Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen – Enlightened Eating
Cassandra Ohlsen, MD talks about her new book, Enlightened Eating and how you can change your relationship with food to save both your health and our environment.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Enlightened Eating – The Eightfold Path to Health
Interview by Lisa Berry
To listen to the full interview of Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen by Lisa Berry on the radio show Light On Living on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
Interview with Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen
Lisa Berry: I was gifted and able to read this book called Enlightened Eating, and I’ll tell you, it was a bit of a scary start at first,
for usually when we ask for there to be light shed on something, a subject, we don’t always know what that’s going to be. We don’t know what’s going to be revealed.
So, I am so happy to bring on Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen, and she is the author of Enlightened Eating. And the beautiful subtitle to that is The Eightfold Path to Health, and it truly is.
I want to share a little bit about Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen with you. She’s an MD, and she’s a diplomat certified in internal medicine. She received her medical degree from Keck School of Medicine at USC. Dr. Ohlsen has practiced medicine for 25+ years and has lived and practiced in the Monterey area for 20. Her dedication to global health led her to Africa and India, where she worked with Mother Teresa at her Home for Dying Destitute and her children’s home in Calcutta. Before Monterey, she had a medical practice in Pasadena, CA and taught “The Art of Being a Doctor” at USC School of Medicine. Dr. Ohlsen also cared for the medically underserved at a Los Angeles clinic helping to rebuild community health after the Watts riots
So, Enlightened Eating is her first book, and I’m just happy to welcome you, Dr. Ohlsen. Thank you so much for sharing this time with us.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Oh, thank you so much, Lisa.
Lisa Berry: I started the book, and I thought, ooh, I can’t wait, Enlightened Eating, I love plant-based diets and a way of having monk philosophy. But then, you started talking about the reality of food and where it came from and came from. And you do shed light on a very difficult for so many levels; we have to have that light shed on these things.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Yes, it’s true, it’s true. You know, Enlightened Eating is about changing your health by changing how you eat, and it also changes how you think and acts with regards to food. It transforms your relationship with food from the inside out.
I see patients every day that can be helped by changes in their diet. And one of the people that comes to mind is my patient named Butch who has a history of heart disease. He had to have bypass heart surgery. And then a few years after the bypass surgery, he had a heart attack.
He was having a stint put in, and his heart stopped. They revived him and didn’t put the second stint in, let him go home and told him to come back in a couple of months to put the second stint in.
Right after that, he became my patient, and we talked about how he felt such despair because he didn’t think he could take care of himself. He was waiting for that next heart attack to happen. And when I talked to him about plant-based eating and how plant-based, no oil eating, especially for someone with severe heart disease helps take control of your future, he felt hopeful.
And he and his wife changed their diet completely to plant-based, no oil eating. And he went back to get his second stint in a few months later, and he didn’t need it. Then years later he stuck with this plant-based diet, he went and had his arteries checked and the graphs from his bypass checked, and they were more open years later than they were when they were installed.
Lisa Berry: It’s like anti-aging.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Anti-aging. So, he was able to take control of his health by doing that, and some so many people could benefit from plant-based eating.
Lisa Berry: I love that you said in that story there with Butch is that he was waiting for the next heart attack and that he didn’t think he could do it. And I think that’s where a lot of people even get stuck in the first place.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Yes. And that’s one of the reasons that I have the Buddhist psychology in the book because people don’t know how to change. And the Buddhist psychology allows you to change without feeling guilty, without feeling shame. It’s very simple. It’s very direct and objective.
And so, what you do is you first identify the issue that you want to work on. You identify the problem. Maybe you want to lose weight. Maybe you want to lower your cholesterol. Maybe you want to handle your blood sugar. Then you identify what got you to that place. Were you overeating? Are you eating too many sweets? Are you not exercising?
Then once you figure out the causes, you start to eliminate the causes, either incrementally or all at once. And then you start to live with the solution, and you start to question yourself about your thoughts and what’s helping you and what’s not helping you. So, you would want to encourage thoughts that would help you accomplish the goals that you want.
One of my patients is a diabetic, and she had a scare. She had to be put in the hospital for very, very high blood sugar. And before, she was kind of casual about it. If she went to a birthday party, she would have cake. But, this time, after that hospitalization, she realized her goal was to be healthy and not to eat that piece of birthday cake. That birthday cake didn’t contribute to her long-term goal of being healthy.
And so, for the first time at a birthday party, she skipped the birthday cake, and she didn’t feel deprived. She felt good about it because she knew she was working toward her long-term goal of health.
Lisa Berry: The reward wasn’t the taste of the cake or the cake. It was the step closer to the goal. What I kind of got from what you’re saying is that when we focus on the goal, that goal almost gives us the fuel and the power behind us like, no, I’ve got to dig and find out who is responsible. Oh, my gosh, it’s me, and I have to do something.
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: Exactly, exactly, you’re exactly right. I mean, problems don’t solve themselves. And, you know, first, we have got to put some thought into it and realize that we’re the ones responsible. We can stay the way we are, or we can make our lives better.
Lisa Berry: I wanted to ask you; so, say we have our goal, and now we’re really taking responsibility, we’re making choices, and then, oops, we fall, we do something that we didn’t, abide by our choices. But by following the Buddhist philosophy, there is no shame or guilt involved. Why is that? How do we do that? How do we remove that guilt and shame?
Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen: I think because when you look at the issue objectively, you’re working toward this long-term goal. It’s not going to be perfect. You are going to make mistakes. You’re not going always to do everything that’s right. But, your trajectory is good. You know, your final goal is good.
And once you start eating healthier, once you stop eating fast food and processed food, unhealthy food, your thinking changes. It takes a few months, but your thinking changes about food and yourself and about what you can and cannot do. And it propels you to be able to do better for yourself.
That’s what the eightfold path to health is about. It’s about talking with yourself and using all these positive reinforcements. So, you talked yourself out of doing that and talked yourself into doing something that was healthy. And you can use your thoughts, your actions, your effort, your awareness to do that.
Continue to page 2 of the Interview with Dr. Cassandra Ohlsen – Enlightened Eating
