A First Step On The Journey Of A Thousand Meals
Introduction to
The Tyranny of the Taste Buds
by James Stephen Du Bois
I’m going to tell you right now that I am going to repeat myself and, in some cases, say the same thing another time in a different context. Repetition can be a path to understanding and I am hoping it will help lead you through what we had to learn more than once. The following information is the silver lining in a cloud that overwhelmed my digestive system about nine years ago and debilitated me for over a year. It comes to light now as a result of an accidental injury Cat suffered at the very end of May 2021. The following principles healed my lower intestinal problems way back when, and we believe are responsible (along with so many loving prayers) for Cat’s healing with such amazing rapidity recently; not just getting along again, but feeling vibrant and joyful.
We make no claims of medical expertise. I offer this testimony, based upon my own research and our experience, to stimulate your curiosity. I encourage you to investigate every claim I make and to experiment for yourself. Cat and I evolved our approach and our small individual differences (due to taste, not nutrition) over the course of the last eight years.
We have become smorgasbord nutritionists taking what makes sense to us from each expert and disregarding what doesn’t or what is contradicted by another more trusted source, or anything being sold as a panacea. We invite you to take a look at these guidelines that we have for ourselves, and see what you can do for yourself with them. We have nothing to sell. None of the following suggestions will cost more than the food you choose to eat.
There is so much contradictory information to wade through in order to find competent advice worth testing. We took wrong turns. Ultimately, we gave up things that were well within our parameters and the advice we were taking, when we started, like:
Meat,
Cat was eating animal flesh when we began our journey to happy health and gave it up completely within the first year, however, she hungered for bacon for another nine months. She doesn’t even think about it anymore. I give you this little anecdote to let you know that this is work. If you really have to or want to change the direction of the momentum in your life you have to face right into the raging torrent of the momentum you’ve created and go in the opposite direction. That will take some time and a lot of will.
Incidentally, I had given up eating any animal products other than eggs (for their vitamin B content) in the late 1980’s after a trip to the summit of Mt. Shasta. It took no effort (the giving up, not the climb!). I simply didn’t feel any more interest in meat.
Dairy,
See: Dr. T. Colin Campbell's bestseller, The China Study for an in depth analysis of the dangers of milk protein.
Fruit,
Modern fruit has very little nutritional similarity to the fruit our ancestors ate. It has been hybridized and genetically altered to get the most sugar content which, of course, drives up blood sugar levels and packs fat.
Secondly, the fructose in fruit has hidden dangers. I lifted the following from the website www.foodsmatter.com. It relates in a very concise manner the warnings I have read over and over again.
“Unlike glucose, fructose is not controlled by insulin, nor can it be converted, as can glucose, into energy in any part of the body; fructose can only be processed by the liver.
Moreover, unlike glucose, eating fructose does not suppress the release of the stomach hormone, ghrelin. Ghrelin is the hormone that makes you feel hungry, so, if it is not suppressed when you eat, you are going to go on feeling hungry and go on eating fructose-sweetened foods whereas you might have stopped eating glucose-sweetened foods because you felt full.
And strangely, although it is a carbohydrate or sugar, fructose is processed by the liver as a fat so, rather than being stored in the liver as harmless glycogen, it gets stored as potentially harmful fat. Thus excess fructose consumption leads to excess fat being stored in the liver which can cause inflammation (with all its attendant ills) and liver disease.
So far from fructose helping diabetics keep their weight down, it might well add to their risk of obesity. Indeed, because excess fructose is stored by the body as excess fat, excess fructose consumption could cause problems right across the population in terms of obesity, heart disease, stroke etc.
The food industry and fructose supporters in general defend fructose on the grounds (quite correct) that if fructose is ingested in equal quantities with glucose (which it is in sucrose, made up of 50% glucose, 50% fructose) it can be metabolised perfectly safely. But the most widely used sweeteners, because of the relative cheapness of fructose, use a higher proportion of fructose than glucose.”
Juices (all but lemon and lime)
If you really want to raise your blood sugar levels and store fat? Ingest the fruit without its fiber.
All of the above foods were allowed in the low-carb diets we tried. And we lost weight on those diets. However, as we gave up more things that we discovered were unhealthy, and narrowed our path, our health improved even more and continues to do so.
It takes time. Dr. Beiler (more on him and this story later) told a patient once that since it had taken her a long time to get in her unhealthy condition she should expect it to take a long time to get well. Be patient with yourself. If you take the first step on a journey of 1,000 healthy meals, experimenting and learning as you go along, maybe by meal 1,001 you’ll be ready to eat healthy food that agrees with you and your genetic makeup for the rest of your life. We offer our recipe as a template from which to add or subtract from, in order to suit your personal healthy tastes.
I’m giving you the good stuff up front. That is the recipe for the dish we eat for every delicious, exciting, taste-bud satisfying, saliva stimulating meal and the list of foods we restrict ourselves to, though that is somewhat misleading, because we don’t really feel restricted (any more). By eating reasonable amounts of the foods we have come to crave––taste buds can be trained––we are really restricting illness and suffering and protecting ourselves from our own gluttony.
The second portion of this piece will deal with our eight-year journey to fine tune our nutritional intake and why we decided to eat what we have come to relish on a daily basis. Our health benefits have gotten better and better with the most dramatic example recently being Cat’s remarkable, rapid recovery from a serious fall and fractured pelvis.
Thirdly, I’ll mention a little about where we are headed from here. After figuring what our bodies need for optimal health (as far we know) we have been exploring the benefits of fasts of different durations for rejuvenation and even cleaner energy.
List of the Foods We Eat; organic whenever possible:
Almonds (fresh, raw, organic; soaked before use)
It is important to soak fresh nuts before consuming them. They have enzymes on them that prevent the nut from sprouting until sufficient rain has fallen to sustain it. These enzymes upset many people’s stomachs. By soaking them for twelve to twenty-four hours you dissolve the enzymes and activate the nut to sprout. Many consider this to be the most nutritious stage; all of the nutrients for the new plant’s survival are right there popping forth.
Avocados
Cat eats avocado. I am allergic to them. There is a protein in them that my body recognizes as a threat and sends my immune system into a frazzle. It took quite a while for me to recognize that it was the harmless avocado that was making me nauseous. We cut out certain foods at certain times to check our susceptibility. Cat discovered that her body prefers that she not eat walnuts, especially her tongue.
Baby Greens
“Rabbit food” turns out to be filled with essentials our body needs from antioxidants, calcium, potassium, magnesium to manganese and chlorophyll. This comment applies to all of the vegetables listed.
Beets
Broccoli
Celery
Four days to a week after table salt is given up, celery tastes very salty. Its sodium satisfies. Lemons have a similar accent on food.
Cucumber
Grape Seed Oil
Make certain to get “Expeller Pressed” oil. It is an inefficient method for producers but makes for the best quality oil, otherwise there is excess heat or chemical solvents are used to get the last little bit of oil from the seeds. Be wary of any oils you buy and how they are processed.
Hazel Nuts (organic, soaked before use)
See notes with Almonds
Lemons
Four days to a week after table salt is given up lemons become a very satisfying flavor-enhancer in place of the poison sodium-chloride. Lemons have many benefits in relation to alkalizing the body.
Onions (when the Walls Wallas are ready)
Cat loves these. They are filled with anti-oxidants. I eat them rarely. It’s a personal taste issue.
Peanut Butter (Organic, nuts only)
Radishes
Raw Eggs (free range)
Red Bell Peppers
Sunflower Seeds (organic, soaked before use)
Spinach
Swiss chard
Zucchini
If a food is not on this list we don’t eat it. Most of these ingredients are ground up and mixed together in the following recipe we affectionately call “Grub.” We make a dressing out of the eggs, grape seed oil and lemon juice. I also add fresh squeezed lemon juice to my drinking water. Cat adds different mixes of onions, peppers and avocados to her grub occasionally. I don’t eat them. I’m a straight Grub kinda guy (see following recipe).
But First a Word About Water Water Water
We drink water as a beverage and lots of it. Water prevents dehydration eliminating 99% of our headaches and body cramps, and it facilitates smooth body metabolism and elimination. Next time you feel a headache coming on drink a couple glasses of water and feel it disappear. It’s an amazingly easy cure and, as a consequence of putting it into practice both Cat and I have left analgesics behind (except in the waning days of her recovery as she weaned herself off of the codeine related pain-killers that the health-care professionals had given her, of which she took only 13 of the 30 prescribed). Every other beverage, except an occasional herbal tea, has a cost we’re not willing to pay.
We don’t drink water while eating, however. At the very least, drinking water while eating interferes with the enzymes in the mouth endeavoring to start breaking down food even before it is swallowed. These enzymes are the first step in the digestion process.
Please investigate anything I offer if you have questions.
G R U B
This recipe is for six meals of approximately 3/4 of a pound (350 grams, 12 oz) each.
These are the ingredients and amounts (You can convert to ounces by multiplying by 0.03527, but getting a scale that will measure in grams will help you a lot):
Zucchini: 350 grams
Cucumbers: 350 grams
Celery: 340 grams
Carrots: 230 grams
Baby Greens/50% Spinach: 125 grams
Sprouts: 175 grams
Radishes: 140 grams
Almonds: 120 grams
Filberts/Hazelnuts: 120 grams
Sunflower Seeds: 60 grams
Directions:
1. Get a big mixing bowl to put your chopped ingredients in.
2. Chop up all of the ingredient to your preferred texture. We use a Cuisinart. When we started we hand-chopped our vegetables and nuts in a wooden salad bowl with a curved knife. Use what you have.
3. Once you get all of the chopped ingredients in the bowl, make your dressing. If you prefer you can make it ahead of time and have it ready to pour on at this point.
4. Make your dressing.
Dressing Ingredients for Six Meals of Grub
Grape Seed Oil, 150 grams
Fresh-squeezed Lemon Juice, 120 grams
Eggs, 3 large to jumbo
5. Add these three ingredients into another commodious bowl and stir fast and hard enough to rid yourself of any un-whipped egg white. We use an egg beater and it handles the job perfectly well.
6. Pour your dressing onto your chopped ingredients.
7. Stir well.
8. Enjoy
Missing Sugar and/or Salt?
If you miss sugar and/or salt we understand. We missed sugar, and salt maybe more, but we stayed strong. After a week we started tasting the incredible sweetness in vegetables, sweetness too subtle for a jaded tongue to detect. We also noticed the salty taste of celery and lemons. You may find them satisfying. We do.
If you stay committed to leaving salt and sugar behind and get over those addictions you will find tastes in your food you never expected, all of them hidden by the overwhelming tastes of processed food. In addition to giving up all-but-unavoidable carbs, we think giving up salt and sugar is the biggest favor we could have ever done for our bodies. These simple steps have produced the manifold rewards for both of us listed in the main text.
Missing Sugar and/or Salt?
If you miss sugar and/or salt we understand. We missed sugar, and salt maybe more, but we stayed strong. After a week we started tasting the incredible sweetness in vegetables, sweetness too subtle for a jaded tongue to detect. We also noticed the salty taste of celery and lemons. You may find them satisfying. We do.
If you stay committed to leaving salt and sugar behind and get over those addictions you will find tastes in your food you never expected, all of them hidden by the overwhelming tastes of overly salted and sugar-rich processed food. In addition to giving up all-but-unavoidable carbs, we think giving up table salt and sugar is the biggest favor we could have ever done for our bodies. These simple steps have produced the manifold rewards for both of us listed in the main text. All of the sodium you need, and the chloride, for that matter, can come from the food you eat.
This quote is from Dr. Bieler: “Salt (sodium chloride) is frequently used to excess on foods because it stimulates the adrenal glands, but it is really a highly corrosive drug—a former embalming fluid which cannot be used in the body economy. But, organic salt, as found in vegetables, is useful and non-toxic. It is this form of sodium chloride which is vitally necessary to the body.” Cat and I have thrived on just the sodium and chloride in our food for eight years and have gotten healthier and healthier.
Here’s another quote from Dr. Bieler: “The eating of inorganic salt [table salt] is a bad habit. Why not, then, let the plants synthesize NaCl into an organic form, in their leaves and fruits and roots and stems, and eat it that way? A simple solution, isn’t it? The urine and sweat never show an excess of salt when it is consumed in this form.”
If you must have salt while you cut back, our advice is to use the Himalayan pink salt that is so popular. It does not contain the micro-plastic bits that highly-touted sea salt contains. Whatever your source, (see directly above) the American Heart Association recommends ingesting at least 500 mg of sodium a day for optimal health. That’s just under a quarter of a teaspoon of sodium chloride. There is an approximately 40% to 60% mix of sodium to chloride in table salt. One teaspoon of sodium chloride weighs 5,690 mg of which 2,300 mg is sodium. That 2,300mg figure is also the AHA’s upper daily limit for consumption of sodium.
Dr. Jamnadas recommends a pinch of Himilayan salt in a glass of water to relieve leg cramps. He recommends a lot of water too.
WARNING!
If you start eating this dish you must avoid any additional carbohydrates. They will cause you to pack the fat in this recipe onto your body instead of burning it for fuel. Remember that your body will burn the carbs first and hang on to the fat for dear life. We can eat all of the fat we want because we use it for fuel and don’t shut down the process by introducing additional carbs into the mix.
We have found this meal satisfying, nutritionally complete and time saving. When people say that it must be boring to eat the same thing for every meal we chuckle because Grub is endlessly nutritious and delicious as opposed to the monotonous repeating of the same toxic weekly schedule of Pasta Monday, Taco Tuesday, Pizza Wednesday, Meatloaf Thursday, Mac Donald’s Friday etc. If that isn’t eating the same thing all of the time, I don’t know what is. Even after seven years of eating our current recipe, we still remark to each other how heavenly the taste is. If grub wasn’t such a good name we would have called it Ambrosia. It started tasting this way, of course, after we got over our withdrawal from salt and sugar and our lingering desire for their tastes.”
Part Two
People are said to be led around by their noses when under someone else’s complete control. Well, the standard American diet (SAD) is leading us around by the little bumps on our collective tongues. Our taste buds rule our dietary decisions in this country more and more every day. Our palate is enticed with stuff called food that in no way resembles nutrition. It is conveniently provided by the processed food industry whose very existence is dependent on our consuming it. Consequently, it is offered to us constantly. Too many of us have been snared into the addiction(s) this ersatz food causes and sustains.
Very little effort is made to train ourselves to appreciate and, ultimately crave, food (body nurturing substances), instead of the unnatural, nutritionally-bankrupt, physically-harmful crap we have come to desire and consume. Let’s emphasize the difference between food and artificial, highly promoted, concoctions disguised as such.
The following is based upon our own 8 year experiment and experience. We got much of the information and advice we chose to follow from the books and links I will share with you. Cat’s and my health (even recovering from accidents) is totally dependent on the food we eat and the limited exercise we engage in. We do not take supplements. We have no prescriptions for pharmaceuticals. We have learned over the last eight years how to micro-manage our weight, and how we feel, by adjusting what we eat. We have had three colds between the two of us in the last five years. We’ve said good-bye to headaches, stomach discomforts, critically-high blood pressure, intestinal distresses, excessively dry skin, hair loss(!) and sixty pounds of excess fat between the two of us. Today we have the energy to go from 4:30 am to 9:30 pm, seven days a week and run our business at sixty-nine and seventy-four years of age. AND, WE DON’T HAVE TO BUY ANYBODY’S PRODUCT, OR SUBSCRIBE TO SOMEONE ELSE’S DIET AND EXERCISE REGIMEN!!!
Completely changing the way we thought and acted about what we put inside our bodies seemed overwhelming at first, but in time, and step by step, it made perfect sense. You’ll learn a lot about your body when you directly connect how you feel with what you’ve just eaten, instead of attributing discomfort to some mysterious ailment or disease. Did you know that your body digests only one animal protein at a time? The second one, and subsequent proteins get put on hold and are never fully digested, and if the protein is cooked, the amino acids that make up the protein are ruined and can only damage the body (see: Beiler). Now, imagine having a double bacon-cheese-burger washed down with a milkshake. That’s four different animal proteins, of which your body will pick one to digest, and make indigestion of the other three. I won’t even mention, at this point, what deep fried starch (“french fries”) adds to the mix. You can find that in Dr. Beiler’s book too listed with the other books and links I am recommending at the end of this article.
Once we got over our discomfort from the detoxification process (that’s a whole other story, hint: drink lots of water), there were no reasons to go back to our previous habits, and we still have good reasons unfolding to go forward. This regime is our health insurance. We pay extra for organic groceries to stay healthy rather than use that money to pay insurance companies and get sick.
To find out how much protein, carbohydrate and fat different foods have in them get the pamphlet/book Nutritive Value of Foods, from the United States Department of Agriculture, Home and Garden Bulletin Number 72. It may have different title or number by now we got ours during the bush administration.
One little ray of sunshine is that you get to subtract the grams of fiber listed for a certain food from its listed carbohydrate gram total. That gives you the number of carb grams you actually need to count for each food you eat. We have yet to learn why this is so, but we’ve kept it in our calculations since reading Atkins for Life, by Dr. Atkins. Like Taubes, (see: Why We Get Fat,) Atkins is a raging carnivore. Did I mention, we don’t take any one author’s work as our gospel?
Eschew Carbohydrates
One of the cardinal principles of Cat’s and my way of eating is that our bodies will burn all of the fat we eat for fuel, if we stay away from carbohydrates. Otherwise, our bodies will tuck away any fat eaten, thus retaining weight and causing all kinds of problems within our bodies, reducing both the quality and length of our lives.
When given the choice, the human body will always burn carbohydrates for fuel and store any fat for future deprivation (see: Taubes). Humans didn’t always have “three squares a day” available and our bodies developed a mechanism to take fasting into account. However, in our current culture there is so much available to consume, we often feed in a fed state giving our digestive system little or no time to catch up. Precious little of the processed food we have been eating is designed for our bodies, instead it is designed for shelf-life, color retention, ease of transport, and a carbohydrate addict’s sweet-seeking taste buds.
Putting processed sugar, whether alone or surrounded by flour and grease, into your body is contrary to the millions of years of evolution that shaped the human digestive system, and the inevitable price will be paid for ignoring that fact. Consuming any more than a few carbs at a time will cause your body to store fat. The body employs the easy-to-burn carbs first and stores the fat for later. Then, it turns any unspent carbs into fat, and stores that too.
Don’t let derision of the so-called “caveman diet,” or “Keto diet” keep you from asking, “Did the human body evolve eating this kind of stuff?” when you are choosing a morsel. Hint: Nowhere in nature will you find sugar crystals. They have been refined from less concentrated, yet still lethal sources, and turned into sweet death. Carbohydrates kill. They are addictive and their abuse leads directly to death. To rid yourself of the curse of carbohydrates, try reducing them to 20% of your calories.
We eat only the carbs that come with our few fruits (avocado, cucumber, zucchini, lemon, lime), vegetables (radishes, baby greens, carrots [one of our highest carb-laden foods, about 6% carbs], spinach, broccoli, beets, chard, onions, bell pepper), nuts (topping our list at 8.8% carbs), seeds and sprouts. There are no minimum daily requirements for carbs. Our bodies function best with very few of them. All of our ancestors, for up to 400 hundred million years, did fine without any bread, sugar, chips, salt, potatoes, sugar, corn, salt, wheat, sugar, rice, salt, beans, sugar, lentils, salt, quinoa, sugar, ice-cream, any dairy for that matter, or salt. They ate meat, eggs, nuts, seeds, roots, berries and wild fruits and vegetables. Very low carb load, and no added salt. We used to thrive with the sodium in our natural diet.
Homo Sapiens’ genetic composition hasn’t caught up with our current processed diet and won’t for eons. It’s been at least 2.5 million years since we came out of the trees, but only 12,000 years since the dawn of agriculture and the proliferation of carbs. That’s a very short time for our genetics and gut to accommodate to the change. Our culture has been attempting to change the momentum of 250 million years, 100,000 generations of evolution.
There have been only 100 generations for us to get adapted to agricultural products and only ten generations since we started processing food, 200 hundred years ago, and introducing that into a digestive tract which is still trying to figure out what to do with the unprocessed stuff. It will take another 100,000 generations for our digestive system and genetics to catch up with SAD, the Standard American Diet (see Dr. Pradip Jamnadas, Youtube video, Fasting for Survival Lecture. That’s a topic for another blog).
“Eat Your Vegetables”
Cat and I eat the raw vegetables mentioned above: spinach, celery, zucchini, cucumber, baby greens, carrots and radishes. Additionally we do steam broccoli and beets before we eat them for easier digestion and because it’s hard to eat beets most any other way.
We consume lots of raw, soaked sprouting nuts, mainly almonds and hazel nuts. We eat raw, organic alfalfa and clover sprouts that Cat grows in our kitchen. We use grape seed oil to mix with fresh squeezed lemon juice and raw eggs for dressing. We grind all of the dry ingredients up in a Cuisinart and cover it with the dressing I just mentioned and call it “Grub.” Eating this way is always the same, tasty, and never boring.
For a treat, in season, we’ll buy and eat organic cranberries which have a very low effect on blood sugar, but still contain fructose. More on the dangers of that in the notes I made above on why we don’t eat fruit. Cat also loves and eats avocados. It took time to find which nuts worked for both of us, and for me to find that I had an allergy to avocados. My body recognizes a protein in them as a poison and sends my immune system to war. Watch your own body’s signals as you experiment with different foods.
Watch That Protein
We use raw, free-range eggs in our dressing. We have found that is the best way for us to get vitamin B12, otherwise unavailable in our meat-free diet. We’ve become convinced by our reading that cooking animal flesh destroys the amino acids in the meat protein and that trying to digest them is destructive to the body (See: Beiler, Food is Your Best Medicine). Our ancestors ate raw meat and raided bird nests for their eggs for eons. Our genetic make-up is accustomed to raw food. Cat says eating eggs makes her skin stronger against bumps and bruises, and I must say, I’ve seen the difference.
We also obtain a moderate amount of protein from nuts (almonds and hazelnuts) sprouts (alfalfa and clover) and seeds (sunflower). We keep our protein consumption well under 20 % of our caloric intake. Now that we are not growing anymore, our bodies only require protein for repair, and not too much. Overloading on protein is harmful (see: Beiler). Excess protein in the body causes indigestion and turns into fat, just like extra carbs do when your body has been fed more of them than it can consume as fuel.
Eat Fat for Fitness
We were not taught these ideas in school. We had to learn on our own––and against the momentum of Madison Avenue pushing garbage down our throats through ubiquitous advertising––that fat is burned as a high quality fuel when few carbs are available. This explains why Cat and I can eat so many nuts and fat-laden seeds, and practically drink grape seed oil and still weigh lightly for our individual heights. With at least 80% of our calories consisting of fat, that leaves us only 20% of our calories left for protein (in the veggies, nuts, seeds and eggs) and carbs (in the vegetables, avocados and lemons). This choice to limit our carbohydrate intake has worked for us for over eight years and it has allowed us to feel so much better while, believe it or not, eating more fat than we ever would have imagined. It burns right off!
Some books recommend rewarding yourself once in a while, for your good behavior, by eating a little bit of the very poisons from which you are trying to extricate yourself, e.g. having a piece of cake at a birthday party. This is terrible advice. There is no reason to tempt an addict. Flirting with what you are trying to give up, is EXACTLY like someone with an alcohol addiction, who hasn’t had a drink for a month, figuring, “I can have just one.” Our advice: Once you give up ice-cream, potatoes, rice, cooked meat and a host of other killers, don’t go back to them. They will no longer tempt you after you have trained your taste buds to crave what is alive, vital and good for you.
This advice is based on experience. One example: About a year into our grand experiment, after still craving meat from time to time during that period, Cat was tempted back to liver and onions and bacon. Just to see if she could handle it, she added mashed potatoes. She was sick for a week. That was the end of her cravings for meat. Each one of us has our own individual path, and has to find our own way, however the basic principles are the same for everyone.
We eat fat and get our bodies to transform it into ketones for fuel by not introducing unnecessary carbohydrates into our systems. We get our fat from the nuts, seeds, eggs and grape seed oil we consume. Many on the so-called keto-diet or the Atkins diet fill up on animal flesh once they are told they can have all of the fat they want. Unfortunately, they don’t need that much protein with their fat and it is to their detriment to consume it (see Beiler, again). We don’t eat meat. We don’t need to because our protein requirements are low and we get plenty from the few eggs and the nuts, seeds, sprouts and vegetables we do eat.
How to Begin
Just do your best. Detox isn’t easy. It’s work, but its rewards are priceless. Ridding ourselves of salt and sugar totally consumed us for weeks. Habits have to be redirected. We didn’t try to give up everything at once, instead, we worked to take definitive steps toward our personal goals. We wanted to totally transform our bodies and it’s taken years, but it has been worth it.
A woman came to Dr. Bieler exhausted, her heart palpitating and her discomfort level so high that she told the good doctor, “I am willing to dedicate a whole year to getting well. It means that much to me.” He responded by telling her that it would take a lot longer than that. And, that it might be the toughest thing she had ever attempted. “It took a long time for you to get into this condition,” he said, “and it’s going to take a long time to change it.” Be patient with yourself. Our advice is to reward yourself for your efforts with another pain-free day of life in your future, not with a big bite of chocolate cake. Isn’t the quality of a life at least as important as its length?
The first thing we gave up was anything with sugar in it (see: Sugar Blues by William Dufty) Next, we stopped eating anything with table salt in or on it. We replaced salt with fresh squeezed lemon for flavor enhancement of our food. While doing those two things we cut way, way, way back on our carb intake.
We don’t eat meat but we needed the vitamin B12 so we lightly cooked eggs until we found what cooking protein does to its amino acids (See Beiler, again, Chap. 15, Proteins Can Be Body Killers). Now we eat them raw in our Grub Dressing.
We recommend that you eat as many raw organic vegetables as you can, especially green ones. Potatoes are not vegetables. The starch in them turns right into sugar in your body. Try oil and lemon juice dressing for seasoning. Try the Grub Dressing with egg for your vitamin B12. Once you have gotten past table salt, you’ll find that celery and lemon will taste very salty. I think you’ll be surprised, if you can just get there. We were surprised. We took a couple of weeks to get over the craving for salt.
We eased ourselves off of table sugar by eating fruit. Then we gave up fruit when we learned of the dangers of fructose. Watch out for fructose! It used to be recommended for its low blood sugar levels, but the body does not burn fructose like glucose and other sugars, it stores fructose in the liver as fatty deposits. We left fruit (except lemons and avocados and zucchini and cucumbers) and began tasting the sweetness in vegetables. All of the vitamins and minerals found in fruit can also be found in vegetables, without the sugar.
The Body’s Equilibrium
Your body has gone to great lengths to make accommodations for the unnatural diet it has been fed. It is going to fight against changing the status quo, even though ultimately, it will be in its best interest to do so. It is your job to help it through the crises of change; side effects can include headache (drink water), nausea and craving. Yes, it is very much like an addict having their drug taken away. This too shall pass. This process is your body ridding itself of the toxins it has accumulated over the years of sugar toxicity, undigested proteins, etc.
Did you know that “morning sickness” in a newly pregnant woman is the woman’s body’s attempt at expelling toxins in order to have a healthy system for the baby’s development (see: Beiler)? Makes sense doesn’t it? So your body is going to want to get rid of its toxins, once you prove to it you are serious. How? By starving it of its addictive substances: salt and sugar, sugar and salt; carbs and starches, starches and carbs.
You can help detoxify your body by not eating. Short fasts of one or two days, or dramatically decreasing your meal size, can take the load off of your digestive system and permit your body to work on detoxifying. Dr. Jamnadas claims that up to 70% of the energy we consume is used to digest what we are eating. That is quite a load on the digestive system. When you continue to eat, even good stuff--when your body needs all of its efforts to clean up--you only delay your own recovery. However, you don’t need to cure yourself all at once. Occasional fasts over six months or so will let you know if fasting is a tool that is going to work for you. Changing what you eat will do the most to change how you feel, especially, once you’ve ridden your body of poison.
Our last recommendation about eating is to suggest that you don’t disguise your food because you wish you could still eat what you’ve given up. Why eat a veggie burger? It comes with carbs (buns, catsup sugar) and it’s amino acids are ruined and of no help to the body. Only harm can come from the heat-altered aminos in the vegetable protein. Celebrate your new appreciation for raw. fresh, whole, healthy, digestible nutrition.
Part Three
The next step into optimal health for Cat and me is fasting. There are well documented higher states of consciousness brought on by meditation and certain natural substances. There are also higher states of physiology when the body is burning ketones derived from its fat stores instead of glucose from a constant intake of carbohydrates. The body can get any sugar it needs (some say the brain must have glucose to function) from breaking down protein in the process called gluconeogenisis. This state is best achieved by voluntary fasting.
According to Dr. Jamnadas, the brain functions better on ketones, “They burn cleaner.” However, ketosis takes a while to get started. You have to burn up all of the carbs in your body along with the ones continually being put in there. Without fasting this can take some time.
It occurs to me that the “starving artist” may just be getting their best ideas and highest inspirations while burning the ketones that result from no caloric ingestion. It is better for the body to go without than to eat excessive carbs. The body will take care of itself with ketosis (not to be confused with ketoacidosis).
In my nest installment I will go into more detail about ketosis and the benefits of fasting. I’ll also give instructions on processing your own organic nuts and sprouts and addresses for obtaining them. I hope you’ve benefited from this effort.
Addressing Discrepancies in the Recommended Books:
Cat and I went through many stages as we studied the books I am recommending to you. That’s also where we found all of the contradictions and discrepancies between authors. We hand-picked what we felt was right for us and experimented with it, then kept what worked. Every one of the authors that I am recommending has their own perspective, agenda, purpose, opinion, experience and desired result, so what they write is influenced (heavily in most cases) by their bias. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to cut through the prejudices that each writer or researcher promotes to the information common to most of them, i.e. carbohydrates are killers, sugar causes cancer and table salt will kill you. Then you can decide whose advice about other issues you care to follow.
You might find it helpful to get the following books as a foundation for your health and longevity. You’ll notice that Beiler and Dufty are from the 20th century, even from the sixties and seventies! This is when people started to forgot the age old wisdom that “potatoes make you fat.” That was changed to “It’s not the potato that makes you fat, but what you put on it.” That is bullshit, however, what you put on it can dramatically add to the deterioration of your body.
Between 1960 and 1980 our processed food culture, with some of our most prestigious universities’ paid-for-backing including Harvard’s, went into hyper-drive and hasn’t looked back since. See Sugar Blues for details on how the cereal companies overwhelmed the scientific community with endowments to these schools in order to push their sugary products with a “scientific” veneer suggesting nutrition, yet always cynically adding the disclaimer that their cereal is “(only) part of a nutritionally-balanced breakfast.”
See Taubes, Why We Get Fat, for the scientific studies that show the faults of the “low-fat” diet craze. He wrote this book as an easy read of his first effort, Good Calories, Bad Calories which is chock full of even more details of the scientific experiments that prove his thesis that carbs kill. They are both excellent explanations of how the body processes what we feed it. He is one of the authors that has no problem eating cooked meat. This is an example of how every author has their own biases, me included.
T. Colin Campbell’s Book, The China Study is the largest cancer study connecting what is eaten with health results ever conducted. Among other things it is a damning indictment of milk protein (Casein) and a fascinating read.
Bibliography and Reference Material
Food Is Your Best Medicine, Bieler
Sugar Blues, Dufty
Why We Get Fat, Taubes
Good Calories, Bad Calories, Taubes
Atkins for Life, Atkins
The China Study, Campbell
Nutritive Value of Foods, USDA Home and Garden Bulletin Number 72
And I offer this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuOvn4UqznU from Dr. Jamnadas for when you are ready for an investigation of fasting. More on it in the next post.
Finally
It is my sincere wish that you’ll find something useful for yourself in this material.