Ten Days On Brown Rice!
Peace To All Sentient Beings
I’m celebrating today because I’ve just completed the infamous 10 days on brown rice diet. Actually this is the third time in my life that I’ve completed the diet and each time has been different.
The first time occurred in my late twenties. My partner, later to become wife number two [WN2], completed the ten day regime together. We took it on board like both an ordeal, and an initiation. That’s not recommended but then we were both young and for my part will admit to being arrogant. Nevertheless I think I accrued some benefit. Unfortunately wife number one [WN1] and I hadn’t completed our divorce. When she heard about my brown-rice lifestyle she wrote all kinds of things, and cited all sorts of derogatory medical articles in the divorce statements, which she no doubt in her way thought to be true.
Meanwhile WN2 and I continued with our Macrobiotic lifestyle for some years. Sometimes macrobiotics were on, sometimes they were off, and sometimes they were combined with a double mixed Martini, or two after work! Even undertaking the ten day diet a second time didn’t seem to prevent the relapses but despite these slippages my thirties passed and as I entered my forties I looked perhaps twenty-eight. But then the dreadful divorce loomed for a second time, and after much turmoil I returned to my home town of Blandford Forum in Dorset and resumed eating much as my parents had told me was good for me, when a child. Naturally I gained weight and until a month or so back had come to look remarkably like my father, before he became my late father.
This shape was helped along by helpings of wholesome Turkish food introduced by wife number three [WN3]. Such delicacies as kofte, burek, and masses of ayran didn’t help my figure. Turkish pastries, profiterole and home made lemonade are packed with oversaturated calories too.
Enter 2006 when Irem [WN3] and I decided to eat more wisely on a constant basis. We’ve been eating whole meal bread and pastry at home for a while but now we practically eliminated sugar, dairy products, meat, packet biscuits, chocolate, crisps and other assorted nonsense. We were still eating plenty of salad, fruit, aubergines, tomatoes and some potato dishes. Occasionally we’d have a Sunday Roast including Yorkshire Pudding.
The desire to eating and living in a simple healthy way must have already been in the back of my mind for when we moved to Amos I brought very few books with me, but amongst the works I brought were some volumes by George Oshawa, (the modern day founder of Macrobiotics), and Michio Kushi, (his most well known disciple).
The philosophy of Macrobiotics, which classifies all phenomena into more Yang, or more Yin, never exclusively one or the other, always to be balanced when combined, and never to be treated as a Western prescription ~ is fairly easy to understand in principle. The ten day brown rice diet is really a misnomer. Oshawa actually prescribes ten days eating whole grains but also says that brown rice is the most balanced grain in terms of a 7 – 1 acid/alkaline ratio. No matter since it was ten days of exclusive, delicious brown rice that I enjoyed.
And I mean enjoy ~ it was so much better, easier to chew, more tasty, and more refreshing than either of my two previous experiences of this regime. At the end of the ten days I can report:
- Increased vitality in all departments.
- Spontaneous running, squatting, vaulting and other gymnastic achievements!
- Health appetite
- Greater flexibility and spontaneity
- Better humour
- A tooth with a damaged root is slowly regaining its full whiteness
And sadly the realization that I’ve so much further to go.
George Oshawa writes that the following stages denote illness:
- Fatigue, caused by an undisciplined, disorderly existence, obesity, shattered nerves.
- Unspecific pain and suffering due to sensual overindulgence and food whims.
- Chronic symptoms caused by lack of balance of either Yang or Yin food.
- Sympathiconic symptoms, the illness has ascended to the autonomic nervous system.
- Functional or structural changes in the major organs.
- Psychological, and emotional diseases such as schizophrenia, neurasthenia, hepatitis, thyroid problems, cardiac dilation.
- Spiritual disease, which may be found in those of sound constitution, and free of bodily or mental ailments, but who none the less suffer from the social consequences of arrogance and intolerance, and despite outward success, are without faith, hope, joy or love. Their end is inevitably tragic.
Oshawa ascribes ten points to each of the first six indicators of illness on the list, and thirty points to the seventh. My score is far to high, but today as I eat my whole grain porridge I truly feel that I’ve started to move in the right direction.
