Is there ever going to be a time when I’m NOT thinking about the food thing? Probably not. Maybe not. But I think I’m getting better about it. What does that mean?
Even before I was a thinking person, actually, from the time I was a baby, I had allergies, asthma, and as I toddled into the world, I adopted some strange eating habits. In homeopathy, strange eating habits are indicative of something else – like eating house putty for instance, may be indicative of a calcium deficiency, which would point the homeopath in the direction of remedies helpful for the condition. But this is what I’m thinking about now. Then, I’m sure my Mom had no idea how to deal with me.
Today, I’m again considering present day implications of our (humanity’s) relationship to food, survival, and our evolution.
I’ve read Nora Gedgaudas’ books: Primal Body, Primal Mind, in a couple iterations, and her new book: Primal Fat Burner. She takes a ‘stand back a few million years approach’ to understanding modern human physiology.
What Gedgaudas aims to do with the plan laid out in her Primal Fat Burner book is to help the reader:
…retrain your body to do what it already knows how to do: flip on the fat-burning switch though a simple diet low in carbohydrates and high in healthy, natural fats, thereby restoring the metabolic advantage that we once enjoyed but have missed for far too long.
This is not solely about fat burning for weight management, although the results do assist with that – it’s about burning fat as fuel for energy production, for life.
The plan is fairly simple:
1. Value the fats your ancestors ate and include in your diet a variety of quality, natural, unadulterated fats from both animals and certain plants like coconuts, olives, macadamia nuts, and avocados.
2. Eliminate the damaging effects of sugars by cutting out processed foods, sodas, fruit juices, grains, and starches, along with artificially sweetened foods, and replacing them with fibrous vegetables, greens, and a few whole fruits (mainly berries) and nuts.
3. Shift the ratios of dietary macronutrients so that you get the majority of your calories from fats, a modest amount from protein, and a very small amount of sugars and starches from large amounts of fibrous vegetables and greens, including cultured varieties.
4. Choose foods to which humans are the most genetically well adapted, and obtain them from the most naturally produced, highest-quality sources.
5. Enhance your detoxification capacity by eating an abundance of phytonutrient-rich vegetables, drinking purified water, and, when needed, using quality supplements.
This subject for me is much more than a commiseration over diet. It has deep philosophical and emotionally-involved implications.
We all have the opportunity, with quality research, information, and suggestions currently available, to make our own best decisions about how we want to live our lives. I’m thankful for all of this. For me all paths lead to awareness. It may not always be a comfortable process, and the point is that every moment is one of awareness. This one, and this one, and this one, and this…
~ Anais
* Note: I created this post on my iPad using BlogPad Pro. You can see its little icon at the bottom. I also used an image re-sizing app called ImageResize, as well as the Apple resident iPhoto. It’s not all that smooth creating a full blog post with images, featured images, etc. I appreciate these tools that enabled me to get this job done.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: diet, healthy eating, Nora Gedgaudas