I have been trying to create for myself a diet, not for weight loss but just for daily healthy eating. This has been quite a challenge as most of the information I come across is totally conflicting. It is really frustrating, but after a year and a half I have come up with something that I feel like works for me. So I thought I would share it although I would encourage everyone to do the work for yourselves and take active control over your health rather than being at the mercy of a capitalistic industry whose interest seems to preference profit over people. I have to say I am somewhat angry about all of this. I am 43 and I am just now figuring out the proper way to eat. I realize that some of this was my own fault and I take responsibility for that. However, I was not taught this as a child and neither were my parents. What I was taught in school is the opposite of what is true. I just don't really understand this, well actually I think I do and its pure evil. (steps down from soap box)
Anyway, this whole process started about five years ago when a friend of mine asked me to join her in a detox diet. I agreed and we did some research and chose the 21 day detox. This was actually a wonderful experience although it did take some getting used to. I grew up in the South where we eat fried meat three times a day and wash it down with sugary iced tea. So going cold tofurky for 3 weeks was a bit of a shock. However the diet plan came with instructional videos and several books regarding how it was created, how it worked, and how to eat properly and why. Lots of really useful and logical information. The overall experience is designed to teach the basics of becoming your own doctor.
The 21 Day Detox participants are put on a three-week program:
Week 1 focuses on plant-based food, eliminating many of the toxins people receive in their diet.
Information included covers a wide range of topics such as food preparation, an acid/alkaline test, health food store tour, personal health coaching, nutritional medicine, enzyme theory, therapeutic fasting and the basic healing tools for becoming your own doctor. In the first week of the cleanse you will be encouraged to consume a plant-based diet. A move away from animal products will decrease the harmful exposure to toxins by as much as 50%. A menu, emphasizing organic whole foods, shopping guide and recipes are provided.
Week 2 moves you into a live-food diet with uncooked foods and two blended meals, which decreases stress on the digestive system.
In the second week of the cleanse you will be encouraged to consume a raw (uncooked) plant-based diet. A move away from cooked and processed foods will decrease stress on the major digestive organs and the supplements prepare the body for deep healing. An organic live-food menu, shopping guide and recipes are provided.
Week 3 is the liquid part of the program where the digestive organs get a rest and healing begins on a cellular level
In the third week of the cleanse you will be encouraged to consume a liquid diet. A move away from a whole live-food diet to blended food will give the digestive organs a complete rest and will supply regenerative nutrients to insure healing at the cellular level.
In the workshop, the benefits of a liquid diet for rapid healing are discussed. The workshop also covers the practical application of reflexology, yoga, meditation and light therapy with scientific evidence to substantiate the chakra system as a healing tool.
This was the beginning of my actually thinking about what I was eating and was definitely a wake up call. I continued from this point with a mostly vegetarian, somewhat vegan, and mostly raw diet. One really great cook book I still use today is Raw: The Uncook Book by Juliano. He has a restaurant in Santa Monica and was one of the first people here to advocate a completely raw diet. The recipes are really good. However it is expensive and extremely time consuming to follow this eating plan. The biggest obstacle for me was the dehydrating process which takes quite a bit of time. So I reverted to mostly vegetarian and vegan cooked foods with some raw thrown in every now and then.
The next discovery was Dr. Gerson and the Gerson Institute. Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. In 1946, Gerson demonstrated recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee, during hearings on a bill to fund research into cancer treatment. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients. In 1958, after thirty years of clinical experimentation, Gerson published A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases. This medical monograph details the theories, treatment, and results achieved by a great physician. Gerson died in 1959, eulogized by long-time friend, Albert Schweitzer M.D.
The Gerson Therapy is a natural treatment that activates the body’s extraordinary ability to heal itself through an organic, vegetarian diet, raw juices, coffee enemas and natural supplements. With its whole-body approach to healing, the Gerson Therapy naturally reactivates your body’s magnificent ability to heal itself – with no damaging side effects. This a powerful, natural treatment boosts the body’s own immune system to heal cancer, arthritis, heart disease, allergies, and many other degenerative diseases. Dr. Max Gerson developed the Gerson Therapy in the 1930s, initially as a treatment for his own debilitating migraines, and eventually as a treatment for degenerative diseases such as skin tuberculosis, diabetes and, most famously, cancer.
It is called a therapy because it was designed for people with illness. It reconnected me with the 21 day detox stage three and made complete sense to me. The issue was however, I do not have any illness, so the design of the Gerson Therapy did not fit into a daily eating plan for me.
Then I came across the China Study. In The China Study, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Recognized as the most comprehensive nutritional study ever conducted on the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease, The China Study cuts through the haze of misinformation and examines the source of nutritional confusion produced by government entities, lobbies, and opportunistic scientists. In a nutshell they found that areas in China with high concentrations of cancer also had high concentrations of meat consumption. Well there you go, Meat = Disease. They also found that in areas where meat consumption was 10% or less of the total diet, there was a negligible amount of cancer.
At the same time I was reading Bruce Lipton's the Biology of Belief which is just amazing. Here is a video lecture where he explains the whole concept.
Bruce is a cellular biologist who's theory is that our perceptions have a direct effect on our bodies. Our bodies have two basic modes: Growth, a healthy optimal state and what he calls Fight or Flight, which is meant to be a temporary condition where growth is put on pause in favor of fighting or fleeing from a threat. These states are created by the hypothalamus putting certain chemicals in our bodies. And these chemicals have impact. That sweaty anxiety you feel from fear is generated by a chemical. General stress can activate Fight or Flight which basically shuts down our immune system. This made a lot of sense to me, and this work mirrored a lot of the personal development work I was / am also doing.
By now you can see where I am going. So the goal for me and my diet became to reduce or eliminate harmful chemicals either from processed foods or the environment or my own brain. I came up with a diet or eating plan which endeavors to incorporate all of these concepts.
I bought an Omega masticating juicer and starting juicing 2 times a day. I juice all kinds of things but basically I took the Gerson Therapy as the basic guideline. I also created a supplement routine which again uses the Gerson Therapy as a base then I added the12 tissue salts and iodine from kelp, boron and spirulina to help detox the body of heavy metals especially the pineal gland. I try to eliminate fluoride as much as humanly possible in toothpaste and water (reverse osmosis filtration seems to be the best bet) and any other chemicals or foreign additives.
One thing I noticed is that when I added the juice to my diet I actually lost some weight which was odd as I was adding this to my three meals a day, so I was increasing my caloric intake. My conclusion was that even though the calories went up, so did the nutritional content. Seems to me that most of the food available today has little to no actual nutritional content. So even though you feel full, your body thinks it is starving so it goes in to storage mode, storing everything it can as fat. When your body receives adequate nutrition, it burns off the excess naturally. GO FIGURE...
So in addition to this I eat vegetarian/vegan whenever possible meals and as much of that raw as possible. I occasionally eat meat in amounts that are well below the China Study's 10% suggestion. I stay away from sugar as much a possible using honey, dates, or agave. I try to get fiber from ancient grain breads (no wheat), flax seeds, and raw almonds.
I find that Southern Indian cuisine is really flavorful and healthy and enjoying cooking recipes from these types of cookbooks. Madhur Jaffery has some good ones.
I have pretty good luck buying supplements from Netrition.com, they usually have really good prices, but you have to check about natural ingredients.
Other healthy products:
Udos oil blend
One of the basic concepts with juicing is alkalinity. Veggies are alkaline and animal products and most processed foods are acidic. I test my pH with test strips, but I don't think this is directly related to blood pH. It makes me feel better though and that's a perception thing.
(Culled from NaturalNews) Here are some pH basics before getting into how to maintain a neutral (7.0) or slightly alkaline (7.4) pH blood reading for optimum health.The term pH literally means power Hydrogen. It's a measurement of the concentration of hydrogen ions. Each number of the pH scale represents a ten-fold difference in that concentration. Your alkaline buffer system has to work hard to neutralize overall acidity.
Food pH measurements can be deceptive. Just because a citrus fruit or apple cider vinegar measures a low or acidic pH doesn't mean it is acid yielding.
The key word is yielding, and it points to the metabolic result after ingestion. Even squeezing lemon or lime into a glass of water creates an alkaline yielding liquid.
Testing your pH by saliva or urine will result in slightly lower (acid) readings than your blood pH. Urine, especially from your first urination, will tend to be even lower as your kidneys have worked on eliminating acidity.
Not to worry if you're getting readings in the high sixes from either test. Different organs may have different pH readings than your blood reading as well.
Acidosis occurs when the blood reading goes below seven and stays there. This is usually what kills cancer patients, especially those who are poisoned with chemo or radiation.
Five simple approaches for an alkaline yielding dietYour alkaline buffer system is designed to take care of the inevitable alkaline/acid yielding food mix. But overworking your buffer will deplete it. Here's a list of acid and alkaline yielding foods to get an idea of what they are.
(1) Try to balance your diet with a 60/40 ratio of alkaline yielding foods to acid yielding, then up the ratio to 80/20. Typically, standard American diets (SAD) consist of mostly acid yielding foods. Fake fats, sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), bleached white breads and pastries and so on are extremely acid yielding. Focus on organic green veggies, smoothies, and juicing as well as green super foods such as chlorella. Fruits of all types, even citrus fruits considered acid, are all alkaline yielding.
(2) Moderate exercise helps the lymph eliminate acid wastes. Over exercising can create lactic acid which is - well, acidic. It's all about balance.
(3) Hydrate. Spring water is alive and alkaline, but few have access to it. It's necessary to drink water treated by reverse osmosis to remove fluorides. The treated water tends to be acid yielding. That's remedied by a squeeze of lime or lemon or a few drops of liquid trace minerals available from your health food store.
(4) Speaking of minerals, key minerals involved with the buffering process are magnesium, potassium, calcium, and sodium. Ironically, dairy foods tend to be alkaline yielding. So other sources of calcium should be looked into. It might be necessary to supplement magnesium, potassium, and calcium, at least until you've established an alkaline yielding diet. Look into magnesium oil (actually water applied topically) for the best magnesium solution.
(5) Oxygenate, sleep better, and stress less. Use deep breathing exercises or oxygen enhancing supplements. Increasing oxygen to cells increases their pH. Don't confuse that with cellular oxidation. Acidic cells cannot metabolize oxygen, so they ferment glucose to survive and become cancerous. Stress and poor sleep contribute to lower pH. Cancer cells cannot exist in a high pH and oxygen-rich environment. High pH and strong cellular oxygenation are directly linked. You can maintain your pH balance with these simple steps while ignoring those expensive magic-bullet pH boosting products.
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