Community Cleansing: Why Wild Foods are Awesome

When the idea of doing this cleanse first came up, I was pretty fresh out of a food forest seminar. One of the most fascinating things I learned during the seminar was how different the level of nutrition is with food that is grown in a food forest or the wild. It is the absolute highest level of nutrition possible. Not only has the food not travelled, but the plant is operating in a closed-loop system that is self-sustaining, so there are no nutrients lost in the soil due to tilling or other annual gardening practices. The plants are getting highly nutritious food, so we are too!

During the course, we were told about a man who served dinner guests some food from his food forest. His guests were baffled, and somewhat annoyed, because he only served them a small plate of food. Colourful, yes it was, but it was not the mountain high mound of food that we are used to being served at a standard North American dinner. However, much to the surprise of all the guests there, they were absolutely stuffed after only eating a few items. This is because the food was so densely nutritious that they didn't need anything more. Because the food we eat is so nutrient deficient in comparison, we need more food to feel satisfied. But here's the catch: we're not actually being more nourished if we eat more. We may feel fuller, but full doesn't mean nourished.

So clearly, all this was on my mind before starting this cleanse. If I'm going to be surviving mostly on fruits and vegetables, I want them to be as nutrient dense as possible, so that I feel nourished and not as hungry all the time. If any of you out there are planning on doing a raw food cleanse, I would highly recommend getting to know your local wild foods. In my neighbourhood in Victoria, I'm lucky enough to have a food forest right down the street that I can go harvest from whenever I want. These are some of the things I got. These will make your cleanse a heck of a lot easier:

Stinging Nettle

This is one of the most amazing plants that exists. I can't believe that to a lot of people it's considered a weed. It contains more iron than spinach, and is nutrient dense in Vitamins A, B, C, D & K, calcium, magnesium, cobalt, potassium, zinc, copper, and sulphur. It is also relatively high in protein and very high in chlorophyll. It's a diuretic, it's stimulates the kidneys and the liver, supports lymph drainage, and is an excellent thyroid support. Oh, and it's DELICIOUS. It's great steamed like kale or spinach (while not on a raw food cleanse), or in smoothies, as the sting goes away if you grind it up. I always feel amazing after eating nettles. The best thing that I heard about nettles was that it helps you "let go of your shit, literally and figuratively."
But watch, cause it stings! Actually, while I'm on the stinging, I heard once that it is actually good, believe it or not, when you're picking nettles, to let yourself get stung a little bit. The best time to pick nettles is early spring, late March to early April. A gentle sting from this plant will give you actually quite an energizing boost. I thought that was hogwash until I stung myself this year and felt a surge of energy run through my body, all the way down to my toes. So don't be afraid of the sting! (I wouldn't recommend falling into a nettle patch, though, that would hurt.)

Lovage

Also known as "poor man's celery", this is an extremely nutritious, flavourful plant. In my opinion, lovage is what celery is trying to be but fails. The flavour is quite strong, and when cooked down a little it adds a lovely flavour to soups, stir fries or stock. I've been throwing them into smoothies and I find it very cleansing. Fun fact about lovage: it is actually a deodorizing plant! Eating it can help your B.O. It's also a remedy for digestive difficulties, flatulence, and certain skin conditions. (I just learned that if you make a decoction- boil the crap out of it for 15 minutes- then pour it in the bath, it will help heal some skin conditions.)


Miner's Lettuce

This is for those of you living in the Pacific Northwest, though it may be elsewhere, I'm not sure. It's called "Miner's lettuce" because the miners used to nibble on it to fight of scurvy. It's highly rich in Vitamin C, A and Iron. You can throw it right in a salad. It's like lettuce, but more nutritious. It can also be boiled or steamed.






Black Mulberry

I have been drinking gallons of Mulberry leaf tea in the last few days. It has a subtle, very pleasant flavour, and is wonderful for levelling blood sugar. This has been really useful for me, because it keeps from having those cravings for bready, sugary things all day long. Helpful for a cleanse!
The berries are really good too! And highly nutritious.





Sea Buckthorn

I mention this because it's becoming my new favourite plant. The berries come out in summertime and they are delicious. They are also high in anti-oxidants (apparently if you leave them out overnight they won't turn brown), vitamin C, and....believe it or not....essential fatty acids! You don't need expensive fish or flax oil....Just go down to Dallas Rd (if you're in Victoria) and eat a few berries!
I have been drying the leaves and using them in tea. They have a nice green tea flavour, also contains many minerals, fatty acids, and protein. They help lower cholesterol, improve blood pressure, and are generally really flavourful and delicious. I could go on- the medicinal value of this plant is never ending!

I'll leave you with that for now. There are many, many more plants I could write about, but I would be here for several years if I embarked on that journey. The moral of this story: learn about your local plants. So much knowledge has been lost about our local sources of food and medicine. We have the power to heal and feed ourselves, if we just do a bit of learning and walking in the woods (or, sometimes, just the boulevard outside the house!)

Until next time,

Lisi

Community Cleansing: Day 1

Well, hi there!

I told you I was terrible at blogging. Fortunately, I don't have an audience base yet, other than myself, so the only person I'm letting down is....myself. The problem is that I think I forget I even have the blog, after a few days. Anyway, enough about that, and more about how I remembered I had it again.

Have I mentioned that I live in a collective house? Well, I do. We do things like cook meals for each other, eat together, make silly jokes (sometimes on the line of 'that's inappropriate!'), have house meetings, go on 10 pm chocolate adventures.... Well, this time, one of our five members, Nina, piped up with an idea: going on a raw food cleanse. She shared with us the 21-day program developed by a young woman from Vancouver, called "Young and Raw". After much joking about the innuendo and slightly creepy connotations of the title (see: inappropriate jokes), 4 of us in the house decided to embark on the journey.

Basically, it's 3 weeks of eating entirely raw and vegan. It's not as boring as it sounds.You might ask, 'what do you eat?' Well, the meal plans are all laid out, so theoretically, all you have to do is follow the recipes for 3 weeks and you're golden. This is the basic structure of what you are supposed to eat in a day:

Lemon and water
Juice (home juiced veggie/fruit)
Smoothie
Lunch
Smoothie
Dinner
Tea/water

With a bit of tweaking here and there (we eliminated the juicing and added in a raw breakfast item, like granola or porridge), this is pretty much what we're doing. Well, so far. It's only Day One.

So it was this morning that I remembered, "oh yeah! I have a blog!" and I decided I would write about this experience. I've never 'cleansed' for this long, this intensely, so for me this will be an interesting exploration of food, health, and particularly emotional eating habits. I'll get to that later....

Of all days, Day One had to fall on the same day as that glorious, beautiful cycle of the moon decided to lay it's course on me. (Too much information? Oh, grow up everyone, it's just nature.) So today was...a bit of a struggle. I am a meat eater, a Type O+ blood type, so I generally need more animal protein than most, though I was a vegetarian and vegan for a number of years. However, during my "time", nothing looks more enticing than a hunk of animal. The combination of generally eating less, with also not eating meat, eggs, or any other large protein source, plus my body giving birth to its iron sources by the second, made for an.....interesting most of the day.

But, despite feeling faint and sleeping away a good chunk of the day, I admit I feel generally fantastic already. This morning, I made a smoothie for everyone with homemade almond milk, cucumber, lovage (I should probably explain this food, as spellcheck doesn't even recognize it), frozen berries, banana, and coconut water. My housemate Tanya made a quinoa porridge, and these two items together made for a very filling breakfast. For someone who has eggs every morning, this was a pleasant surprise (normally, a porridge breakfast fills me up for the first 20 minutes then proceeds to completely vanish from my system and I must find the most immediate source of animal within my reach).

I was preparing myself for this cleanse a couple of days early, by eating smaller portions, and also staying away from sugar and bread. So, my system was already starting to re-wire itself to not rely on empty, sugary carbs for the illusion of nourishment. For those of you thinking of cleansing in future, I would definitely recommend 'easing' into it. Don't indulge on fudge brownies and pizza the day before you start a cleanse, unless you want to create a living hell for yourself. For the next few hours, I did some stretching and voice work, and I found myself letting go of some bodily tensions and unnecessary emotional baggage (what we in our house call our emotional 'poo'). I then got exceedingly tired and faint, so I had a hot bath, then fell asleep for two hours.

Oh, and I had lunch somewhere in there. Lunch was an amazing salad prepared by Nina the night before. The meal plan calls for a very simple lettuce-y salad with not very much in it. I like to think of lettuce as 'crunchy water'. If I'm going to eat a salad, it's going to have kale, spinach, spicy greens, and all kinds of flavours. Which is what this salad was. And then I discovered, at the bottom of this leafy party, a treasure more exciting than rum to a pirate, the holy grail, the shining beacon, the archangel at the gates of Heaven: Avocado. A hallelujah chorus ensued.

 In addition to all the food we had to buy for this cleanse, I also went out and harvested a bunch of wild items at our neighbourhood food forest (yeah, that's right). These items generally have a much, much greater nutrition content than most produce you buy (especially at larger grocery stores), so I felt much more full eating this salad than I would have by eating the one in the recipe. I'll do another post about wild food later on, because I think it is really important for a cleanse like this.

After my nap, I prepared an amazing afternoon smoothie with a whackload of nettles, strawberries, Oregon grape, banana, almond milk and coconut water. It was very energizing (nettles have more iron than spinach), and kept me going for the rest of the day. I also found that snacking throughout the day helped me. Another piece of advice to people wanting to do this: don't starve yourself. That's not the point of a cleanse. You are making dramatic changes to what you are putting in your body, so be nice to yourself. Give yourself a break. If you're hungry, 'eat, eat, eat', as my Ukrainian Jewish grandmother would say. She would think this whole idea was meshuge anyway.

This brings me to a couple of interesting thoughts I had today. First of all, I think one should always ask oneself thoroughly, before beginning or even thinking about an endeavour like this, the question why. Why are you doing this cleanse? What do you want from it, really? Examining that is really, really important. For me, if there is any more than a shred of "to lose weight", I hesitate. In my mind, that can be a nice side effect, if you are carrying extra pounds that are weighing you down, but it should never, ever be a reason.

In my mind, the purpose of a cleanse is to reset your organs, to get the body's systems moving at their best, and to let go of some emotional patterns. It is an exploration, an examination of an emotional dependency on food, on specific foods like sugar, caffeine, and carbs that attempt to fill a bottomless pit. Anyone else eat when they're bored? If I'm working on a project, or avoiding something, I'll eat, check my email, futz around on Facebook, or watch a TV show. With eating, it's always bread, cheese, sugar, or caffeine. "Exciting" foods. Not boring old fruit or nuts or veggies. And you know what's funny? Rarely during those times am I actually hungry, even remotely. I'm hungry for something that no delicious buttery toast will ever give me. I'm searching for that "excitement" in my life, but if I'm not feeling motivated to embark on those things that truly excite me, I'll eat something that I find exciting to give me the temporary thrill. And then, ironically, with all of those foods I mentioned, after I eat them I have even less motivation to pursue projects, because I experience THE CRASH. So those foods that are supposed to give me the feeling of being excited ultimately make me feel depressed.

And here's the interested point: even after I've eaten a very nourishing meal, about 10 minutes later I'll feel a pang of hunger. I think, no, I can't be hungry, I just ate, and no it wasn't just a plate of celery. It was a full meal. But I closed my eyes, looked inward, and realized my body wasn't hungry. I feel the illusion of hunger, but it's not my body wanting more. It's my mind, my soul, wanting to be occupied and engaged. Either that, or cinnamon bun.

Funny though, after a couple of days of no sugar, and I don't crave it at all. Same with coffee or cheese. Yes, you have to replace those foods with other favourites, but perhaps they are healthier options like avocado. I find that after a couple of days, other items become the "exciting" foods, things that weren't that exciting before.

The moral of the story is, when you feel that pang of hunger, or feel the need for a 'snack', ask yourself, what do I really want? And do that instead.

Until Day Two,

Lisi