'Everything is Natural'
Below you can find Chapter 11 of Daniel's (our founder's) book, Breaking Normal in audio and typed form.
Listen here → Breaking Normal Chapter 11 - Everything is Natural
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Chapter 11: Everything is Natural
I believe that everything on Earth, everything around and within you, is natural. Everything you can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear, all inner space and outer space.
There’s no such thing as “all natural” or “not natural,” because everything is. We are made of the same materials as the Earth, and the Earth is made of the same materials as the universe, and the universe is made of the same materials as the multiverse, and on and on. There is nothing outside our world, no shelf labeled “unnatural” from which we can grab a bottle of something and sprinkle it onto an otherwise natural dish and thereby make it unnatural.
Even high fructose corn syrup is natural. Even GMOs. Both are the result of a human being—which is a natural being—interacting with other natural beings, to isolate parts of that being and enhance certain characteristics—sweetness, in the case of high fructose corn syrup.
This chapter is about diet and physical well-being, though my intention is to use diet to open up the consideration that the food we eat, and the way we eat it, influences other aspects of our lives, because how we do anything is indicative of how we do everything. We are what we eat, but maybe it is equally true that we are what we look at, what we listen to, what we touch, taste and think.
The poison is in the dosage and the medicine is in the poison. It is possible to have too much of a “good” thing, and it is possible to have too little of a “bad” one. It is also possible to cleanse your health away, just as it is possible to eat yourself to death. I’ll never forget what our taxi driver in Jamaica told us as he escorted us around the island in search of the best coconuts. He sagely expressed, “Be careful what you eat or you’ll dig a grave with your teeth.”
My grandma lived to be 100. She was one of the “healthiest” people I knew, and yet, as far as I could tell, she didn’t follow a strict dietary regimen, or ride some roller coaster of splurging and purging, or gluttony and fasting. She didn’t feel guilty about eating dessert, and she didn’t eat her vegetables simply because she was supposed to. She ate when she was hungry, and stopped eating before she felt full. In her later years, when her caloric demands were low, she could seemingly make a meal out of a single strawberry, by savoring it, by eating it slowly, and by being grateful and present as she did.
I take my inspiration from her, though my own journey has gone down many paths. Sometimes, the path I found myself on became the path I lost myself on.
It starts in the house I grew up in, where I was on a strict “see food” diet. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, Oreos, Coca-Cola, Fruit Loops, Scooby Snacks, you name it. If I saw it, I ate it. At school the lunch often included chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs. I even drank Coca-Cola as my sports drink when I was captain of the high school baseball team. As for the milk, let’s just say it was highly manipulated by humans before it even left the cow.
“It’s just food.” That pretty much sums up my attitude at the time. The “see food” diet continued through my childhood and into high school. The difference was that now I wanted to gain weight so that I could throw a faster fastball. I started eating more—more meat, more fast food, more whatever—while also supplementing creatine and protein. It worked in the sense that I got bigger and stronger, though to judge from photos, I was also puffy and inflamed.
When I got to college my priorities shifted from sport performance to aesthetics. Girls didn’t care how fast I could throw a baseball, only how fast it looked like I could throw one—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. My workouts at this time had more to do with getting muscular than with being healthy and mobile. I still ate a lot of meat and protein, but thanks to my inspiration from my brother, who had recently gotten ripped, I also chowed down on green vegetables with dinner. That one change made a noticeable difference.
The climax of this seefood approach came the year I graduated college, at a New Year’s Eve party I put on. For a lot of reasons, I didn’t eat much that day, and before the party all I had was an apple. I wasn’t as aware of my body then as I am now, so I didn’t hesitate to drink alcohol once the party got started. Nor did I hesitate to mix in a cigar and cannabis. Shortly into my own party, I was so messed up I had to leave. I asked my friends to take me to a hotel.
I’d seen people throwing up on the side of the road before, and I always wondered how they let it happen. That night, I found out. Before reaching the hotel, I hollered to pull over and emptied my stomach onto the curb. Once there, I fell immediately into bed. I actually started crying because of how miserable I felt.
I remember waking up some time later, looking around the room at my friends who by now were also messed up, and commenting to myself at how strange they looked. I went into the bathroom to puke again, but when nothing came up I stood at the sink and splashed water in my face. The room was spinning, but by looking at my own eyes, I was able to steady myself. I stared into them for a long time, seeing more layers and depth and nuance than I’d seen before. Eventually I started to pray. I pleaded with God to remove from my body whatever it was that was still making me sick. I promised to never again consume any of the things I had that night, and to stop polluting my body altogether. I would stay clean, I decided, until the next calendar landmark—which happened to be my brother’s birthday in February.
It’s strange…I seemed to sober up right there. I splashed more water on my face, then walked out of the bathroom and saw my friends laying around, and told them that I was going back to the party. Which I did. And had an awesome time.
The next day I realized that my brother’s birthday was exactly forty days and forty nights away, and that synchronicity inspired me to up the ante. I decided to cut out even more than weed, alcohol, and tobacco. I dropped coffee, masturbation, candy, and everything else I deemed to be junk food.
His birthday came and went, and I kept going.
Here is where the appeal of diets becomes especially potent. Diets, like dogmas, are alluring in their certainty. The mantra “all or nothing” is simple. It’s clean division with no remainder, and leaves little room for doubt or deliberation. Sometimes it is easier to be told what one can and cannot do than it is to make and take responsibility for one’s own decisions. Whenever a question arises, all a person has to do is pull out the stone tablet somebody else wrote and read it for the answer. Adopt a diet or a dogma, and one no longer has to think for oneself.
The appeal of a raw vegan diet is that it is clean and cleansing. Its promise is to make sure there is nothing bad inside your body, and it carries the added benefit of being morally superior to other diets, especially those that include meat. At that time in my life I wanted to be clean, both inside and out, and I enjoyed the newfound energy and clarity I felt. And because my brothers and I were traveling to places like Costa Rica for retreats and surfing, the transition to pure raw vegan seemed natural.
At first it was great. My energy, like I said, shot way up, instead of dropping like I had expected. My eyes seemed clearer, my skin glowed, everything about me seemed more radiant. I was pooping, I imagined, as free and easy as a monkey for the first time in years. My brothers reported similar results. We felt clean, converted, born again. We spent the days surfing in the sunshine and eating starfruit on the shore—in addition to coconuts, mangos, papayas, star apples, milk fruit, cherimoya, and jackfruit.
The challenges arose when it came time to go back home to Georgia, and the amount of fresh tropical fruits became limited. We had discovered the gospel, and the last thing we wanted to do was lose it. So, we made sure that didn’t happen. Our business was mostly travel anyway, first as mobile marketers and tour managers, and later as retreat hosts, so we made sure to travel to places and host retreats where our food, literally, was everywhere: islands, tropical locations, California. Transit presented some challenges, as the airports were like food deserts littered with kryptonite. We began packing less clothes to have more room for fruit.
I was surprised, overall, that it wasn’t harder. On the one hand, the menu of permissible food was limited, but on the other hand, there was no shortage. For months I felt amazing, and experienced a newfound appreciation for nature that I might never have known had I not gone off meat and cooked foods. The Earth, I realized, provides everything. Not that anything I ate before that point came from anywhere other than the Earth—because it’s all natural—but it usually came from the Earth via the hand and obvious MANipulation of someone else. The feeling of picking produce straight from the tree or vine on which it grew, however, and immediately eating it, was empowering and eye-opening. In that pure and simple act the fingerprint of man’s manipulation was almost hidden from sight. In addition, it brought clarity and understanding into the natural seasons and cycles of ripeness and life in general. Those cycles carried over and were reflected in the seasons of my own life. Overall, I felt clean and unadulterated, like I was getting back to something primal and elemental—the bodily equivalent of unlearning all the things I’d been forced to learn. I also noticed that I was less aggressive, less combative. I was more willing to glow with the flow. I grew my hair out, took fewer showers, let go of deodorant and soap and, strangely enough, felt cleaner and smelled better.
But the purity that makes raw veganism so alluring is also what makes it so punishing. Purity is an ideal, an abstraction dangling above a distant horizon. The closer you get, the further away it seems. In pursuit of this ideal, slowly but surely, my life began to revolve around food. I began noticing sensations that I imagined were symptoms of anxiety—all in relation to my food choices and options. If I didn’t have a bundle of spotted bananas nearby—aka “dinosaur wieners”—the nervousness was almost palpable. Eating is one of the most social activities humans engage in, and yet, I couldn’t go out or to a friend’s house without thinking about what I was going to eat. Non-organic produce presented a quandary. The sight of someone eating meat created a flashing sensation that I associated with anger.
I had heard stories from fellow raw vegans about cravings and hunger. Confessions, really. Some of them reported shame about having cheated on their diets by gorging on meat in secret, only to puke it all up later. I remember one confession that really impacted me. A young vegan woman had admitted to gorging on meat in her closet. Their confessions rang true to my own challenges. I too had cheated. My friends and I, in the effort of expelling all cravings for meat, had gone to a Brazilian steakhouse one night in Costa Rica to gorge ourselves. The next day I woke up in a sort of food hangover filled with shame. I felt polluted and clogged up. The only positive, as far as I could tell, was that the desire to eat meat was temporarily vanquished—the thought of it was no longer tempting, but grossed me out.
That was the start of an addiction-like cycle of using cheat meals once or twice a month. They served two purposes. First, they provided a light at the end of the tunnel, a distant reward I could look forward to and stay motivated. Second, they were a sort of punishment, making me so sick as to kill my cravings. It didn’t seem healthy to me, but I rationalized that it was normal.
After a few months on this cycle, I seemed to break through. I no longer needed the cheat meals, I no longer slipped up, and for the next six months I ate nothing but raw, organic, and vegan.
The symptoms were subtle at first, but visible. My gums receded. My hair thinned. My skin seemed to dull. I got skinnier and fatter at the same time. My parents and acquaintances began to look at me strangely, because part of my rawness was letting my hair grow even more and neglecting or looking down on personal hygiene. Some of their comments shook my dogma, caused me to doubt, but I made sure not to show it. Outwardly I became even stricter in my diet and more adamant in my faith. They just don’t know any better, I told myself. The lesson here is that arguing with someone against a behavior that you think is bad for them might be the least effective way to get them to change that behavior, because it incites more resistance. When you provide someone with all the reasons why they “shouldn’t” do something or eat something, they automatically begin to construct the opposing case.
Inside I was questioning, and I was seeing signs I couldn’t ignore. For example: the anger and wrath that fellow believers directed towards heretics, shoulding and shaming everyone who believed differently. That shoulding and shaming was also directed inwardly, and at sinners within the group. Even more puzzling was the lack of interest I now had in the opposite sex. At a summer fruit festival, a sort of Woodstock for vegans full of young and beautiful women, I was surprised at how little interest I had in pursuing intimacy with them. Other men didn’t seem as interested as I would expect. It was like a spring break without the sexual energy, because all the energy was directed towards our food. People were falling in love, not necessarily with each other, but with certain fruits and vegetables. Some compared mangoes and bananas, or bragged about who had brought the most exotic fruit to the party. People tried durian or jackfruit for the first time and were converted, while any support of meat or animal products was taboo.
I might have gotten over these observations were it not for the observation that I no longer woke up with something I’d heard was normal for young men: morning wood. I hadn’t had that in months.
One day my brother took a bite of salmon, and I freaked out on him. I exhibited the same kind of anger towards him that I’d observed in others. He called me out on it and told me to look in the mirror. I realized that my anger might have been hiding the fact that I secretly wanted a bite too. I decided to listen to myself—and to my dad, who was encouraging me to give it a try—by taking a bite. The next morning, that thing that hadn’t happened in months spontaneously happened. My boxer shorts were like a tepee, held up from within by an old friend. That’s when I knew my diet was over. I later got my testosterone checked, and it turned out that my hormonal chart read like that of an eighty-year-old man.
The Buddhists have a metaphor about using a boat to cross the river, and then dropping the boat once you get to the other side. The tendency some people have is to continue carrying the boat when they no longer need it, so that it eventually slows them down. That hormone test, as well as the evidence in my pants—or lack thereof—and the advice I got from other guys, convinced me to drop it.
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That was five years ago. My diet now changes from day to day based on where I am and what I’m doing. I trust that the way to nourish myself is not by adopting someone else’s dogma, and not by creating my own, but by observing certain parameters and guidelines based on my own experience. The attachment to getting answers from somewhere outside myself may have been part of the sickness I was originally overcoming.
I’ve learned that there is a difference between eating to survive, eating to cope, and eating to thrive. I’ve learned to let go of perfection, and that what matters is what I do most of the time, or out of habit. I’ve learned that quick-fixes are usually short-lived and not sustainable in the long term, and I’ve learned that different people can eat the exact same food and get different results. I’ve learned that food is fuel for my fire, not the fire itself. My spirit is the fire, and that fire can burn, clean, and refine almost anything, if my intention is right.
Getting to this point involved learning to be okay with the sensation of hunger, and allowing myself to actually feel it before making it go away with food. Hunger is a primal sensation, and the way we deal with it might be indicative of how we deal with other sensations. I wonder if that is why so many religious and spiritual practices incorporate rituals of fasting, abstaining from taking nourishment. Whether it’s going days at a time without food, not eating until the sun goes down, or merely skipping breakfast, there seems to be physical and spiritual benefits to experiencing hunger. Spiritually, I imagine that people go to the desert and abstain from food for a time when they are wanting clarity on some challenge or aspect of their life. When someone is in that position, food might be a distraction, something that keeps them from getting to the core of whatever issue they’re working through. Instead of sitting with the emotion or sensation, they might eat impulsively as a mild form of self-sabotage. They might eat something, not feel satisfied, eat more, not feel satisfied, and eat more still. In those instances, no amount of food will satisfy, because it’s not food they are hungry for, and the answer to that challenge is not in the fridge or pantry.
Some holistic practitioners talk about how fasting gives the body the opportunity to cleanse itself and regenerate, while others say skipping breakfast allows them to focus on other tasks and be more productive during the day.
Additionally, many modern, dehydrated people have mistaken thirst for hunger.
I doubt anyone would think it strange to say that drinking wine instead of tequila might influence the kind of night one is going to have, or even more drastically, drinking only water. One would expect that to be the case, which is why over the years we’ve experimented so much with different spirits. It is the same with food. Eating meat produces different energetic results in your body than eating plants. Eating sugar does something different than eating fat, and eating the two combined does something different still.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to eat foods that don’t agree with them, and then mask the symptoms of that disagreement, because they’re either moving too quickly or too distractedly to appreciate and make choices based on the feedback. “It’s just food,” they say and try to get it as cheaply as possible. Pharmacies help perpetuate this cycle, because anyone can buy a pill to suppress almost any symptom, from heartburn to indigestion, to headaches, to runny noses, to acne. Solely relying on these cover-ups is the dietary equivalent of damming one’s emotions, which often results in more severe damning.
This is why I’m not on the seefood diet anymore, nor am I on a restrictive vegan or paleo diet. Some days I eat meat, some days I eat pancakes, some days I eat salad. Some days I eat breakfast, some days I don’t eat anything at all, or at least not until dinner. My “diet” is simple: I don’t eat anything I don’t believe is good for me, and before putting anything in my mouth, I choose to believe that it is healthy. “Oh, so I can just sit around eating candy all day, but as long as I tell myself that it’s good for me I’ll be okay?” Well, it depends on whether you truly believe it, and at this point in the book, having done the prior exercises and gotten in touch with your inner responses, I imagine you will sense whether you truly do or not. From my perspective, that question, the way it is worded, seems more deflective than sincere.
Whenever I go to a restaurant, they give me a menu. For the most part I can only order things directly on that menu. In the same way, I believe that wherever I am living, wherever I have chosen to live, God has provided a menu for that location. And even though everything is natural, I believe that if I want to be in optimal health and divine brilliance, it is in my best interest to eat what is directly around me—the plants that grow best in that climate and the animals that thrive there. I figure I might as well shop locally too, to support the people and businesses around me. Whatever I’m going to eat, I make the best of it. I remind myself to be grateful and appreciative for what I am able to consume. If I don’t believe it is good for me, I either change my beliefs or I don’t eat. In this way food gives me the chance to check in with myself to see how I am feeling, and to decide based on that rather than on the opinions of someone else.
A good practice is to pray before eating, as so many traditional societies have done and still do. It connects us to our food and prepares the body and spirit to receive it. I like to take a moment to pray and reflect on all that went into the food that I’m about to eat.
That means the ingredients. It means the animals and what they ate. It means the sun and the rain and the cycle of the seasons. It means the farmers who cultivated the land, the people who made and operated the machinery. It means the truck drivers, the pilots, the railroad workers, the engineers, the chefs and the dishwashers. On and on and on. You’ll find, I imagine, that it is harder to feel disconnected from the world when you practice gratitude for everything you eat. Each morsel is a chain of connections leading back to the environment from which we came. By eating it, you too are forming a link in that chain.
In praying for every thing, you pray for Everything, because that’s how much it takes to make a meal possible.