Elephant in the Room: Stress!

Why are we so stressed out?

To detox, we need to understand stress.

Two Types of Stress:

To understand the causes of stress, we need to first know there are two kinds of stress: acute stress and chronic stress.

See, stress in our daily life is just like hurt or pain - they are there to protect us from further harm.

When people or animals experience an immediate threat to their well-being, they know something is wrong and danger might be there if we don't do something, thus acute stress occurs to alert us. Think about when we could not find our wallet or cellphones, the stress response kicks in to help us respond to the event. Once the event is over, our body returns to normal and the stress is gone.

These days, when people talk about stress, they usually mean chronic stress that's always there, in the background ready to rise up.

Animals don't seem to experience chronic stress, except those that live around human beings (yeah, and we thought they were the trouble makers.) - those we abuse or keep in cages. When left along, animals don't appear to have chronic stress like we do.

Three Causes of Chronic Stress:

There are three reasons why we are far more chronically stressed than animals or our prehistorical ancestors.

1. We changed our environment drastically

Wild animals live in pretty much the same environments like they have been living for millions of years in their evolution. We don't. We have changed our environment so much that most things that create chronic stress are the recent developments of civilization and culture, including traffic jams, computer crashes, constant interruptions and noise, air travel, financial market mess and stock market volatility.

2. We changed from being in immediate-return environment to being in delayed-return environment, thus uncertainty about the future rise.

No, I am not talking about the interest rate and long term treasury bond.

Wild animals live in immediate-return environment, while we found ourselves in a delayed-return environment ever since we started to rely on farming about 10,000 years ago (at the start of the agricultural revolution when we began to settle into permanent communities, build houses and grow our own food.)

In the immediate-return environment, animals get immediate feedback to know how things are going, or if their effort, responses to events work. (Well, if you get eaten, you get eaten, but at least you know the outcome right then.) Our ancestors also lived like that until very recently. They wandered around, searching for foods, dealing with threats or predators, interacting with other human beings and raising kids. Day to day, moment to moment they had constant feedback about how they were doing in meeting goals. Prehistorically, people couldn't do much for the future so they were focusing on meeting their day to day needs and there were very little uncertainty about how well they were doing.

These days we spend most of our time and effort for future goals. Can this relationship work out? Can we find a job after four years of college? When we put all our time and effort into something, there is no assurance that our hard work will pay off and the uncertainty about the future causes us constant stress.

3. To make things worst, there is often nothing we can do about it.

Just like the return is delayed, the threat is also delayed in the future, and it is in our mind rather than immediately present, even though it's every bit real. Our human nature wants to take action to remove the stressors but we find ourselves not able to do anything about it at the moment. Therefore, we feel frustrated and stressed out when we worry about things in the future that we have no control over.


Well, happiness and stresses are both connected to our well-being and eating well is part of the whole so we have to take a holistic approach. When we are off balance, we tend to stress eat without really enjoying, savoring and tasting whatever food has to offer and that's sad.

Enjoy Your Berries!

Double Berry Soda (yield one serving): 

Ingredients: 

• Strawberry 50g
• Raspberry 50g
• Preferrably honey 20g (or sugar 12-15g)
• Lemon juice 2 tsp
• Soda water

Directions:

1. Cut strawberries into small dices. 
2. Put strawberries, raspberries, honey, lemon juice into container, mix well and chill in refrigerator for 5-6 hours.
3. Add soda water to dilute and serve.

Berry Fruit Salad (yield one serving):

Ingredients:

Salad:

• Strawberries (cut in halves), blueberries, raspberries about 10-20g of each in equal parts
• Romaine lettuce or any greens 20-30g, cut into 1 inch pieces
• Celery 20g or half stalk, chopped.
• One kiwi sliced
• 1/4 apple sliced or cut into chunks

Dressing:

• Strawberries, blueberries, raspberries in equal part, about 15g of each
• Celery 15g or half stalk, diced
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1/2 tsp honey or sugar

Directions:

1. Put all ingredients in dressing in blender and blend until smooth.
2. Combine all fruits and vegetables in a mixing bowl and pour the dressing on the salad. Mix gently and transfer to a plate. Sprinkle chopped celery on top an serve.

Cold Fruit Medley Soup with Chickpeas (yield one serving):

Ingredients:
For soup:

• 1/2 red grapefruit, about 100g, peeled and diced     
• Six strawberries, halved
• 30g raspberries (about 6-8)
• 10 dried Goji berry
• 1/8 tsp salt



Dried Goji Berry

• 1/8 tsp black pepper

• Honeydew 50g, cut into bite-size dices
• 2 tbsp cooked chickpeas or beans

Directions:

1. Soak dried goji berries in a little water to soften.
2. Put half of total red grapefruit (50g), half of total strawberries (3 strawberries),  raspberries, 10 dried goji berries, salt black pepper in blender or food processor and blend until smooth.
3. Combine the mixture with honeydew dices, the other half of red grapefruit dices, the other three strawberry halves, and cooked chickpeas. Serve.

I hope you enjoy these recipes.

Detox, is it for real?

Detox, is it really difficult? Is it necessary?

Do you feel moody, exhausted, stressed and unhappy most of the time but have no idea why? Do you want to stay healthy, energetic but can not find enough time to shop, cook or exercise, so you just grab whatever and gobble it up, hoping that will fix it for you.

The diet we have today is very different from what it used to be, so is its availability, quality and the amount we consume. On top of that, we have a very different life style. Without some understanding in the food we eat, the art of cooking we can manage, the nutrition our human body needs to function at its best, we really are just shooting in the dark, are we not?

I intend to write short articles in this blog, focusing on where to find the best deals and prepare the food in the most delicious way I know of, but since I put up "Detox" as the first word in my description line, I feel I owe it to you to explain my food philosophy before posting anything further.

You must know that some people release their pressure through emotional eating, but that starts an evil cycle of stress, eating and guilt until many chronic deceases destroy our overall wellbeing.

Most of us are not to that extreme but when it comes to something so easy to see, so tempting to grab and so ready to jump into our shopping cart. Unwittingly, we have put a lot of those in us before we find our skin dehydrated, our hair losing quickly and our metabolism slowing down.

The problem maybe that we overeat, eat the wrong things, eat in the wrong way, and eat it for the wrong reason. Maybe the real question is, what is eating us that is causing us to feel hungry and in need of instant gratification from food all the time?

Fresh food doesn't necessarily cost more. Food, doesn't have to be expensive to make us healthy, to be sustainable for our planet earth. Cooking doesn't have to take up a lot of time to make it great, soothing and relaxing after a long hard day. That's the meaning behind my description line: "Detox, Easy, Fresh, Affordable and Sustainable."  That's my idea how food should be.

To read more...