The Fundamentals

My Journey Begins

To embark on your own journey to authentic wellness, it will be helpful for you to understand the milestones I found on my own path.

The founding and ongoing changes that became New Life and the New Life Food Plan are two significant milestones to discover. When I started New Life, there were limited activities. The principle and virtually sole objective was weight loss. For the first few years, there wasn't even hiking.

In the mid-1980s, I started hearing guests talk about wanting to reduce stress and create a healthy lifestyle, but their continued impression was that weight loss was the way to do this. Late in the 1980s, I introduced an increased emphasis on health and the mind-body connection. These changes in emphasis were based mostly on my own cumulative knowledge, professional experiences, and observations of New Life guests' experiences.

Weight loss was still the underlying reason guests came to New Life, but my interaction with guests made me sense that their faith in the value of dieting and weight loss was waning.

Indeed, the early 1990s broadened the focus of health beyond weight loss to lifestyle change. By the turn of the century, I was finally hearing guests say, "Diets don't work." And through their New Life experience, they wanted to acquire a deeper understanding of what a healthy lifestyle could be and to transfer the practices presented at New Life to their lifestyles to approximate their New Life experience. They were letting go of what I call "institutional dieting." As discussed throughout this book, my reference to "institutional dieting" encompasses any of the endless, usually commercial versions of structured, frequently programmatic responses to changing your relationship with food. Institutional dieting regimes range from mere fads to intricately prescribed behaviors and foods.

Although in my view the transition away from institutional dieting is becoming a major step toward a progressive and effective path to health, only in the last few years has the concept embodied by the term wellness become a true guest objective. The inspiration burning in the heart of New Life had always been about wellness. In contrast to weight loss, New Life preferred the pursuit of wellness more comprehensively through subjective lifestyle adaptation as it relates to food and other wellness considerations.

Evidence of the consistency and ongoing pertinence of New Life's food philosophy is the persistence of New Life's food ratio. When I started New Life, Black River Produce opened in the same year. The business included two guys and a station wagon. At the time Black River introduced a unique service that offered a wide range of fruits and vegetables that were available by the piece and not by a one-case minimum. All the institutional kitchens at which I worked during the 1970s ordered only limited produce amounts that typically included iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, onions, lemons, and grapefruits.

I have been buying produce from Black River for the last forty years. Since its opening day, the biggest bill that I pay every month to feed the guests at New Life comes from Black River Produce. The second biggest bill I pay every month is to a health food co-op company for healthy grains and other items.

I have witnessed the progressing emphasis on healthy food. In the contemporary health food store, there are so many choices, many of which are more expensive. Learning to navigate a health food store or health food section will teach you that most of the products just have overpriced sugar, fat, and salt while usually having less chemicals added. I will talk about this phenomenon more in the health food section.

The third biggest bill is for commercial food and comes from an institutional food distributer. I would venture to say that any restaurant, including all the ones I have ever worked in and you have gone to, would not have the New Life purchase food ratio. More likely, a restaurant's biggest purchase amount would come from an institutional food company. When I was a cook, I remember reading a magazine titled Volume Feeding. I always thought that was so funny, realizing we often think more about the volume of food rather than quality and nutrition.

These purchase ratios will be relevant to your wellness oasis. You'll notice the locations in the grocery store where you spend time and where you select food for purchase. You should also be aware of your choices at health food stores, convenient stores, restaurants, and social events in your life. There will be more about how to do this in later chapters.

During the last forty years, I have dealt with many different food plans and diets, while never changing my New Life food philosophy. At its start, New Life was to be a new life for me, a summer during which, instead of eating unhealthy food in the...