Conversation with George

By: Jera Jones

February 4, 2009

George: I'm carrying this big abdomen around with me, and it is embarrassing. I don't know what to do about it. You don't seem to have that problem, Jera. What do you do? What would you do if you were me?

Jera: Just change your diet. That is the easy part. You probably already know that. The real questions are what do you change about your diet? And how do you enable and motivate yourself to do it? You've probably heard some things about the high protein diet, and you probably know people who have tried it. I eat a very low protein diet, but I get plenty of protein. The high protein diet is what people want to hear. Eat all the meat and dairy you want and loose weight. The only problems are that it doesn't really work, and it will ruin your health. Well, there are actually more problems than that. It is very hard on the environment, is cruel to animals, squanders water, etc. But can you satisfy your hunger with a small salad? Probably not, and do you have the stamina to chew through a large salad at this point? That's what I do, but how could it work for you?

George: I don't really care for salad.

Jera: You know there are lots of ways of making salads. There are blended salads, juiced salads, and lots of so-called "raw gourmet" dishes that are basically glorified salads designed to mimic foods that people are used to eating such as pizza, lasagna, meat loaf, et cetera. There are fermented salads that utilize micro-organisms to pre-digest the vegetables a little.

George: That sounds a little gross.

Jera: What, the fermented salad?

George: Yeah, that part about the micro-organisms pre-digesting the vegetables.

Jera: You may have had your perceptions of gross shaped a little by the media. If you can eat a piece of meat without thinking about a gross slaughter-house scene, or drink a glass of milk without picturing a sickly cow dragging around an over-sized udder, you are amazing to someone who has watched all the videos on animal rights.

George: Okay, I admit it. I eat some gross things!

Jera: Thank you. The raw ideal of Natural Hygiene does not include ferments. And I think a completely healthy person would not require ferments. I myself am not there yet. I still need the help of friendly micro-organisms to enable me to thrive on a diet of raw greens, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. I really notice a difference in my skin when I include them in my diet as opposed to when I don't.

George: Your skin? What's wrong with your skin?

Jera: Well, if you look close you'll see these little pink blemishes, kind of dry patches, on my face and hands.

George: My mom has those too. I think it just comes with age.

Jera: That may be true, but if I can heal my skin, I'd like to do it.

George: Have you seen a dermatologist?

Jera: Yes, but I didn't choose to use the drug he prescribed.

George: Well there you go then.

Jera: You honestly think the drug would have fixed my problem without causing more problems? More likely it would have caused more problems without fixing the original one.

George: You don't know until you try.

Jera: Well, I read the list of ingredients, then I did some internet research and found that one of the main ingredients, cortisone, was really bad news. Then it had preservatives in it, prop- something, which is basically isopropyl alcohol, which is a liver toxin, and not something I want to put on my face every day. Are you on any medications?

George: Not at the moment. I finished a course of antibiotics and decongestants a couple months ago for a bad cold I had, but I'm good now. My wife is taking Prosaic, and my son is taking Ritalin.

Jera: Do you ever feel like a pharmaceutical junky?

George: What?

Jera: Never mind. It is going to be tough to change your diet enough to get rid of your bulge. Your family may not give you the support you need. People get really vulnerable emotionally when they try to make improvements on their diets and need family members to be supportive. If they are not, you may need to find support somewhere else. Some people have been helped in Overeaters Anonymous. Other people compare OA to the blind helping the blind. None of them really know how to achieve dietary health.

George: If I want it bad enough, I'll do it.

Jera: I can tell you right now, eat only fruit, salads and nuts, but you will have two main problems. You won't necessarily believe that I know what I am talking about because other people, even so-called experts, will tell you something completely different, and you physically and emotionally will not be able to do it.

George: How do you do it?

Jera: I had a bit of a head start because I was raised on whole foods. My parents didn't serve any refined products, any spaghetti, white bread, candy or soda, et cetera to me when I was young. That is what I call step one in the diet transition toward raw and living foods. Get rid of everything refined. This is a difficult step for most people, but it was done for me by my parents.

George: But you ate meat -

Jera: Not only ate it, we raised and butchered our own!

George: So what did you eat on a typical day while you were growing up?

Jera: For breakfast we had wheat cereal -

George: Wheat flakes or shredded wheat?

Jera: Neither. Hot cooked wheat cereal freshly ground in a grist mill by my father, with goat milk and honey. .

George: Was it good?

Jera: It got eaten, I'll say that. It was a little monotonous having the same thing every morning. On weekends when we had more time to prepare something a little more elaborate, we ate fried eggs from our free-range hens with bacon which was usually store-bought, but occasionally came from one of the hogs we raised and butchered. Sometimes we made whole-wheat pancakes. Occasionally my mom yielded to pressure from me and my siblings and bought a box of Wheat Chex or something.

George: Eggs from free-range hens are supposed to be really good.

Jera: Yeah, I think I stopped eating eggs when my kids were small. The kids thought it was gross when we opened an egg and there was a chick inside. And I think the whole sensitivity to animals thing was just growing on me. Eventually we gave the chickens away, and I haven't eaten eggs since. But you are right. Free range chickens are healthier, happier, and lay more nutritious and better tasting eggs.

George: So lunch on a typical day when you were young, what would that have been?

Jera: My mom was pretty good at making bread for our lunches. I have two brothers near me in age and a sister ten years younger. She was a stay-at-home mom and kept busy with bread making, making a lot of our clothes, gardening and caring for animals. So I had a sandwich made from my mom's home made bread, or a roll, with peanut butter and honey and an apple or banana most days. On weekends we just ate fruit. At family gatherings we sometimes tell stories about how other children reacted to our food at school. My sister likes to tell about the time she brought a head cheese sandwich to school and had to explain to her friends what it was.

George: That's got to be a good story.

Jera: Yeah, my sister's a crack-up. None of my grandparents were farmers. My parents learned about farming from books, and they did a pretty good job of it. So after reading up on how to use all the parts of a pig, they, amazingly, did just that. I don't remember the recipe, but head cheese is just like it sounds, brains, eyeballs (well maybe not eyeballs), jowls, facial muscles, ears boiled in a pot and it gets gelatinous when cooled and you can slice it. Nice taste.

George: Don't know if I'd have a stomach for it.

Jera: Well I definitely wouldn't now, but when you are young you eat what you are given and learn to like it if you can. It's funny though, I never liked yams when I was young, but I love them now.

George: So for dinner, I suppose you had more of your home-butchered meat.

Jera: Yes. We had goat milk most of the time, so there were always baby goats being born so there would be milk available. The males would be castrated and raised for about a year and then butchered, so we had practically an endless supply of goat stakes which my parents broiled for dinner most evenings.

George: Was it good?

Jera: My brothers and I would fight over the biggest piece. We didn't like drinking our milk though. Sometimes my parents would make us sit at the table until the glasses were empty. Maybe we should have been Jewish; they wouldn't have had both meat and milk at the same meal.

George: Really? Why is that?

Jera: There is something in the Bible about not boiling a kid in its own mother's milk, so they take precautions that that won't happen. It is good too. One of the principals of Natural Hygiene is two different proteins should not be eaten together.

George: You mentioned Natural Hygiene before. What is that?

Jera: Well, Natural Hygiene is like it sounds too, being natural about your personal care and personal care includes food. Dr. Herbert Shelton wrote a lot of books about Natural Hygiene from the 1930s to 1970s. I have read two of them. My husband has read a lot more of them than I have. In one of the books I read, Fasting for Renewal of Life, Dr. Shelton wrote a lot about the habits of animals. Animals fast when they are sick or injured. Animals eat only the foods they were designed to eat. They don't cook or mess around with their food before they eat it, or mix a lot of weird combinations together. In the other book I read, Food Combining Made Easy, he taught that certain things go together like vegetables and greens, other things should be separate, like fruits, and different types of fruits, such as sweet, acid, sub-acid and melons, have certain rules about how or whether they can be combined with other types. Food Combining Made Easy was written for omnivores and there are rules about what other foods protein and starch foods can be eaten with. For instance, protein and starch is a bad combination. A steak should not be eaten with a baked potato.

George: That would change a lot of menus!

Jera: Yes it would, no hamburgers, no pizza, even a peanut butter sandwich is a protein (the peanuts) with a starch (the bread).

George: Do you suppose I could get something down at the Sidewinder that conforms to the rules of Natural Hygiene?

Jera: I know they have some salads down there, but you have to be very clear that you don't want croutons, cheese, ham, chicken, or bacon bits on your salad. That way you can have either a piece of chicken, or a piece of fish, or a hamburger patty with your salad, or if you hanker for starch more than you do protein, have a baked potato with it instead. They might also be able to bring you some steamed vegetables.

George: A cheese-free salad and a baked potato. That will raise some eyebrows.

Jera: Tell me about it. I've been different all my life. One time a kid put his finger in the whole wheat bread sandwich my mother had packed in my lunch and said, "What is that?" leaving his finger-print behind. Back in the 1950s no one had ever heard of whole wheat bread.

George: It's going to be an adventure.

Jera: Yes, it will.