ADHD | BLOOD SUGAR | LIVING/RAW | SOBRIETY | TEENS

The Suppers mission is to provide safe and friendly settings where people with food-related health challenges can develop and manage their own personal transition to a healthier lifestyle.

Logical Miracles, Stories of Hope and Healing from The Suppers Program.

Welcome to The Suppers Programs!

Wouldn’t you just love to:

Feel great
Lose food cravings
Look younger
Enjoy the foods that are good for you
Greet every day with brightness and energy

At Suppers we recognize that most of our major health, mental health and addiction problems are at least partly caused by environmental toxins and a compromised food supply. So we teach “nutritional harm reduction”, that is to say, gentle manageable changes taken at one’s own pace and on one’s own terms to reduce the consequences.

In keeping with Dr. Rogers’s holistic view, the Suppers Programs offer people a support group where they can make good matches between health problems and lifestyle solutions. These might include switching to healthier versions of favorite snacks, using supplements to reduce cravings, eating regularly at the family table, or working on supportive relationships. Whether the challenge is depression, anxiety, problems with alcohol, obesity, diabetes, or learning issues, the physical brain is a key player. And its role is often overlooked in our medical and recovery cultures. That’s why we focus on diet and lifestyle changes that include the physical body in the health restoration and addiction recovery process.

We understand that from your point of view, however, the labels are very important. So we have Suppers Programs and literature for people who identify with the following:

Families with ADHD
The need for Stable Blood Sugar
Help maintaining Sobriety
Improving the eating habits of Teens
Learning to use more Raw or Living foods

Literature specific to these topics is accessible from the purple menu bar at the top of every page of the Suppers Programs web site and all universal Suppers Programs information can be accessed from the green menu bar.

All of the Suppers Programs literature is available free as PDF files. Most of the articles are relevant for anyone whose family health or mental health challenges include a combination of depression, anxiety, or learning issues and obesity, diabetes or problems with alcohol. Why?

Because the diagnosis is inconsequential compared to the biochemical and environmental causes.

Is The Suppers Programs Right For You?

The Suppers Programs are table-based support groups for people who are oriented toward prevention or who would like to use a whole food and lifestyle approach to address chronic health challenges. There are no fees but the price of your own groceries.

Do you even know if your diet and lifestyle are preventing you from living a full and healthy life?

Fill out this short beginner's questionnaire to see if a Suppers program is for you.

Suppers Meetings

Suppers meetings currently serve people in central New Jersey. For information about meetings and facilitating, please contact us at 609-921-0441 or .

Background

The Suppers Programs are an outgrowth of Suppers for Sobriety, a table-based recovery group for alcoholics and their loved ones who are ready to make diet and lifestyle changes to support more comfortable sobriety.

It quickly became clear that any of the “health relatives” of alcoholics (people with obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety and learning issues) would benefit from the programs. Why? Because the underlying biochemical and environmental causes are virtually the same. While the details of the individual nutritional needs and toxicity issues vary greatly from one person to another, the general recommendations are essentially the same: eat closer to nature (whole foods), use simple assessment tools to determine what foods best suit your highly individual biological needs, manage and reduce stress better, and get into the habit of meaningful physical activity.

Here’s What We Were Up Against

Do you think healthy food is boring? Would you say you eat candy because you “like the taste”? If you are like we were, the thought of having dinner without bread or pasta, a cup of coffee, and dessert sounds depressing. At the level of one’s physical body, the huge challenge to the overweight, addicted, depressed, anxious or exhausted is to get enough support to carry you through the transition to a healthy diet. It’s hard to believe it until you experience for yourself how much more wonderful your mood is on real, whole foods than on the rushes (and crashes) of processed or non-whole foods. It’s hard to believe until you explore for yourself how the things you think of as your way of eating -- from packages and bottles --are keeping you on the rollercoaster of anxiety, depression, obesity, and diabetes.

While Suppers meetings are sometimes specific to a group (for example, concerned parents or alcoholics in recovery only), single issue groups turned out to not be necessary or even desirable. Regardless of the diagnosis, we’re all on the same blood sugar/mood chemistry rollercoaster if we’re eating primarily packaged (non-whole) foods instead of whole food. What turned out to be most important was the desire to lead a healthier life and willingness to take the good habits home to other family members. The common denominator – the addictive food supply – led us to similar solutions for people with far flung health priorities: Absent refined foods and beverages, and these problems don’t exist. Change people’s diet and lifestyle and reverse the process.

Shared Roots

Our culture – particularly our medical culture -- identifies us with labels like “depressed”, “obese”, “diabetic”, and so forth. At the Suppers groups we would like to help you turn that around and identify with your solutions instead of your labels. The Suppers programs are learn-by-doing support groups that help people who identify with any combination of the diet-driven health challenges that relate to poor insulin and blood sugar regulation and the attendant mood consequences, like:

Recovery from alcoholism and problem drinking (70–95% of “real” alcoholics are at least hypoglycemic; many end up diabetic)
Obesity or struggles with weight (often a pre-diabetic state)
Diabetes, hypoglycemia and the problems that extend from poor insulin regulation (like cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s)
Depression (for many, a diet-related condition that requires lifestyle changes, like detoxifying, having less sugar and more sunlight)
Anxiety (a natural consequence of low calorie dieting and consumption of refined carbohydrates)
Learning issues like ADD (sometimes a consequence of diet and environmental impurities as well as poor blood sugar regulation)
Triggers for certain mental health episodes (also sometimes related to poor blood sugar regulation and deficient mood chemistry)

What they all have in common is shared roots in habitual but correctible unhealthy diet and lifestyle behaviors and other environmental factors. They are all made possible by some combination of our lifestyles, environmental impurities, and the addictive food supply of highly processed foods and beverages that alter our mood chemistry.

For Chronic Illness, Medical Treatment is Not Enough

Hasn’t your doctor (or your own common sense) told you you need to eat better, reduce stress, and exercise? The solutions are simple, but for most, they are not easy to follow.

Here’s why:

Our number one national addiction is not cigarettes or alcohol. It’s food. And the national menu of processed foods is so addictive; many of us have lost the taste for foods that support life. They also sap our strength and rob us of mental and physical energy. That makes the standard American diet a gateway to obesity, diabetes, drinking problems, and numerous mental health issues.

At Suppers meetings, you can learn more about the mechanisms of blood sugar regulation and brain chemistry that lead us to make poor “automatic food choices”. More important, you’ll learn the practical solutions like:

Preparing healthy, mood-stabilizing meals from single, whole, fresh ingredients, including easy one-pot meals that take less than a half hour to prepare
Making them delicious
Getting and giving support as you learn to make accurate observations about how you relate to foods and drinks
Getting and giving support as you re-shape your palate for nutritious foods
Getting and giving support as you identify specific needs for you and your family like cooking to support recovery, stabilizing blood sugar, or blood type-specific meals
Getting and giving support as you establish new habits of mind and body, like setting doable goals for exercise and stress management
Restoring the habit of eating at a family table

All of this takes place in a support group that’s cost free except for the price of your own groceries.

What Has to Happen

Medicine and therapy are not adequate to the task. As a culture, we need to shift our priorities to identifying the biochemical and environmental causes underlying our obesity, or struggles with recovery, or mood misery, etc. This is not something we can accomplish just in medical settings; it’s something we accomplish at home with our friends and families. While drugs may be necessary while you identify the sources of your problem, they don’t resolve the chronic health conditions that result from unhealthy lifestyle. They provide relief as long as you take them. We’re grateful they do! Up to a point.

And here is the point: To the extent that drugs or therapies allow you to mask symptoms so that you don’t change your diet, stress management and exercise habits, it is to that extent that the drugs or therapies perpetuate the problem.

Obviously, in the case of diabetes or severe depression, medication must be included in a person’s plan. Still, there is no substitute for healthy living. The person with type-2 diabetes is likely to reduce dependence on medications with a stabilizing diet coupled with exercise. In addition, people with type-1 diabetes may be able to reduce the amount of insulin needed to stabilize their blood sugars if they can establish the right habits.

So if you suspect that some or all of your health and mood challenges could resolve or partially improve with diet and lifestyle support, the Suppers Programs are for you.

What’s to Eat?

Once you remove all the highly processed foods, what’s left? Real food: single, whole, fresh ingredients. All of the Suppers recipes call for ingredients that won’t spike most people’s blood sugar. The meals are flavorful, relatively simple preparations that require lots of low starch vegetables, a protein source (could be animal or vegetable), and high quality fats. Cereal grains are limited to the non-gluten grains like brown rice, and there is no sugar. Most of our recipes look like soups, stews, and chili.

Beginner Suppers Meetings

Our meetings are all about learning together and supporting each other as we learn new habits of mind and body. Beginner groups run in 8-week cycles, mostly in private homes. Meetings take about an hour and a quarter; starting with the preparation and eating of a delicious meal of whole foods. In the warmth and camaraderie of our small meetings we also:

Share educational materials
Journal
Practice easy stress management exercises
Set and monitor goals for new diet and lifestyle behaviors
Make dates for walking or exercise
Write our “Suppers Story” to share anonymously on our websites

Once you get how this works, you and your new friends at Suppers may want to share your success by facilitating your own Suppers meeting and passing it on.

Our Pledge to Members

The only price you will ever pay is the cost of your own groceries. The only investment you will ever make is your own time and effort. The payoff is more vibrant health for you and your loved ones.

At Suppers, we are very concerned about the profit motive that drives the national menu of highly processed foods, one of the strongest forces degrading the food supply, setting us up for addictions, and endangering our health. So we pledge to set a good example and keep the program free. All of our literature is available at no cost as PDF files at thesuppersprograms.org.

In return, we ask all who attend to embrace our spirit of no profit motive, to share their experience while refraining from the promotion of any products or services.

Message to Parents

There is very compelling research coming out of Columbia University showing that children who regularly eat dinner at the family table have much lower incidences of drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. The vast majority of teenagers surveyed said they want to eat dinner with their families. 59% of our children regularly do. Though it doesn’t always seem that way, our children and particularly teenagers want to spend time with us. If creating a family dinner table is beyond you, or if you need help re-establishing the habit, your therapeutic friends in the Suppers Programs can help you make this vital force for parenting a reality in your household.

At Suppers we believe that doing whatever it takes to sit down regularly as a family to wholesome meals is the single most important thing a family can do.