WHAT IS MACROBIOTICS?
By Marijke De Coninck
 
Macrobiotics is a way to understand the laws of nature and to see how we are a part of them.  By living a macrobiotic life, we are able to achieve the possibility of making positive changes in our life on many different levels, because everything is connected with each other on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.

The word ‘Macrobiotics’ originally came from Greece, which means ‘big (macro) "life" (bios)’. The path to a long and healthy life in the most broad and deepest understanding of the laws of nature.  Through a macrobiotic way of living, gradually, we gain clarity in achieving our life’s aims.   Macrobiotics is not a diet or a cure, neither a therapy, it is not a treatment, a sect or a religion. I can only describe macrobiotics as a way to approach life.  Macrobiotic food CAN help us to live life more fully and to develop our spiritual consciousness.
 
It is an art of life in which you become more and more conscious. Conscious of the responsibility you have to give your life shape.  The search for, what which belongs to it, is first of all the search for our true self.  Who am I?  What am I doing here in this lifetime?

 
Arrow 1 : is our true self.  We are born with "a big dream" and we know the path we have to travel.
Arrow 2 : often we stray off, due to our up bringing, education, circumstances, society, food ... and we loose touch with our self and our life aim.
Arrow 3 : through a macrobiotic way of living, we find the clarity and the way back to our true  and Higher Self to achieve our dream in life.
 
What kind of food can I eat when I choose to cook in a macrobiotic way?

If I recommend to people what foods they are better avoiding, to improve their health, they always ask what they can eat.  For our climate, generally speaking, we eat basically whole grains, vegetables, beans, soup and seaweed. We prepare the food with a little oil, seasonings, condiments and use some seeds and nuts and small portions of fish and local fruits. Ideally, organic is chosen and as local geographically to us as possible, fresh and as least processed as possible.  We try to use the food that is grown in the season and climate we are living in.  For optimum health, it is best to create a varied cooking style, variety in taste, preparation and cooking style.  It is good to see a Macrobiotic Consultant if you want to change the way that you eat and your lifestyle.

What does ‘eating macrobiotically’ mean?

To me there is no such thing as ‘a macrobiotic diet’ because macrobiotics is an approach to life and food, eating habits can be founded on macrobiotic principles. They vary a lot depending on a person’s physical condition, the time of the year, if you are a man or a woman, which type of work you are engaged in and where you are living.

Century after century, there wasn’t the possibility of extensive transportation, people always ate what was available in their surroundings. We didn't eat kiwi fruit and bananas, this was food that was only available close to the equator.  All over the world, and for thousands of years, grain has been the most important food for human beings, however until relatively recently, in the last century, we have opted out of eating grains, vegetables and beans making them less important and have replaced them with animal food, dairy, refined sugar and processed food.

Traditionally people ate cooked grains, vegetables, beans, seeds and nuts and small amounts of animal food in a temperate climate such as the one we are living in (UK).  By neglecting our traditional, ecological food habits, we created chaos on a social, economical, ecological and medical level from which we are witnesses today (newspapers, television, neighbours, friends,...). 

Macrobiotics is not an alternative to modern life, it is not an approach to solve daily illnesses, whether they are personal, social or ecological. The Macrobiotic approach can become the awareness of our original traditional wisdom, adapted to the time we are living in and can include consideration of what we have learnt through science and materialism in the modern world.

View (vision)
 

By ‘natural lifestyle’, we understand a life style which contributes to the development of a healthy society, with healthy people.
We define ‘healthy’ as flexible, prepared to transform but with both feet on the ground.  An holistic approach, is looking how food, in the broad sense of the word, everything that comes into our body, influences our ‘being’.  Through our senses; what we see,  hear, eat, drink, breath, touch, feel (energetically) changes us on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level.

As long as we consider illness and problems as enemies we have to conquer, we live in duality. As long as we live in duality with ourselves, we are in duality with the world. Transformation happens when we step out of this duality and embrace what we have been fighting, so that we experience oneness. Oneness is harmony. If we experience harmony in ourselves, we open to the world and we create the possibility for the world to feel harmonious.

You can only achieve real health by accepting the problem or illness, becoming its ally, accepting its presence and opening yourself to its sense and meaning.
 
Illness and problems are the doors to transformation. They give us the chance to find the missing piece of our personal and social jigsaw puzzle and to integrate them.  If we encourage love to all parts of our self we become whole, who we really are, instead of "curing" the person we are suspected to be.