Nov 08, 2009 - Thoughts on Food

Not that I'm hungry or anything, even as my weight has plummeted to 130 pounds (my appetite was suppressed a week ago), I really needed to refine my understanding of how to choose the right foods, prepare them so they are tasty, get full at mealtime, maximize nutrition, continue to reverse my condition, and protect my health. Yes, all that! This is what I have learned.

I was very excited about raw foods when I discovered this way of eating two years ago. It goes down easy and tastes great, and if you can stick to it faithfully, you'll receive great benefit. But it is a discipline ALL THE TIME. The proper ratio of fats, fruits and leafy greens is important. Invariably, to get enough to eat, you tend to drift to the fats like avacodos, oils, and certain nuts. Or you eat more fruits, which presents it's own set of issues. Salads just don't have the calories. The high fat dressing might, but the salad just does not. You should be able to eat anything raw, but the high fats just did not work for me - something was missing.

I know a few raw foodists who are overweight because they live off the fat of the land, but most who follow the principles get really thin at first then tend to plump up and even out after a couple of years. Good for them! I love seeing someone being successful.

Eating raw foods can become quite dogmatic adversely affecting your quest for the right foods if you become serious about it, at least until you can develop enough meal plans and can actually find a good variety of these foods locally. Soak and sprout. Don't eat this, can't eat that. You start feeling a bit like a primitive cave dweller who, after breakfast has just been eaten, immediately begins in earnest looking for enough food for the next meal. Forget about chasing down that gazelle, they're too fast - you could try, but if you miss, there goes lunch. And if you ran long and hard enough, you return from the failed hunt too darned tired to stay awake for dinner, which isn't the worse thing, since you already know it's going to be leftovers.

But I still enjoy most raw foods. The nutrition is high, the taste is great, and they have the potential to be very health-restorative. I have two issues with this lifestyle, however - high fats and low calories.

High fats and oils put me right where I am, among other things I'm sure, even though I was not considered overweight. Low calories of the non-fat foods caused me to gravitate to the fats and oils. I needed to get full and if I was to stay within the parameters of the raw food diet (as I knew it), I'd have to rely on fats and oils, which only partially solves the problem - I just couldn't eat a great deal of these type of products - way too rich. I needed to get full. This desire to get full is biological in nature.

Just as a caution, if you are diabetic or know someone who is, you already know that diet is critical and knowing the glycemic load of foods is vitally important to understanding how to maintain a consistent blood sugar level. You can't just rush into a diet change without careful research. I would not suggest plunging into the lifestyle I am advocating or what anybody else advocates without seeing the facts and proven results for yourself -there's not a great margin for error.

But allow me to offer these words of encouragement. Dr. Gabriel Cousens produced a video in which he invited diabetics, type I and type II, of all races from every part of the US and invited them to his center in Patagonia, Arizona to show them how raw foods could stabilize their blood sugar and dramatically reduce their need for insulin or remove the need altogether in thirty days or less. For most people, this happened in half the time. For those who stuck it out for the duration, they went home insulin free, lighter, and healthier with real empowerment over their disease just by making better food choices. One person, a young alcoholic, continued to drink heavily (much to the chagrin of those around him) throughout his time there, and still, his insulin needs dropped to almost nothing by the end of the period. The video is titled, 'Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days'. Get it on Amazon. Or, ask me and I'll loan it to you. It is inspiring. Food is powerful medicine.

The stomach is designed to feel satiated and believe it or not, it's entirely based on how much you eat, that is, volume, and not on what you eat. Too little volume, you'll want to eat more. Too much and you'll get pain. You can fight the low volume for a little while. This is called dieting - aka, caloric restriction. Doesn't it suck?? Pick most diet plans marketed today - all based on the same principle of calorie restriction. Or they use fiber (wood? cellulose? bran? styrofoam??) to fill the stomach, or some other unnatural trick to make the brain think it has received all the nutrition and food volume it needs. Most people can't do this forever, it usually lasts until that special food gets put on the table and starts calling irresistably. Then the swing back to meeting the biological need to feel satiated returns with a vengeance and keeps on coming and coming until all the weight, and more, has returned. And don't get me started on the sugar high if that special something is chocolate cake! Calorie restriction does not work - it lasts as long as willpower lasts (which is like fighting the black knight with a rubber knife), is miserable to endure and is doomed to failure. We aren't designed to do that at all.

So what do we really want? Good old fashioned, unprocessed, natural complex carbohydrates. Not bread or ground wheat products or 5 minute reconstituted rice, but high starch vegetables right out of the ground like brown rice, potatoes, turnips, rudebegas, carrots, squash, etc. I thought this was odd at first, but it makes sense now. This now will replace the meat as the center of the meal and doesn't need ketchup, steak sauce, or barbecue sauce. Spices (except salt) come in real handy here. Get to know them. No fats or oils needed. Use fresh ground flax seed to get the omega-3 fatty acids which corporations insist you can only get from their processed oils. Pure bunk.

You could fill the stomach with potatoes and you'll take in only 500 calories. Potatoes are not fat food. Butter and sour cream on the potatoes are the fat foods. Eat all you want. Boiled preferred, or sauteed quickly in vegetable broth with onions and other veggies sounds good, too. I just ordered a potato cookbook from Amazon so I can really learn how to make this vegetable a centerpiece.

Interesting facts about how the body stores reserves. It requires 30 percent of the energy in carbohydrates to convert this fuel source to fat. The body really doesn't want to do that - too expensive. It will make every effort to burn this food as fuel, which is to our benefit. Fat, on the other hand, requires only 3% or less of it's energy to move (notice I didn't say convert) itself to storage. It is effortless and painless - and worthless for all but the anorexic. As a matter of fact, you could take a core sample through any stored fat section of your body and easily determine exactly which type of fat was stored! Polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, satured - makes no difference - fat does not get converted, it just gets moved. This process was designed to get us through some tough winters when there was no food, but honestly, when was the last time that happened to you or me? If a famine hits, keep a bottle of rancid olive oil handy and see how long you last.

I still love my salads and fruits, which I'll be eating in abundance, just not as the center of my meal - these foods are important and taste fantastic, but I will be adding suateed (NOT in oil), steamed and boiled vegetables to my diet to meet my caloric needs. No more pushing away from the table before I'm fully satisfied. There's no need when the food is right. I'll still keep all animal products from my diet and refrain from fats and oils, except those found in the vegetables naturally, and limit the foods that are exceptionally high in fat like avocados and certain nuts. This sounds entirely sensible to me.

Just a note on cooking - Steam or boil all that you can. The temp never gets over 212 degrees. Maybe I said this already, but it bears repeating. When the food gets cooked to the higher degrees, bad compounds form, most of which is concentrated on the outer layers of the food exposed directly to the heat but found in abundance throughout the food. Put a lid on this type of cooking as much as possible.

Even so, once a year I plan to break the rules and make an oversized pot of my famous seafood gumbo for our friends and family who are willing to make the trip up the hill. Instead of having three bowls, though, I'll cut back to one, and eat more salad. I'm thinking mid-July.

If you're interested, there's a sign-up sheet in the breakroom.