scales, and measuring will not enter our discussion. We will talk about real water-based food with positive health attributes.

There will be some recipes. The recipes presented will outline the practical means that may assist you in your lifestyle adjustments and support your desired food-related behaviors. This book aims to change your perspective on the food you eat. You will create a personal and subjective relationship with food that will allow your water-based body to function in a manner that initiates and achieves authentic wellness.

A Historical Perspective on Our Relationship with Food

In college I read a book published in 1970 titled Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, which sold more than five million copies. Toffler pointed out that since my birth in 1950, change has occurred in an exponential rate never experienced in human history. He examined this change and how it has affected every aspect of our lives. This book had a powerful impact on me.

In 1970 while I was going to college at Florida State University, I worked an overnight shift at the computer lab. This computer was housed in a large basement-size air-conditioned room. I fed the data cards into the computer for processing. In my fourth year of running New Life, I bought an Apple computer that I put on a desk, spending much time during the off-season learning how to use it. Today I have a smart phone. I can be anywhere and take reservations and do research for this book while holding the phone in my hand. That is future shock.

We have come so far in technological and social transformation just as Toffler talked about in his book, all having positive and negative ramifications. But because of the food we eat and the sedentary lifestyle that has been developed since the mid-twentieth century, we have made limited positive changes in our relationship with food. This has created significant negative health benefits. This book will address these negative consequences not so much as a societal issue but as a subjective and personal issue that we can each address with a transformation of our relationship with our bodies and minds to then establish authentic wellness.

Using nutritional coaching, I have designed a completely different measure of how the food you eat affects your body and mind. To grasp this, you must understand what your body is and realize how almost all the information that you know has flowed from the promotion of institutional dieting. To move away from the promotional clutches of institutional dieting, you must learn to disperse change across the many different dimensions through which authentic wellness may be attained.

As you begin this journey, remember that I have tried to organize this book into sections, but the separations are artificial and academic. The education, sociology, and psychology of eating all overlap in many overt and subtle ways. We can define the body and mind as separate categories, but our living reality informs us of their connections. I had to find my own path, and you can read about that in the biography; however, that's what led me to this multidimensional approach. Your path to authentic wellness will be discovered and hastened by a deeper understanding of the many dimensions of your relationship with food.

Let's Begin This Reeducation

Eating is universal to all human beings. We must eat. The makeup of the human body is also universal. The truth is that our body is about 65 percent water. It would make sense to eat foods that are water-based. This is true for everyone reading this book, whether you are rich or poor, tall or short. Whatever age or gender, we are all mostly water. All living things are water-based.

I once discussed this reality with one of my favorite body workers. She used the metaphor of a swamp to describe our bodies — mostly water with all kinds of other living things suspended in a swampy environment. I like to think of us as a pond. If the water in the pond is overwhelmed with pollution, the pond's ecology loses its health over time. We have all heard the expression "You are what you eat."

Consider the characteristics of our relationship with food prior to 1950. The vast majority of the food eaten was water-based, unprocessed, unpackaged, and pretty much based on the seasons. Consequently, prior to 1950, the human relationship with food was water-based, and the human body was comprised of approximately 65 percent water.

The times before 1950 are not presented for consideration to romanticize them. Our pre-1950 relationship with food did not lack its own nutritional tragedies — famine, scurvy, poverty, and other causes. Today we have too much nonfood. As in the case of our relationship with technology prior to 1950, our relationship with food also changed at a rather slow pace.

The post-1950 period has witnessed unprecedented changes in our relationship with food. Over time the composition of our bodies has transformed. We are no longer water-based beings. Our bodies are a muddle of water, fat, and chemicals. Look at yourself and the people around you at work, the amusement park, sporting events, and where you shop. Look at your neighbors and family members. If you listen to the news, you'll hear about the alarming rates of obesity and degenerative diseases. Look at pictures of people before and after 1950 and notice how our girth has grown dramatically.

The Food-Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, and Institutional Dieting

The food-industrial complex is the vast cluster of food production and manufacturing interests and enterprises. These entities govern every aspect of our food — seed, cultivation, harvest, transport for processing and packaging, storage, transport, and public sale. This is a far cry from the days when most people lived on farms. The food-industrial complex continues to respond to the popular preferences for food convenience and palatability that arose in the 1950s. The complex has done so by incorporating excessive sugar, fat, salt, and chemicals, all of which have moved our food substance increasingly away from its primary basis in water. These kinds of foods compose what I call nonfood, and they have dramatically overwhelmed our food supply.

Big Pharma is the collective domination by large pharmaceutical corporations over the choice and priority of scientific research required for the development, clinical testing, and marketing of drugs that are needed to accommodate our changed body composition. I am sure you notice that there are so many commercials about drugs, and there are very few about water-based foods like apples and avocados. Big Pharma relentlessly peddles us on the expectation that the drugs they produce will be effective in addressing obesity and other negative health issues related to the food we eat and prevalence of a more sedentary lifestyle. The drugs provide additional chemicals intended to counteract the negative effects of ingesting high volumes of sugar, fat, and salt. We will go into this in more detail. These added chemicals have further unhealthy ramifications and side effects. This cycle continues, and as mentioned, it is accelerating.