Food is our strongest desire. No one can conquer his or her appetite. If you eat in an imbalanced way, your appetite always wins. For example, if you take something salty, you are forced to drink. You can’t escape because the salt needs the water to make balance. If you eat something dry, you have to drink. With the best modern packaging, we still can’t keep pretzels dry. It is impossible, because the dryness seeks moisture, seeks liquid. If you eat salty pretzels you seek liquid.

We can say, who is thirsty? Are you thirsty or are the pretzels thirsty?

When you eat the pretzels it is the same thing. There is no difference anymore.

If your condition is not balanced, then you can’t control your appetite. Even though you know what to do, you can’t do it. The secret is learning how to make a balance for your condition, so that you can naturally start to control your appetite. Everything changes to its opposite. The current approach to losing weight is restricting yourself. But when you restrict yourself, you want to eat. Of course to lose weight we have to have some restriction, but the overall approach has to be one of not restricting, of satisfying ourselves.

We are a nation of underchewers. And while that may seem like a pretty minor food sin … it actually has real health implications. Read article

In macrobiotics we look at illness as a developmental progression. The first major stage, which is not really an illness itself in many cases, is our blood starting to become imbalanced. Our blood, which has hemoglobin, iron containing protein at the center, is important for maintaining our direction in life. When our blood quality is strong, it is easier to maintain a good direction. When our blood quality starts to become weaker, it is easier to lose our direction. Also, our sensitivity is affected. Once we have a disorder with our blood, which includes allergies and skin diseases, we become much more emotional than we were before and emotional sensitivity starts to change. We start to become more sensitive, overly sensitive, or start to lack sensitivity in certain areas. It can go from one extreme or the other.

From there, illness passes to the next level, emotional disorders. Here, emotional imbalances, which started on a previous level of blood, start to become more fixed or deeper. This then becomes our state of being, where we have free-floating fears or anxieties and become more depressive or angered. Our view of life or our approach to life starts at this point to be affected, in the area of so-called emotional disorders. Finally, from emotional disorders, we develop organ or gland problems. This is the area where most modern problems fall, heart disease as well as diabetes and chronic hypoglycemia. Intermittent hypoglycemia we can classify on the level of blood.

It is not by accident that emotions are between our blood quality and our organs or gland quality. Emotions play a kind of balancing or harmonizing role in our lives. We will look at this more next week.