A Shaman's Guide to Eating Well
by Jeffrey Pierce

This is the first in the series of "A Shaman's Guide to..." covering the sixteen bazillion things that I get regularly asked as a shaman. More guides will follow. Some will make you wonder how anyone was brave enough to ask that question, but all of the guides are immensely practical.

I've been asked by countless people over the years, "What should I eat?" I'm not a nutritionist; I'm not a doctor; I'm a traditionally trained shaman. What's that? If we rolled back the clock a handful of centuries so that we were living in a tribal culture, in addition to their role as a spiritual guide, healer, historian (the list goes on and on), a traditional shaman often acted as a pre-Internet form of Google. The catch? If they're wrong, the tribe suffered. So while folks in the modern age tend to look at traditional shamanism as something of a mystical path, let me assure you, it is deeply saturated with immense amounts of common sense.

This is what a traditional trained shaman suggests that you should do to eat well.

Mmmmmm... Roadside diner food...

Fresh Foods

Eat fresh foods whenever possible.

Avoid prepackaged foods whenever possible. Keyword: avoid. And avoid them in this order (from friendliest to unfriendliest): frozen | canned | boxed pre-made meal. If it's boxed, unfrozen, and you "just add..." (water, hamburger, etc.) it's almost a guarantee that it contains something you probably wouldn't eat if you were made aware of that ingredient.

If it grows in the ground, on a bush, or on a tree, eat as much of it as you would like to eat.

This includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, and the like. Eat organic whenever possible. Not only are organic foods better for your body, but they tend to taste significantly better than non-organic foods. As a general rule of thumb, you're safe eating anything you could grow in a backyard garden patch or on a fruit tree.

Don't eat anything from your family.

You're a mammal. If it's a mammal, don't eat it. (See "Ritual: Balance" below and the pattern that includes other kinds of meat will emerge.) This leaves fish, chicken, turkey, and the like. Eat organic whenever possible.

If a product comes from an animal, limit how often you consume it.

Don't eat a pile of cheese or consume eggs for every meal. Dairy products are fine, just in moderation. Once again, eat organic whenever possible.

Packaged Foods

Whenever possible, eat the non-packaged version.

See "Eat fresh foods whenever possible" above. This will require that you cook. Cooking isn't scary, difficult, or particularly time-consuming, and there are a bazillion sites that offer recipes. It may take a try or two before you get it "just right" but you'll eventually make the recipe your own. Cooking it yourself tends to move whatever packaged food you were you were going to eat (and, instead, cooked from ingredients yourself) into the "Fresh Foods" category. That's a good thing.

Read the label: If it contains more fat than protein, don't eat it.

Seriously. If it has 16 grams of fat and 4 gram of protein, your mouth might thank you but your body will hate you. Doritos? 8 grams of fat, 2 grams of protein. Unfortunately for Doritos-lovers, they fail the test.

Read the label: If you wouldn't eat or drink an ingredient on its own, don't eat or drink it in something else.

Not to pick on Doritos, but they happen to be one of the packaged chips that I like. They contain (among the other ingredients) maltodextrin, monosodium glutamate, and disodium phosphate. If you saw a bunch of containers with those labels on them, would you open them up to eat what's inside? I wouldn’t.

(By the way, according to Wikipedia, "Disodium hydrogen phosphate (Na₂HPO₄) is a sodium salt of phosphoric acid. It is a white powder that is highly hygroscopic and water soluble. It is therefore used commercially as an anti-caking additive in powdered products." Mmmmmm... wanna eat me some of that!)

Ritual

Give yourself the opportunity to play.

Play? With food? Sure! My general rule of thumb? "From Sunday evening through Friday's lunch, follow the guidelines above. From Friday evening through Sunday's lunch, eat whatever you want." Want a bacon-double cheeseburger with a mountain of curly fries and a strawberry milkshake? Save it for the weekend. Want to eat Doritos? Save them for the weekend. If you're eating healthy and low-fat five days a week and breaking those rules two days a week, chances are you'll be just fine. It's a 5:2 ratio of healthy to "whatever you choose." But you have to give yourself the opportunity to play and it's absolutely okay to do so.

Ritual trumps all else.

Thanksgiving, our truly American feasting holiday, falls on a Thursday. It is absolutely okay for you to eat ham, pie, gravy, and the works on Thanksgiving even though it's not on a weekend. Feasting with friends and family is a ritual. Ritual trumps all else. Likewise, if you're going out to dinner, you do not have to scour the menu for healthy alternatives. Enjoy yourself. If the rest of your eating habits follow the guidelines suggested here, the vast majority of us will be absolutely fine indulging now and then - especially where ritual is concerned.

However, if you're going out to dinner every night, that's not ritual. That's routine. At that point you need to get back to your 5:2 ratio.

A Final Word

Balance

Seek balance in all things. While plums are fine to eat, you're going have issues if you eat twenty of them at a sitting. Likewise, the astute among you will note that coffee gets the green light. (Coffee beans grow in nature.) As long as it doesn't give you problems, you can drink coffee every day. (Sadly, my preferred Double Chocolate Mocha horribly fails the "more protein than fat test.") However, seek balance. If you drink six cups of coffee every day, you're going to have problems at some point.

Also, set a Hunger Scale for yourself that goes from 1 to 10. "1" indicates, "I'm so full I think I'm going to puke." On the opposite end of the spectrum, "10" means, "I'm so hungry that I'm dizzy and blacking out." Keep your hunger between "4 and 8." Stop eating before you reach that, "I'm full and just eating because it tastes good," line. Never let yourself get so hungry that it's uncomfortable and don't eat if you're not hungry. (Our bodies, when healthy, are actually designed to let us know when they want food.) Your body (and your metabolism) will thank you if it's not being pushed from (or held to) one extreme or the other.

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Originally published in Old Ways on January 5, 2012