What is the best diet for clear, healthy skin?
Everyone has a different opinion about this, and to some extent, everyone is right. Our bodies and their needs are in constant flux, and what works for you one day may not work the next. This is why listening to your body, learning to read it like your favorite book, is so important. Dispense with dogma, and tap into your body’s deep cravings by learning to eat intuitively.
Bio-individuality aside, there are a few key tenets to creating a happy relationship with your gut-skin axis:
You aren’t what you EAT, rather you are what you DIGEST
Eating pre-industrially is the goal
Diversity in your diet is key to creating and keeping diversity of your gut microbiome
Let’s break each one down.
You are what you digest:
When we say you aren’t what you eat but rather what you digest, we mean that all those veggies you try to cram in your diet so virtuously are fairly pointless if they are exiting you at the other end in a recognizable form…… :/ We are all tough biddies here who can look at their poop to read their gut health right? Right. So take a peek because that is your best daily free barometer of whether you are digesting properly. Google bristol stool chart. You want the smooth snake shape ;) In Ayurveda, Agni is your digestive fire/force, and it is what governs the rest of your whole body health— you want the fire burning bright enough to digest everything you’re eating and transform it into matter and spirit to keep you fed and fired. While raw veggies have a role in certain diets and life phases, they are not too digestible. Look to the cultures that your grandmothers were raised in, and to the old forgotten recipe books THEIR grandmothers used. How did they prepare broccoli and cabbage? Probably not raw. Some tips to make sure you are actually DIGESTING and making good use of all those nice foods you eat:
Start meals with digestive bitters (there are a million out there!)
cook your veg
use warming digestive spices like ginger, cumin, rosemary, sage, and many more
have a post-meal digestive tea— again, ginger can do no wrong, any types of mint good too
relax while you eat. You cannot physically digest when you’re stressed.
Eating pre-industrially:
The discussion of great-great grandmothers leads us to the next point— the concept of eating ‘pre-industrially’. People love trying to brand this idea. ‘Paleo’, ‘Pegan’, ‘Ancestral’ and many more. At its core, this concept revolves around a relationship to food that is pre-capitalistic. Highly seasonal, highly local, highly participatory. It is being thrifty and using the whole animal, it’s keeping lettuce and kale on your terrace until the last possible heavy frost, it’s gleaning fallen apples, it’s joining a CSA, or a community garden. It’s developing a direct, clear connection to your food source which is exactly what the industrial food system destroys—- which also heavily impacts the diversity of…(drumroll)…. your gut microbiome! More on that in the next Q.
Getting back closer to the source of your food, whatever that means for you, is a way to reconnect with the source of ourselves—- we evolved with plants, and animals, and grains, and beans, and we adapted and changed in this complex dance with them. What is important is learning how to prepare these foods that have sacred places within so many different cultures with the patience and respect that they deserve, and which people have figured out over thousands of years of trial and error. Soak/ferment your beans and grains. Cook most of your veggies. If you eat meat, source local and utilize nose-to-tail. Hunt wild game like deer in overpopulated areas where they are destroying forest under-stories and native plant populations without their natural predators present anymore. Eat in a way that balances your hyper-local ecosystem, and you will find that your internal ecosystem magically, alchemically mirrors the balance your choices help to create. Basically:
nothing in a plastic package
as local as possible for about a million reasons from supporting your local farmers and economies to keeping your gut biome linked to your surroundings
get acquainted with old forms of food prep— fermenting, broth making, pickling, drying—- they are fun and slow and magical
find a butcher who will set aside cheaper, less asked for, more nutritious cuts for you that utilize the whole animal (bones, liver, etc)
Feed the baby aka your microbiome:
MICROBIOME. An essay unto itself. The galaxy you carry around in your gut. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of thinking I could take this or that $90 probiotic more times than I can count and have all my chronic gut/skin/hormone crap resolve like magic— but all of the emerging science is now telling us there is a much more sensible, much cheaper option that works much better. It is to eat a ton of different things every single day. Each little bug in your gut has its favorite snack, and we need to supply them with their snacks so they keep our immunity, digestion, hormone processing and allllll the rest humming along smoothly. This is not to say that probiotics don’t work period! They can help for sure. However, I have found the DIY varieties in the form of homemade milk Kefir and all the veggie lacto-ferments out there are the best long term solutions. In particular, homemade kefir is very powerful and capable of re-seeding your gut rather than just providing transient bacteria the way yogurt and fermented veggies do. Full post on Kefir coming soon. Here is what you can incorporate and rotate through on a daily basis to keep the little monsters that wear you like an avatar fed:
all veggies any veggies but cooked/fermented mostly
good fats like olive, grass fed ghee/butter, coconut
meat/seafood from the most local/ethical suppliers available to you
BEANS LENTILS CHICKPEAS any and all legumes (minus peanuts) this is very very important, soaked sprouted or fermented
resistant starch in the form of cooked and cooled potatoes, root veggies, properly prepared (soaked/sprouted/fermented) grains
fruit
fermented foods especially fermented dairy if tolerated, the best quality you can swing.
spices and herbs all day all night
Learning to eat this way doesn’t happen overnight, but transitioning to this more dynamic relationship with food can heal not only your gut and skin, but also our communities and the planet.
There’s always more to say about this, but until next time.
<3
Aviva