On ‘being under the weather’, the beauty of acute illness and why I love sugar.
Don't get your knickers in a knot. I'm still a wellness gal. Just a more happy one.
Dearest gentle reader,
I have loved that letter opening ever since I binged Bridgerton last year.
You know what else I haven’t forgotten from that season finale? That quote where Penelope says “Gossip is information, and information connects people” and honestly, I think about that quote a lot.
I’ve been under the weather this week. I wrote about that term ‘under the weather’ on Substack notes briefly.
Back in the day, before Louis Pasteur (fraudulently by the way, you can dig in if you want to) declared that germs are the cause of illness, people believed quite literally in the term ‘I am under the weather.’
When people were sick, they attributed it to atomospheric and electrical changes.
When the weather changed, the bodies responded. I’ll always remember my nanna hurrying to put a jacket on me after I finished a 90 minute soccer game in the freezing cold rain. “Put a jacket on, you’ll catch a chill!”.
It’s the same to this day. Only now, we’ve got so much more in the form of environmental and electrical assaults. Our bodies have to find a way to adjust to these assaults— acute illness is the way it does this. I’m sure you notice that people seem to be ‘under the weather’ more often throughout the year now.
More germs? Or more in the way of chemical, environmental and electrical interference?
Feeling ‘under the weather’— fever, aches, tiredness. It’s the body adjusting to its environment.
I’ve come to see acute moments of illness as something to appreciate. I really mean that.
Hippocrates said “Give me a fever and I can cure any disease.”
A fever isn’t a glitch. It’s the perfect response to the assaults of an imperfect world.
I feel brand new after a fever. Whenever I’ve had mastitis, I have felt completely reborn after breaking a fever and getting into the sweats. Everything relaxes into its correct perspective. Things I was stewing over before become ordered. Fevers don’t just serve the body, but the life. They burn away what’s old, what’s irrelevant, and they leave us purified and clear.
I always notice in my kids, that they’re different after a fever— they mature. It’s like a perfectly designed alchemical process has taken place to help them move to their next phase as growing humans.
It burns away all that isn’t important. Doesn’t belong. Is in the way.
When you look at it from a German New Medicine standpoint, the ‘healing phase’ is often when the symptoms are present. We’ve just resolved a conflict, and the symptoms are the tissues responding to the resolution. I’ve come to learn that whenever we get anything like snotty noses, tummy ache, headache— to ask “what resolved right before this began?”
In my home, we’re not ‘sick’ a lot. But I’ve learned to appreciate the importance of acute illness, and how strengthening it is for a body to go through that process fully. We celebrate that our body is actively responding to the environment. That we are alive and dynamic in our relationship with the world. And that we rest deeply in the love and intelligence in which our body was designed.
I wrote briefly this week on Substack notes about sugar. I wrote that I believe sugar is going to be one of the things that makes a comeback in the wellness world— especially for women. Hey, we can all have our opinions. I’m not sharing every single nuance of this conversation but an over-arching belief that being anti-sugar is not good for women.
When I was deep in the cleansing world, we used to say that how you are with fruit is how you are with the sweetness of life. Is there anything sweeter than the sweetness God provides in fruit and honey?
I saw a video the other day of quite an influential woman saying that ‘just a quarter of an apple is enough to add visceral fat to the body’.
I’m sorry, what?
I have sat in many different seats when it comes to wellness approaches. I love digging around to find ‘ways’ that might best suit a body, but that still give freedom. I believe that some people do really well with some structure and discipline with their eating, and that having something to ‘follow’, is actually life giving, not life taking.
Not everyone is in the position to be ‘intuitively eating’. Some are too highly emotional, and some have other things going on which means that following a protocol is the most supportive thing for them.
I also believe that sometimes, following a protocol can be a way to grip too hard onto a sense of control and can be rooted in disorder. We all know this.
Life can flow between the two. There can be seasons of tightening up, there can be seasons of loosening up. If you’re European, you stay loose because your wellbeing is not dependent on ‘correct eating’ but on beautiful eating. You walk every morning to the Boulangerie or to the ‘Cafe and you have a croissant with coffee and sugar with your friends. You walk home. You walk everywhere. Your sense of community is rich, your joy high, your movement natural. A croissant, bad? What? I don’t have time in my beautiful life for this nonsense.
We spend too much time analysing food in the wealthy western world, and not enough time on the many other elements of health and wellbeing— namely beauty, community, purpose and natural movement that is outdoors, everyday, regardless of weather.
I have deeply explored many perspectives when it comes to ‘ways to eat’. You probably know that my origins are in exercise physiology/bioenergetics and that my honours thesis was on exercise/appetite/food. I have studied with Natalia Rose and others in the cleansing world and I resonate with parts of several philosophies.
I love to dig. I love to experiment. But the more I dig the more I realise that people need different things at different times.
I by no means believe I have it all figured out.
The only way I know something is by trying it for myself.
Reading it in a peer reviewed journal is not enough for me.
We all know that there are holes in a lot of science and that our bodies run on an intelligence that supercedes it.
That’s not to say I don’t pay attention, but personal experimentation is my main method of research.
I have tried many things and when I say tried, I mean immersed myself in different ‘ways’.
For example, I lived years of food combining— a premise where for example you eat proteins and starches separately, fruit on its own. At its core, the essence of this ‘way’ is that eating simply is better for digestion and that some food groups produce enzymes that when produced together, slow the digestion process. It’s thought that this could result in certain foods staying too long in the gut and causing issues like over-fermentation and sluggish digestion. That’s the high level version.
I have rested into a place I call Body Luxury— high standards, but relaxed.
I don’t measure my macros or fuss over protein, but that’s not to say that if there came a point where I felt I needed to ‘follow’ something again and change tactics, I would.
There are seasons for it all.
But back to sugar.
In the last year I’ve dug into Ray Peat’s work. I don’t adopt all of it, but I have experimented with it. To sum it up in brief:
His work is rooted in bioenergetic principles and focus on a healthy metabolism. He is big on gelatinous meats— to buffer against the tryptophan from eating a lot of muscle meats (it can be inflammatory). He’s big on clean dairy, if tolerated (I personally eat sheep and goats cheese). He’s really big on avoiding PUFA’s and ultra processed foods, and replacing all Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids with saturated fats like butter, ghee and coconut oil. He encourages oysters once a week, liver once a week and is big on the importance of sugar.
“When energy is adequate, the body makes the right decisions”
“Sugar is protective. It lowers stress hormones and supports the thyroid.”
“The idea that sugar is the enemy has done more harm than good.”
He goes deep into progesterone, which he calls the hormone of safety, of growth and of peace, and into Estrogen which he calls ‘the stress hormone’.
What Ray Peat is also big on is personal experimentation and working with your thyroid hormones. He encourages you to find what works best for your own bio-individual self.
“Science became theology when it stopped being skeptical.”
“You are allowed to question everything, even what they call science”.
But measuring and calculation aside— I think about sugar and I let my intuition tell me some things about it.
The idea that sugar is deeply protective, anti-stress and signals ‘safety’ to the body makes sense to me.
For centuries, sugar was a rare and precious luxury. To enjoy sweetness was sensual and celebratory.
Sure, now as a culture we over do it. But is it the sugar we over do or all of the other crap that goes with it— the crappy fats, the artificial ingredients, all the bad food combinations, the poor sunlight, the indoor and sedentary lifestyles, and not to mention all of the crap in our psyche which guilts us to death about everything we eat?
There are SO MANY other issues around sugar, that have nothing to do with the sugar.
I have said that I believe that sugar will make a comeback in the wellness world. Women will realise that sugar hasn’t been the problem so much as ‘all the other stuff’.
Sugar when eaten gratefully, naturally, and SIMPLY, is better digested than a health food bar with sugar alcohols loaded with 12 ingredients and a tonne of conflict in the psyche.
Of course, I’m generalising. But I know my readers are intelligent and discerning.
We’re probably all guilty of an era where we would work out on an empty stomach. Think about how our body perceived this— No food. No sugar. Is she being chased by a rabid animal? Adrenaline and cortisol are high.
Ray Peat says “Sugar is what tells the body— You are safe, you don’t need to fight.”
Our wellness world right now is so big on protein. Have 30g of protein before working out! They say. You see shredded women on IG reels adding 30g of whey protein to their coffee, unsweetened almond milk, no sugar before a workout.
Once upon a time, way back when, I would’ve agreed with this approach but I just don’t now. We need the sugar to signal safety.
Not just safety, but abundance.
I have coconut water everyday. We go through it like we live in Thailand and we have a coconut tree in our backyard. I love the extra hydration, the potassium and the fact that i’m not just guzzling plain water all day (even though I have a whole house filter as well as a fancy japanese drinking water system).
This might be controversial for some, ‘too much sugar’ some might say, but as a breastfeeding mum, it invigorates me. I tell all mums who are about to give birth to load up on coconut water for their recovery. If it’s winter, don’t put it into the fridge because we know you need warming foods and nothing cold.
I have noticed that since making SURE I include regular natural sugars into my days, I feel calm. It alleviates my anxiety. My body knows that it’s safe. I’m not starving. I am not at risk. Abundance and safety is the message.
If I have coffee, I always have it after eating, and I always have it with creamy milk and sugar. Sometimes I’ll add collagen, but the organic whole milk + the maple or honey + some glyceine or a big fat home made gelatinous marshmallow is enough for me.
My drink of the moment is a mocha— organic cacao with some boujee additions, maple or honey, organic whole milk, some glyceine powder or a big fat gelatinous home made marshmallow.