This is the about page from my cooking site: Cucina Naturale It’s currently under construction as I update the new theme with photographs…it might still be fun to look at for what is there and I do hope to start updating it more often if you want to subscribe. It’s more of a food diary with cooking ideas rather than recipes. I cook on the fly and so recipes are always approximate and not carefully reconstructed. Food as art form in the moment. My internal Kitchen Witch and muse at work.
About
I started sharing recipes when I started cooking “healing” food after becoming critically ill and disabled for years. I always have loved to cook so that part wasn’t new.
Below is a bit of the history of how I learned more about both the food I had always eaten and then about foods called “super” and otherwise especially healthy. I did discover, also, that I had always known how to eat well.
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I did just about every elimination diet out there (over a period of 15 years).
This is my experience and only mine. I know that we all have different and unique journeys. No one healthy diet is appropriate for everyone and yet as we all have encountered there are 100s of “health gurus” doctors and self-appointed know it alls, who seem to know exactly what we need.
Health gurus who claim a protocol is right for everyone are at best deluded. At worst they’re contributing to the suffering of others in that they’re imposing their experience on others in a predatory fashion. They excel at making people believe they need the health guru and will often charge up to $500 or more for an hour of their time….that’s cash above and beyond the books and whatever else they’re selling. Their targets are often desperate people who are very ill and truly need support.
This is the thing: we don’t need to be told what to eat, we need to learn how to discern it for ourselves as unique individuals.
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Because of nothing better available at the time I started mindfully tending to my healing, I tried many “healing” diets. All featured some sort of elimination diet. Such diets are great in that we learn more in mindfulness when less din is surrounding what is put in the body. We see how our body responds in elimination and we see what it’s like to add food back. We learn to listen to the body…if we trust ourselves anyway and not whatever random health guru we might be learning about foods from.
Some of these health gurus have been useful in that some of their insights are, indeed, helpful. The trick is knowing how to let go of whatever is dogmatic and/or delusional in what they’re selling. Until we grow quite a lot in learning to listen to our body it seems most folks opt for joining the guru in dogma.
I ended up finding what I needed in my immediate ancestry. I grew up eating an intact culturally sound whole food diet. (Mediterranean) I knew how to eat as my family hadn’t lost that yet as brand new immigrants.
I simply had to find my way back to my own ancestry! Now I can eat what makes sense at any given time from all traditional diets, really. Some of us are mutts and it might not be as clearly ancestrally driven. For me it really was…and I am reconnected with the only great joy from my family and upbringing. Damn good food served with LOVE. My family may have otherwise been emotional nightmares yet we knew how to eat. When you know how to eat that’s connection with the natural state. With a connection to the natural state in mindful attendance of that one can better find the natural state in all contexts of life. In any case I now again eat gluten, dairy, soy and every other food group and taboo food that we all hear to avoid with loud screams from someone. Right timing and listening to what the body can handle RIGHT NOW, remains important.
Mindfulness to what the body needs NOW remains critical as my body continues to struggle with injury and microbriome overgrowths of various kinds. All else is secondary and it took listening for a really long time to get here. I continue to learn to be and listen to the moment. Again, I absolutely do not assume this is what it’s like for everyone. We are all different.
Cucina Naturale
More on diet, healing and gut health on Everything Matters
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