Food as Medicine
a conversation with Susan Lord, MD
Our relationship with food is often more complicated than we’d like. Susan Lord, MD, an integrative physician at Kripalu speaks with Special Projects Editor Laura Didyk to explore an approach for reinvigorating our relationship with food that includes wholeness and simplicity.
Kripalu Online: Why don’t you start us off by talking about the phrase “food as medicine.”
Susan Lord: The term was coined by Hippocrates, who believed that food not only puts you in balance and keeps you in balance but also can heal any illness that we have.
Food is more than certain nutrients getting into the body. There’s a long history of the use of food in the community. It’s the way we love our babies. Our religious ceremonies often involve food. We bring prana in, we bring life force in. It’s a very direct way of affecting the deepest levels of who we are, taking in certain foods. Like plant foods, which have a higher vibration, are very, very healing, and they give our bodies what we need on every level.
That’s a very different experience than eating things that have no nutritional value and, in fact, have properties that tend to imbalance us.
It matters how we cook our food and how we serve our food, and how we eat it, and how we share it. If you’re cooking with wonderful fresh ingredients and with love in your heart as you’re cooking it and serving it, I believe that has a very different result and feel than someone who’s angry when they’re cooking, for instance.
KOL: As in the movie Like Water for Chocolate?
Susan Lord: Yes, exactly, exactly, that’s why food is so holistic . . . Psychological, spiritual, physical, emotional--[food] affects us on all these levels.
KOL: I hear the same thing over and over about changing food habits: it has to become one of the most important things. Is that where you’re coming from?
Susan Lord: Well, one of the things that I think we’re in danger of in Western medicine as we begin to embrace nutrition more and more is that it’s going to become a prescription, that I’m going to sit here and say, “You shouldn’t eat that, you bad girl,” or, “You should eat this, and if you don’t, you’re gonna get heart disease.” It becomes reduced to little more than taking heart medicine.
What I want to do is make food so attractive to people that something deep inside of them says, “I want that. I want that vitality. I want food to be a centerpiece in my family life.” Whether you have a windowsill garden and you want to start with just one herb that’s sitting on your kitchen windowsill, a little fresh basil or dill, and put that in some dishes. That’s an amazing experience to actually plant a seed, grow a plant, and eat it, and feel that.
And for children to have that experience is really amazing. Most of them don’t even know what a farm looks like, or where food comes from, so getting back in touch with the earth is really, really important. And then, what it’s like to go shopping when you’re not thinking, “This is a bummer. I have to squeeze this in between work and getting home, and I’m late,” but you create that time once a week to make your list, and think about who you’re cooking for.
This inspires us to enjoy it--really look and smell the different produce, see what’s in season, what looks especially good. Coming in with a different attitude, allows you to embrace the shopping instead of relegating it to cleaning the toilet. Y’know?
KOL: I do know. (Laughter)
Susan Lord: And I know that, too. That’s the paradigm shift--embracing this whole way of letting food be your medicine. In so many cases, when people can just begin this process--it’s not all or nothing--so many of their symptoms begin to go away.
KOL: Say I'm a mother and I come to see you. I’m overwhelmed and want to eat better, but I also have three kids to feed and please?
Susan Lord: First of all, when mothers come to me, and they’re coming to me about their children, I ask them to just put them on the back shelf for the time being. If there are two parents, I work with both of them. I need both of them to be on board. It’s very, very hard if, for example, the father is bringing in lots of potato chips . . . and it’s in the cabinets and the kids see the father eating that kind of thing.
That’s the first issue to deal with before we even think about the kids. The second is to really understand the mother’s relationship to food, because she’s teaching her children her own belief systems about food, and so until the mom has done her own work, she can’t ask her children to do anything differently. They’ll feel it; they'll feel the split. There’s a wholeness that the mother needs to have with her own relationship to food before she can help anyone else.
KOL: So when you’re working with a patient on improving her health, do you start with food?
Susan Lord: What’s interesting is that food will bring up almost every psychological complex that people have in their lives. Whether it’s belief systems about not having enough, or you think you don’t deserve having wonderful food, or you think you need to meet everybody else’s needs before you can tend to your own . . . wherever you feel like you aren't fulfilling who you are, those blocks will often come up as you start talking about food.
I have a patient, a young woman, who came to see me for a life-threatening illness that involved her gut. We started by looking at the way she was spending her time, what was taking energy from her instead of giving energy. This took us into what she thought about herself and how she relates to her friends. We looked at the way she was raising her children. We looked at her relationship with her husband.
And, of course, we also looked at food. This was her hardest issue . . . she was panicked about it. She felt like she was going to have to give up the last thing in her life because of this illness. So we worked very, very slowly with her diet and began to make small changes.
She’s been in total remission for six months. But it had to be the emotional stuff first. Food was the last thing I could get to. It was really about the things that were draining her energy.
KOL: If I want to have a relationship with food that’s based on wholeness and sustaining energy, how do I begin today?
Susan Lord: The place to start is in this moment and what you are feeling. Are you hungry right now? If you are, what do you want to eat? Don’t worry about 20 minutes from now. What are you feeling right now? Let’s say you think you’re hungry. Ask yourself what you’re feeling. Your answer might be, “Well, I’m actually bored, and it’s 10:00 am, and that’s about the right time for a snack.” And you have this feeling in you that you need something, but when you actually look at it, it may not be physical hunger. But it’s a hunger for something.
KOL: When you asked, “Are you hungry?” I thought, “Yes, I am,” but I just had lunch. And when I ask myself what the real feeling is, the answer is: I feel energetic. I need to move my body. It isn’t: I need food, but I need to exercise! Those are two very different answers. More often than not, I eat instead because I’m not stopping long enough to ask.
Susan Lord: And this is why living a mindful life is the underpinning for all healing. It doesn’t even matter what the issues are--the more mindful you can be, the more natural and healing your choices will be. So if you think about it that way, you only have to live one minute at a time.
Susan Lord, MD, is an integrative physician in Kripalu’s Institute for Integrated Healing who specializes in complementary and alternative medicine using mind-body approaches, energy medicine, functional medicine, nutrition, and lifestyle counseling. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, she was the director of nutrition programs for the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington DC.
Don’t Miss Susan Lord, MD, leading the Kripalu Healthy Living program Food as Medicine, April 27-May 2, 2008.
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