cod liver oil

Erp. Pardon me. I've begun to take cod liver oil. This is how focused I've become on health and nutrition. When Yani opened the refrigerator the other day and saw the cod liver oil, she shut the door firmly, looked me in the eye, and said, "Ma. What. Are. You. Doing." She's been a trooper with my nutrition whatnot, but I lost her at the cod liver oil.

While Yani lived here in September and October, I got her to love butternut squash (research shows it takes 3 times to develop a taste for something you've been iffy about -- don't you just wish you could take part in that study? -- and you will recall that we have enough to supply Farmington with 3 servings of butternut squash per resident). She was open to cooking with coconut oil, she gave in to not having bread around, and we had kale as an appetizer most nights. When I made my first batch of almond milk, she congratulated me without even a hint of an eye roll. But the cod liver oil? I probably should have waited until she moved out before getting that.

After the cancer diagnosis, I started taking an increasing interest in the physical health of my counseling clients. Before that, when physical issues would come up in session, I would empathize like a good therapist does, and then begin looking for the emotional root of their ailment. Yes, yes, any emotional disturbance is somehow experienced in the body, but the point is that I felt like my job was to explore their emotional lives, not their refrigerator. After cancer, I started to feel less sure about that. Instead of focusing on the psychodynamic flora of someone's depression or anxiety, I wanted to hear about their intestinal flora. How they were sleeping. When they move away from blue light in the course of their day. How often they let the sun shine on their face. How much sugar they eat. How often they eat fish, or fish crammed into capsules. I found myself wanting not just to talk about their relationship with their mom, but their relationship with kale.

I can't learn enough about nutrition. It's asking a lot of a 57-year-old brain, to take all this in, but I am so hungry to learn all I can. I have a pile of flashcards: "Fat Soluble Vitamins" this one says on one side. "D, A, K, E," I say to myself before flipping over the card. On the fridge: little notes about soluble vs. insoluble fiber, insulin resistance, grams of sugar to a teaspoon. I'm taking a year-long course on holistic nutrition, and beyond that I take all the webinars and go to all the seminars I can find about nutrition, dietary theories, varsity-level smoothie making. I am workshopping my way to nutritional Nirvana. If there is such a place, it's overflowing with kale, I can tell you that much. People there sleep on beds of it.

I've added a branch of health coaching to my practice so that I can work with people who want to make dietary and lifestyle changes but don't know how. I'm looking for clients who are recalibrating after a cancer diagnosis, or recovering from chemotherapy. Or people who may finally be concerned about gradually creeping up toward “diabesity.” They may just know they're off track. I'm finding that I feel pretty passionately about this new mission -- I feel like I need to do my part to keep us all from going to hell in a bread basket. In terms of our collective health, the sky really is falling, like in that book "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs." 

Along with the new branch of my practice, I've made remaining healthy (and happy) the organizing principle in my life. Followers who have been with this blog from the start will recall that mid-chemo I wondered if I was supposed to be making a sea change in my life. I didn't want to. I liked where my little boat was going. I don't know if I am embracing holistic nutrition as a way of staving off early death, or as a way of living a long, energized life. Sometimes I can't tease those apart. 

This is a sea change for me. It's not the answer to everything, but I now have a set of (erp) oars.