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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Carbohydrates:
- I’ll talk about the many different types of carbs
- I’ll explain which carbs are essential for health and which carbs can contribute to disease
- I’ll talk about how to find your sugar and starch tolerance level
- Finally I’ll share the best ways to get more healthy natural whole real carbs into your diet
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Carbohydrates are one of the three main macronutrients besides fat and protein. The most popular carb of them all is sugar. This pure white highly processed refined powder has been the cause and reason for many people failing to reach their body composition and health goals.
Sugar’s sweetness and ability to affect your hormones, your immune system, and your neurology should not be underestimated, and I’ll talk more about this later on. But there’s more to carbs than just this simple sugar.
Carbs in the modern age need to be differentiated into two groups: cellular carbs and acellular carbs.
Cellular carbs are minimally processed whole vegetables, fruits, stems, leaves, and seeds of plants. Cellular carbs are made up of living cells with more nutrients, structural fibre, and a lower density and percentage of actual sugar content per cell. These carbs get digested by your body and your gut microbiota without issue (remember your gut microbiome is the ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms living in your colon).
Acellular carbs are highly processed and refined sugars, flours, and includes the starch stored in whole grains. Acellular carbs are made up of dead cells with hardly any nutrients, non-functional fibre, and a much higher density and percentage of actual sugar concentration per cell. The digestion of acellular carbs creates an immediate excess level of sugar in your blood as well as an imbalance of your gut microbiome due to the fact that these naked sugars without the nutrition and without the fibre are rapidly digested and encourage the overgrowth of Candida and other pathogens.
All carbs are made up of single or groups of molecules called saccharides or sugars.
Monosaccharides consist of just one sugar molecule such as glucose, fructose, and galactose.
Disaccharides are made up of two sugar molecules. Examples include sucrose (your regular table sugar), lactose (milk sugar), and maltose (which is two molecules of glucose).
Carbs that are made up of 2-10 saccharide molecules are called oligosaccharides and any carb over 10 sugar molecules long is called a polysaccharide.
Now mono- and disaccharides can be considered simple sugars and oligo- and polysaccharides could be called complex sugars.
Starch is a storage form of carbs. Starch is a polysaccharide made up of hundreds to thousands of saccharide molecules, specifically chains of glucose.
Dietary fibre is also a carb. Fibre from foods are non-glucose oligo- and polysaccharides meaning that while your digestive system will breakdown and assimilate sugars and starch into glucose it will not breakdown and assimilate fibre.
Fibres can either be insoluble meaning it doesn’t dissolve in water or soluble where it does dissolve in water.
Insoluble fibre passes right through your entire digestive system from mouth hole to south hole and is not digested by your body and is also not digested or eaten as food by your gut flora.
Certain soluble fibres are digested and eaten by your gut flora. These fibres that feed your gut flora are known as prebiotics and they feed both the good bugs (probiotics) and the bad bugs (pathogens).
Another type of carb that acts as a prebiotic is called resistant starch. It is a polysaccharide made up of glucose molecules, but unlike regular starch which is digested by your body resistant starch acts like a prebiotic fibre where it is resistant to human digestion and so becomes food for your gut microbiome.
So there’s a lot of different carbohydrates some of which your body can digest, some of which your gut flora can digest, and some neither your body nor your gut flora can breakdown.
So which carbs are essential for health and which carbs aren’t?
If there was ever an essential carb it would be dietary fibre, especially prebiotics. Whole real vegetables and fruits will provide you with plenty of prebiotic, soluble, insoluble, and resistant starch fibres.
Insoluble fibre has the benefit of taking out toxins, cholesterol, and metabolised hormones ready for elimination in your colon, but insoluble fibre also has a dark side as it can cause damage to your gastrointestinal tract if eaten in excessive amounts or if eaten out of balance with soluble fibre. Think of insoluble fibre as steel wool rubbing up against your single-celled very thin gut wall.
Soluble fibre on the other hand can not only act as a prebiotic feeding your gut flora, but also provides a soft sponge bath for your gut wall. Aloe vera and chia seeds are high in viscous mucous gelatinous polysaccharides that can give your gut wall a soothing massage and are a lot better for your gut than insoluble fibres especially if you’re dealing with gut issues like constipation.
Beta-glucans are a type of polysaccharide and fibre found in certain mushrooms and seaweeds that supports immune function and has been shown to boost the immune system helping cancer patients overcome their cancer. I believe beta-glucans are essential to a long and happy life.
Are sugars and starches essential for health?
In general I would say no, but it really does depend on your ability to tolerate sugar and starch which I will talk about soon.
Whatever your sugar and starch requirements are keep in mind that carb quality matters when talking about simple sugars and complex starches.
If you’re getting sugar and starch from cellular carb sources like whole real vegetables and fruits then your chances of developing a chronic disease, gaining fat, and upsetting your gut flora will be very low compared to someone else who gets their sugar and starch from acellular carbs like highly processed and refined flours and sugars from baked goods, sports drinks, and table sugar.
When you eat acellular carbs these get taken up into your bloodstream quite quickly causing a massive spike in blood glucose levels followed by a massive surge and release of the hormone insulin. Insulin’s job is to remove glucose from the blood. When glucose is left in the blood for too long it will cause damage to your cells, body tissue, and your immune system. So insulin puts glucose into your muscle, liver, and fat cells for use or storage. When insulin is active your body turns from fat-burning mode into fat-storing mode. If you become insulin-resistant like a type-2 diabetic where your cells no longer respond to insulin then glucose will be left in the blood for far too long causing long-term damage to nervous tissue and other bodily tissues and your immune system will be unable to function properly leading to premature aging and cancer.
Basically a high fibre diet with more prebiotic soluble fibres made up of cellular carbs from real food sources is a lot healthier for you than a low fibre diet or a diet high in insoluble fibre that’s rich in acellular carbs. Sugars and starches are not essential for health, but may be needed depending on your individual needs and lifestyles.
You may have heard of low carb diets, high carb diets, slow carb diets, and even controlled carb diets. How do you know which diet is right for you? Find your personal tolerance to sugars and starches, that’s how.
You have a unique requirement for sugar and starch different to anyone else and this is called your carb tolerance. Since there are many different carbs I like to be more specific and call it your sugar and starch tolerance. Your tolerance to sugars and starches is based on you being able to eat a certain amount without increasing your waistline or increasing your fasting blood glucose levels, and by not having a decrease in performance in the gym, in the boardroom, or in the bedroom.
So how do you find out how much sugars and starches you should be eating?
One way is to look at your ancestral background. Cultures that live on or near the Earth’s equator have a higher tolerance to sugar and starch due to the high availability and cooling nature of fruits and some tubers. Cultures that live closer to the Earth’s poles have a lower tolerance to sugar and starch due to the lack of vegetation and therefore they have evolved to eat more animal foods higher in fat and protein as these have a more warming effect on the body.
Of course today most people (me included) are fruit salads made up of many different ethnic backgrounds so it’s impossible to take this information as fact, but instead use it as a guide and it’s good to have this knowledge in the back of your mind as you work through the next practical step.
To find your tolerable level of sugar and starch intake you will start eating a ketogenic diet meaning very low carb with very high fat and then by slowly progressing toward higher levels of sugars and starches and lowering your levels of fat you will find out how much sugar and starch you really need to meet your activity requirements and the unique biochemical needs of your body.
Because you are looking for your own unique tolerance to sugars and starches you will need to subtract the total amount of fibre from the total amount of carbs which will leave you with just the sugar and starch content of that food. This is also known as net carbs.
So for example a cup of cooked broccoli has about 12 g of total carbs and 6 g of fibre and after calculating for net carbs and removing the fibre content the total amount of sugars and starches in a cup of cooked broccoli is 6 g. Okay another example, a medium sized cooked sweet potato (that’s about 200 g worth without the skin) has 36 g of total carbs and 6 g of fibre. Subtract the fibre from the total carb count and you get a net carb sugars and starches content of 30 g.
Remember to focus on eating cellular carbs as much as possible during these diets.
Also stick to the same weekly routine in terms of activity levels whether that be in the gym or at home or at work. The goal here is to find the amount of sugars and starches that you can eat without harm in this current point in time of your life and if you find yourself not being as active or being more active than usual this is going to give you incorrect information affecting your results.
During each of the following four diets keep a journal and note down how you feel, your hunger and energy levels, your mood, your activity levels and performance in the gym, your libido, as well as your bowel movements. You will also want to note down any significant life happenings like a stressful event or celebration. And if you can, get yourself a glucometer or glucose meter which measures your blood glucose levels and measure your fasting blood glucose first thing every morning.
You will use all of this information after trying out each of the four diets to find out what worked, when it worked, what didn’t work, and what may have interfered when something should have worked because it was shown to have worked in the past.
Okay onto the diets.
The first diet you’ll begin with and follow for 2-3 weeks is the very low carb high fat diet aka the ketogenic diet. Total allowable net carbs on this diet will be 30 g a day and they will all come from non-starchy vegetables only. We want to restrict the sugars and starches on this initial diet. For an 80 kg male aiming for a 2000 calorie a day diet this means fat will be between 100-190 g a day and protein will be around 100 g a day. For a 60 kg female eating 1800 calories a day this means fat will be between 130-175 g a day and protein will be around 75 g a day.
So on a VLCHF diet (very low carb high fat diet) you could eat five cups of cooked broccoli and reach 30 g of your maximum allowance of carbs for that day.
After completing 2-3 weeks of the VLCHF diet move on to a low carb high fat diet for 1-2 weeks. This is where daily sugars and starches (net carbs) fall between 30-80 g and starchy vegetables are back on the menu. Again for the 80 kg male fat will now be between 120-165 g a day while protein stays around 100 g a day. For the 60 kg female fat now lies between 110-150 g daily with protein staying at around 75 g a day.
So on a LCHF diet you could eat a medium sweet potato (around 200 g worth) giving you 30 g of sugars and starches for the day.
Next diet to try out for 1-2 weeks is the moderate carb diet. This diet has net carbs between 80-150 g a day. So for the 80 kg male daily fat intake will be between 90-130 g and protein stays at about 100 g. For the 60 kg female daily fat intake becomes 80-120 g and protein sticks to around 75 g a day.
Final diet to test for 1-2 weeks is the high carb low fat diet. The HCLF diet is has net carbs between 150-300 g a day. The 80 kg male will have around 20-70 g of fat a day with protein still around 100 g. The 60 kg female will have about 10-60 g of daily fat with about 75 g of protein.
Remember all these are estimates and are based on your activity levels and whether you’re a pro athlete, a weekend warrior, or a sedentary office worker you will need to tinker with and play around with the protein and fat and net carb ratios.
Once you’ve done this sugar and starch tolerance testing you will once and for all know how much carbs you can handle without increasing your waistline, without feeling moody or hangry, and still being able to perform in the gym, the boardroom, and the bedroom. And remember this is just for where you are right now in your life and as I like to say life is a process never still, but always in flow. In a few years time you may find that this no longer works and you’ll have to figure out your new sugar and starch tolerance levels as well as protein and fat ratios that work for you.
Okay let’s talk about the best food sources for fibre polysaccharides and how to include more real carbs into your diet.
The following are all fantastic sources of prebiotics and resistant starch:
- Jerusalem artichoke
- Onions and garlic and leeks
- Asparagus
- Green bananas
- Beans
- Cooked then cooled potatoes and white rice
Shiitake, reishi, and maitake mushrooms and seaweeds are fantastic sources of beta-glucans. Remember beta-glucans help boost your immune system.
Aloe vera and chia seeds are full of gelatinous polysaccharides. This is great for gut health.
Imagine a meal made up of:
- Potato salad with red onion
- Roasted asparagus and garlic covered with butter
- Stir fried shiitake mushrooms and broccoli seasoned with kelp flakes and chia seeds
- Hummus
- Some reheated white rice
- Baked sweet potato mash with butter, cream, and cinnamon and
- Cauliflower puree with duck fat
In this meal you have altogether soluble, insoluble, prebiotic, and resistant starch fibres as well as a whole lot of phytonutrients, micronutrients, and sulphur with not that high a sugar and starch content and all of them are cellular carbs.
A favourite and simple vegetable dish I like is a starchy vegetable roast including potatoes, kumaras, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and carrots roasted in extra-virgin olive oil or duck fat. Very delicious and tasty and simple to make.
I also enjoy soups and smoothies that include more raw vegetables and herbs and spices.
If you feel you need to be living a lower carb lifestyle remember that most fruits today are bred for sweetness with higher sugar content so focus on heirloom varieties with more skin, less flesh or with more tart and sour flavours. Fruits with a higher skin to flesh ratio will have more fibre, phytonutrients, and antioxidants and less fruit sugars. So for example smaller berries are more nutrient dense then larger berries and won’t cause as large of a spike in blood sugar and insulin.
Hopefully the next time you hear that a certain carb diet is better than another you’ll think twice and ask yourself, ‘how much essential fibre compared to non-essential sugars and starches are there in this diet and would the net carb ratios work for me and my current lifestyle?’
Don’t guess. Test!
“With any recommendations and advice you hear the only real way to find out if it’s true for you and whether it will work for you is by trying it out for yourself.”
You’ll never know if that jersey or that dress looks good on you until you put it on.
I’ll leave you with this. You cannot treat all carbs the same. Some are more essential then others and some are downright detrimental (acellular carbs). Your individuality means your fibre and sugar needs will vary from moment to moment and will be different to other people.
As with all foods quality matters so make your choice of carbs a quality choice.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Saturated Fat and Cholesterol:
- I’ll explain how fats and cholesterol are needed by your body
- I’ll talk about how and why saturated fat and cholesterol were wrongly convicted of being the cause of heart disease
- I’ll talk about how industrial seed oils aka vegetable oils are very much non-essential and damaging to all life on the planet
- Finally I’ll share the best and most delicious ways to get more healthy natural whole real fats into your diet
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Saturated fat and cholesterol are essential for health, no doubt about it.
Saturated fatty acids form about 50% of the membranes of your cells. This is the cell wall and saturated fat gives your cells more strength and stability. Think about what happens to coconut oil or melted butter when left at a cool room temperature or if you put them in the fridge. They become solid. This is due to the high content of saturated fat which is much more stable and not as easily oxidised or damaged as the other two main types of fats monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Now if you were to put olive oil or fish oil in the fridge they would remain liquid as they don’t have anywhere near the same amount of stable saturate d fatty acids, but do have higher amounts of the more flexible monounsaturated fats and even more flexible and unstable and fragile polyunsaturated fats.
Besides making for strong cells by giving your cell membranes proper integrity saturated fatty acids also enhance calcium absorption which is critical for bone health. Saturated fats also help in the production of other essential fatty acids like omega-3 needed in the inflammatory response for healing. Saturated fats are also rich in fat-soluble vitamins A and D.
Now all fats in general have health benefits including helping your body to make use of fat-soluble vitamins. If you’re drinking low fat smoothies, you ain’t getting any of those fat-soluble nutrients. Fats also help stabilise your appetite and make you feel more satiated and full. There is no excessive release of the fat-storing hormone insulin when you eat fats compared to carbohydrates. Fats are a longer burning and consistent source of fuel compared to protein and carbs. Unlike fat protein and carbs, but more so with carbs these macronutrients get burnt up a lot quicker leading to sugar highs and sugar lows. Leaving you hungry and angry aka hangry.
Cholesterol is another very essential nutrient for health. Cholesterol is not fat, but a steroid alcohol and acts as a building block for hormones, neurotransmitters, and cells. Vitamin D for example is made when cholesterol in your skin mixes with UVB radiation from the sun. Your sex, growth, and stress hormones like testosterone and oestrogen and cortisol are made from cholesterol. No cholesterol equals no sex and growth my friend. Also cortisol is not only your primary stress hormone needed to help you deal with stress, but it also reduces inflammation in your body.
Cholesterol is also used in making bile that’s needed for proper digestion of ft. The protective coating surrounding your nerves is called a myelin sheath and these are made from fatty acids and cholesterol. Cholesterol is also an antioxidant fighting off free radicals in your body preventing DNA damage, premature aging, and cancer.
Finally and probably the biggest most important health benefit to saturated fats and cholesterol is that the dry weight of your brain is made up of at least 50% fatty acids and cholesterol. Without fat and cholesterol your brain would be nothing but a watery and mushy mass of stupidity. You want a fat head. You really do trust me.
As you can probably tell by now saturated fats and cholesterol are essential for a healthy and happy bodymind.
However, for many years now saturated fat and cholesterol have been demonised as the bad guys when it comes to health particularly heart health. This has never been true and fortunately the tides they are a changing. Whole natural real foods that the human organism was evolved to eat are coming back into favour while sales of processed and packaged fake pretend food-like products are starting to fall.
Our species of animal evolved and thrived on eating other animal meats, vegetables, and fruit. The coexistence of humans with these three main food groups has been going on for a few million years. Seeing as saturated fat is found predominantly in animal fat as well as coconut and cacao beans that humans have been eating forever and a day how could it ever be possible to think that an old-school food can begin to create new-school diseases.
For instance heart disease was a very rare and new disease over 100 years ago, but today it’s as common as canola oil and numero uno on the list of most fatal health conditions of all time.
To find out how saturated fat and cholesterol were framed for crimes they never ever committed we need to go back over 100 years ago when in the early 20th century a Russian pathologist called Nikolay Anichkov conducted studies with rabbits by feeding them high cholesterol animal foods. Seeing as rabbits are pure herbivores and raw vegans is it any wonder what the results were. Yep cholesterol damages arteries… in rabbits that don’t eat a high cholesterol diet.
Then in the mid 20th century we have Ancel Keys an American scientist who did a study on 7 countries showing an association between high rates of heart disease with high amounts of animal fat consumption. Problem is he cherry picked his data and picked only the 7 countries out of 22 countries he could have selected to show this connection. If you were to pick another 7 countries from that same set of 22 country data today you could show the complete opposite that high rates of heart disease were associated with very small amounts of animal fat consumption. Meaning ladies and gentlemen of the jury that. that man, Ancel Keys intentionally chose only the information that he knew would support his hypothesis and idea that saturated fat causes heart disease.
But wait because unfortunately there’s more… oh when will the hurting stop?
This is where money and food industry come into the picture. The American company Procter and Gamble who were in the candle and soap manufacturing industry in the mid to late 19th century used to use animal fats in their products. At the same time new oils extracted from plants were coming onto the market and these were a lot cheaper than animal fats. In the early 20th century the process of hydrogenating cottonseed oil had been invented. Hydrogenation is where you take a monounsaturated or polyunsaturated oil which as I mentioned before is naturally liquid as designed by Mother Nature herself and then turning that liquid oil into a solid saturated fat. So of course Proctor and Gamble would use this cheaper industrial seed oil in their candles and soaps.
It wasn’t long till electricity came online in homes and in cities and then candle sales plummeted. So what Procter and Gamble did next was pretty clever, deadly in the long-run, but financially smart indeed. They started to sell the crystallised cottonseed oil as a cooking fat called Crisco.
Ever since then other industrial seed oils and other vegetable oils have come on the market as imitation butters like margarine and as replacements for lard and tallow in big restaurant fryers. Even the fast-food chain McDonald’s used to use animal fats in their fryers until they were persuaded to switch to Crisco and other vegetable oils for health and financial reasons I’m sure.
The reason for the abundance and low cost to these industrial seed oils is that national governments subsidise seed farmers and growers. Authorities support and give money to grow more of these crappy crops. These crops are the highest growing food group in the world and were originally used as animal feed, but instead of throwing out the leftovers and newly created waste government officials working together with the food industry realised that if they market this stuff as healthy they could make more money from taxes and sell it as human food.
So here we have some really dodgy science showing that cholesterol damages arteries and that animal fats cause heart disease and then we have food manufacturing companies selling extremely cheap unhealthy industrial seed oils and marketing them as a healthy alternative.
So what is it that makes these crop oils, these seed oils, these vegetable oils not only bad for your health, but also damaging to the environment?
I’ll start with the environment first because even if you couldn’t care less about your own health maybe you’d think twice about buying and eating these crop oils if you knew how it affected the planet, the environment, and the future that your children will be growing up in.
Because authorities are paying to help increase the production of these crops which include cottonseed, canola aka rapeseed, corn, and soy they are knowingly or unknowingly causing massive damage to the ecosystem. How?
Just as the health of your body depends on the health of your gut microbiota which are the population of trillions of microorganisms living in your gut the health of the planet is dependent upon the health of the soil.
Topsoil is the first half metre or couple feet of soil. This soil isn’t just a mass of dirt like the subsoil beneath it. Topsoil is an ecosystem of microorganisms, worms, insects, fungi, plant roots, and broken rock. Together this entire ecosystem transforms light (sun energy) and matter (earth energy) into a natural compost called humus and into minerals, vitamins, hormones, enzymes basically every single nutrient under the sun and on the planet that’s needed to create life and make a happy and healthy human is made and found in the topsoil.
It takes thousands of years to create just one foot of healthy topsoil. Sadly topsoil around the globe is being lost due to food industry growing monocultures of seeds, that is the same single crop on the same land year after year. Once we lose this topsoil we will lose a huge supply of food.
Different soils will have different nutrients. All plants have their own unique nutrition needs and provide a different set of nutrition to the soil. When one crop is grown on the same soil year after year all the nutrients required by that one crop will be sucked out of the soil leaving the soil malnourished and lacking in those particular nutrients. Eventually this soil will be dead of nutrition and the crop will no longer thrive and production will need to be moved to another location.
We need to remember and I say this almost every show it seems that life is a process always changing and in flow. We must rotate the crops we plant on the land so that the soil never gets stripped of one set of nutrients. So until the food industry learns this, the future of the health of the soil, the planet, and future generations of people looks pretty dark.
Once harvested these seeds are turned into margarines and other solid fat substitutes that I call franken-fats through a process called hydrogenation. This involves pumping hydrogen molecules into these fragile polyunsaturated fats, saturating them with hydrogen turning them solid. This process damages these unstable fatty acids oxidising them creating free radicals. So here you have a brand new and damaged food-like product that your body does not recognise and the damaged fatty acids create inflammation and stress leading to disease.
Another process called partial-hydrogenation is even worse as this creates trans fats. Only recently have trans fats been labelled as unhealthy, but what makes things worse is that food standards state that if there’s less than 0.5 grams of trans fat in a single serving of food then a food company can put on the nutrition label 0 trans fat content. Lies I tells ya. All lies.
There are new seed processing methods used today that do not create trans fats, but still create rancid damaged franken-fats. Fractionation and interesterification are what these new processes are called so if you see fractionated or interesterified on a food-like product label… drop it, drop it like it’s hot.
Now the processing of seeds and fragile liquid polyunsaturated fatty acids into damaged solid saturated fatty acids involves many steps that make me wonder how we as a species could ever call ourselves the smartest animal on this planet. Really?
First there’s the hydrogenation, fractionation, or interesterification process followed by chemical extraction, deodorisation, degumming, bleaching, addition of additives, preservatives, artificial flavourings, and synthetic antioxidants, and so you want turn and run when you see a brick of grey goo looking back at you when you open up the packet unnatural colourings are added to make these franken-fats look like real food. Still can’t believe it’s not butter? Eww and yuck! Seriously!
Now some of you might say ‘but it has been shown that these vegetable oils lower cholesterol in the blood’ and you’re absolutely right. You know why?
Because these fatty acids are damaged and cause inflammation in the body guess who has to go about putting out the fires caused by them — cholesterol. Cholesterol has been labelled the bad guy just because it’s been caught at the scene of the crime. But what mainstream medicine fails to realise is that cholesterol is like your body’s own fire brigade and they are at the scene trying to put out the fire. The real fire starters are eating fake pretend food-like products like industrial seed oils. So of course eating these franken-fats will lower cholesterol in your blood because most of your fire brigade are in the cells and body tissue busy repairing the damage caused by these rancid oxidised fats!
Alright let’s talk about what fats are healthy and how to include them in your diet.
I already listed the healthy animal and fruit fats you want to focus on back in episode 8, but I’ll share them again here.
- Egg yolks
- Ghee and clarified butter
- Butter
- Lard
- Bacon fat
- Tallow — beef and lamb fat
- Duck fat
- Coconut oil
- Palm oil
- Cacao butter
- Macadamia oil
- Extra-virgin avocado oil
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- Sesame oil
- Raw nuts and seeds
Remember all these fats should be minimally processed, extra-virgin, and cold-pressed so there’s no damage caused by heat.
“The best way to increase your intake of healthy natural whole real fats is by eating a lot more vegetables!”
Vegetables have a lot of antioxidant, anticancer, and longevity nutrients, but the real reason I love to eat vegetables and have eaten more of them in the past few years than I ever did in the first few decades of my life is because vegetables are the best vehicle for fats!
There’s nothing like lightly steaming up some broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage and tossing them in some butter that’s come straight from the fridge, but then you see the butter begin to melt and get all gooey and when you season it with sea salt and take that first bite wow, what a taste sensation. Believe it or not friend but yes vegetables can taste juicy… you just need to add some beautiful fat.
You can take raw vegetables like celery, carrots, and cucumber and dip them in some nut butters or spread some fat on them. I love almond and macadamia nut butters. Peanuts are legumes not nuts and can have an inflammatory effect for some people so as always no matter what I or anyone else says be sure to listen to your body as the body never lies. If it doesn’t like a food then stop eating it.
Don’t forget by eating fats with vegetables and fruits your body can better absorb the fat-soluble nutrients in the food.
I have a big super green fatty vegetable smoothie every night with dinner which weighs in at over 600 grams. That’s over a pound of nutritious, delicious, scrumptious, and highly precious plant and animal fat nutrition, energy and information. I chew and chew with every mouthful and it takes me about 20 minutes to finish and by the end I’m as full and happy as Santa on the day after Christmas.
Another tasty way to eat more fat is to eat more of the fatty cuts of meat. Now remember back in the detox episode toxins love fat and get stored in your fat cells when your body cannot eliminate them. This holds true for animals as well. So if you’re eating the cheapest animal meat you can find that wasn’t naturally raised and bred, free-range out on pasture, eating a species appropriate diet then you have a toxic fat bomb right there.
When you choose fattier cuts of meat especially when it comes to organs meats like liver you must 100% choose the free-range and naturally raised meat. If you choose fatty cuts of muscle meat you can simply cut off the fat, but with offal and other meat where the fat is mixed inside the meat, don’t waste your money, time, health, energy, mood, and vitality. It ain’t worth it.
My personal favourite fat is 100% cacao or dark chocolate. No added sugar or sweeteners, just the cacao seed, bean, or pod whatever you want to call it churned into a fat bomb of a bar. With cacao being one of the highest antioxidant foods everything’s coming up chocolate!
Probably the best and most nutritious way to include more fat and overall nutrition in your diet is to eat liver pate. I love chicken liver pate. It is a mix of chicken liver, herbs, heavy full-fat cream or butter and it comes out like a dip. Raw vegetables again come to the rescue to help transport this beautiful mixture of fat and protein and vitamins into your bodymind.
My favourite chicken liver pate recipe is by Diane Sanfilippo author of Practical Paleo. I’ll put a link to the recipe in the show notes for this episode.
I’ll leave you with this quote by George Bernard Shaw as a reminder you are meant to have a naturally fat head and be proud of it.
“No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.”
Amen George.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Connecting with Nature:
- I’ll explain the importance of relationships and connecting with others
- I’ll talk about the different types of natural connection that nourishes your bodymind
- Finally, I’ll share some simple and effective relationship and nature rituals you can put into action to grow your natural social network
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
All life came from a single cell billions of years ago. Now this cell wasn’t alone for long as it soon multiplied into a community of cells. Over time this community of cells adapted and evolved and grew and developed into all the different life forms we see today.
Human beings are social creatures. We live and we love and we fight in communities. Wanting to be with other people and feeling a connection with another person is built into your DNA going way back to that very first cell.
Now if you think about it how do we punish someone who’s already in prison? Solitary confinement. This is where people are physically separated from the main population and put into a room by themselves isolated from the rest of the world.
There’s no worse prison than that of a mind of someone who has lost connection to their friends and family.
Whether you experience pleasure or pain as long you’re with other people there’s a hidden sense of safety and security that makes you feel like it’s okay to feel this way. You can call on another person for help or you can blame that other person for causing your problem. A shared experience also tends to feel more alive and vibrant in the moment then if you were to have it by yourself.
But when you are cut off from family and friends this is where feelings of loneliness and solitude begin to creep in. Every time I bite into a delicious piece of dark chocolate or drink a tasty smoothie the first thing that comes to mind is ‘I want to share this experience with someone else’. But if I’m alone at the time there’s a split second where I get a little bit sad at not being able to share what I’m having.
Sadness is an emotion that you can feel and deal with on your own quite easily. Grief on the other hand can hit you pretty hard and it usually comes from a major sad event happening in your life suddenly, out of the blue, and unexpectedly. Dealing with grief alone is never easy. You need support and people around you to help you to see a different perspective of things and to see that this time of grieving is only temporary, eventually things will get better. Without support that grief if left to linger may turn into depression.
To paraphrase a line from The Lord of the Rings:
“Grief must move on, grief cannot linger.”
The saying it takes a village to raise a child is very true if we want that child to grow into a happy and healthy adult. Today many families are having to raise children alone. I’m not talking about single mums or dads, but families that have no extended relations nearby to help them. No grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no-one to act as a babysitter or teacher or guardian. This raising of kids without proper support puts too much stress and strain on the family and eventually on society as a whole.
Obviously us human beings are happier and healthier together than we are apart — up to a point as we do get on each other’s nerves every now and then, but as a society we are all in relationship with each other whether we like it or not. It is this relationship, this togetherness that moves you as an individual and us as a society forward and helps every single one of us to learn and to grow.
“Relationships are the key to experiencing the fullness of life.”
A lack of relationships equal a lack of experience leading to a lack of learning and growth and a lack of living.
Now even if you were the last human on this beautiful planet you still wouldn’t be alone. Animals, trees, and plants you are also in relationship with these guys. You have a relationship with the planet itself and even the sun.
The three key relationships in your life include:
- The relationship you have with your self
- The relationship you have with other people and
- The relationship you have with Mother Nature
The primary relationship you have is with your self or should I say selves. You are not only a physical being, but also an emotional, mental, and spiritual being. Your inability to live an awesome life comes down to the fact that your many different beings are out of sync with each other. For example, if you say to yourself ‘I want to be happy and healthy’ which is an expression from your mental being relating to your emotional and physical being, but then you eat fast food full of rancid plastic vegetable oils, sick drugged animal meats, and processed sugars then your emotional and physical beings are going to express something a lot different to what you were intending.
Another example let’s say you’re a person of faith who follows a creed of ‘love thy neighbour’, but more often than not you gossip about other people behind their back in order to make yourself feel better than them due to a lack of self-esteem. Well here you have a disconnection between your mental, emotional, and spiritual beings.
In order to have a happy and healthy relationship with your self you need to have a clear intention on how you want to be in the world and then you need to live your life in harmony with that intention. If your intention and way of being are incongruent, are not in harmony with each other you will never truly be able to love your self and who you are.
Once you can live a harmonious life and love your self then the relationships you have with other people are a lot easier to be in. You won’t have the need or feel that you have to defend yourself when other people question the way you live because you know that your intention and your way of being are 100% in harmony. So no matter what vile crap other people might spew in your direction to try and rock your boat, you can stand tall and simply agree to disagree because you can only control how you feel. Their feelings are not your responsibility.
As my mentor Paul Chek says you are 50% responsible for every relationship you are in. You are 100% responsible for how you think and feel toward your self, but you can only take half that responsibility when in relation with another person.
You want to nurture the relationships with the closest people in your life. This doesn’t just mean family or friends, but anyone that you interact with on a regular basis. Even the relationship with the local shop owner you buy your lotto ticket from every week needs to be nurtured.
We are social creatures after all and were made to live in communities sharing experiences and ourselves with each other.
“Isolation leads to desolation, whereas integration leads to celebration.”
The final and most vital relationship is the one you have with Mother Nature. This means the Earth, the sun, and all other life forms.
Your body is of this planet, this planet is of a star, and stars are of the universe so you literally have the Universe inside you. You are made up of the Universe. You are made up of stardust. You my dear beautiful [reader] are made up of the Earth and soil.
Our human ancestors before the dawn of air-conditioning, television, malls, and high-rise buildings spent 100% of their time on soil, on grass, on sand, or in the sea. Even huts and shelters were made out of natural organic materials meaning our ancestors were connected to the Earth even while sleeping.
Why is this important?
Your body is a biobattery where your cells hold an electrical charge and positive electrons build up overtime and act as free radicals in your body. These free radicals cause damage to your body like rust damages a car. Now think of the world we live in today with WiFi signals, cell towers, and all these new consumer electronic gadgets our world is full of electromagnetic fields and these EMFs disrupt your battery, your energy signature, your aura. EMFs also cause a buildup of positive electrons in your body leading to more free radical damage, more rust.
Guess what electrical charge the Earth is? It’s not neutral, it’s not Sweden right it’s negative. So every time you ground yourself to the Earth and come into physical contact with it the Earth sucks up those positive electrons, those free radicals and gives you more health affirming negative electrons. This is called grounding or earthing and has many health benefits besides fighting off free radicals. Earthing can also:
- Reduce stress
- Improve sleep
- Speed up healing
- Decrease recovery time
- Increase energy
- Improve the flow of blood normalising blood pressure
- Reduce inflammation
- Boost immune function
You can find out more about earthing and grounding at earthinginstitute.net.
Okay so that’s your connection with the Earth now let’s have a look at why you need to connect more with the sun.
Vitamin D controls the expression of over 1000 genes in your body. Vitamin D actually isn’t a vitamin, but a steroid hormone like oestrogen and testosterone. Vitamin D is a powerful antioxidant combating those damaging free radicals. It also boosts and activates the actions of vitamins and minerals and controls how these micronutrients work with your body benefiting your bones, skin, and blood vessels. Vitamin D is also involved in fighting certain cancers.
Now your main source of Vitamin D comes from your skin when it’s exposed to UVB radiation from the sun. Note I said UVB rays not the cancer causing UVA rays. So slapping on a pile of toxic UVB blocking sunscreen and sunbathing behind glass which filters out the UVB and only allows in the UVA is the exact opposite thing you want to be doing for better health. You can also get some vitamin D from food and supplements, but your best and original source of vitamin D will always come from the sun.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a healthy relationship with the sun right now, I’ll give some tips later on how to rebuild it.
Last point about your relationship with Mother Nature involves being surrounded by her loving embrace and by this I mean being within and with her natural forms. So this means connecting with other life forms other than the human ape.
This could mean having a pet or how about NOT stepping on a snail or killing other small bugs. This could mean having a garden and tending to it regularly or going for a swim in a natural body of water like the ocean or a river.
In Japan they have a natural organic therapy that has been shown to heal many diseases and prevent illness called Shinrin-yoku translated as ‘Forest Bathing’. Another translation would be ‘getting outside and going for a hike in the woods’.
Animals, trees, and plants, all living beings release signalling molecules called pheromones to communicate subconscious intention to other members of their tribe. Now trees and plants also give off other organic compounds called phytoncides that can influence your bodymind and by being in a forest surrounded by nature breathing in these plant chemicals you can experience the following benefits:
- Reduced stress
- Improved sleep
- Faster healing
- Decreased recovery time
- Increased energy
- Improved blood flow normalising blood pressure
- Reduced inflammation and
- A stronger immune system
Have you noticed that these are also the exact same benefits you get from earthing and grounding. Coincidence? Yes! Life begets life and the Earth, the sun, animals and plants all boost your life force energy.
Remember we are all of this one song this Uni-verse. We are single notes of a symphony or individual pieces of a giant puzzle. As this quote from Alan Watts nicely puts it:
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.”
‘We are the world‘ as they sang for Africa 30 years ago and it’s true. We are all in this together my friend.
Okay so here are a few ways to improve your connection with self, with others, and with Mother Nature.
To have a better relationship with your self meditation is a great option. Meditation isn’t so much about reaching a point of enlightenment, but moreso about being in a focused state of mind where you can keep your mind on a single thought. By practising meditation on a regular basis you can train your mind to stay in the present moment giving your thoughts full attention
Meditation is also a time for quiet and in a world where we are drowning in noise from other people, from the media, from our own thoughts having a daily me time and quiet time ritual will help reduce your stress making you more resilient and better able to handle stress in your life.
Now there’s a 1001 ways to meditate. You don’t have to be sitting in a cave in silence for days on end chanting a mantra although you can if that floats your boat. There are movement meditations like Tai-chi and Qi-gong.
Personally I like walking and cooking meditations.
During walking meditation I time my breaths with my steps and count my steps as I walk counting 1 2 3 4 as I inhale and 1 2 3 4 as I exhale through the nose with my mouth closed.
Cooking meditation involves me being fully in the moment where I may have some music playing in the background and where I may or may not dance while in the kitchen and I time my chops of the knife or stirring of the pot to the beat of the music. I stay away from intense house or dance music as these can be a bit of a health hazard when wielding a knife in the kitchen.
There are some fantastic books out there on finding your self and being true to who you really are in all forms of being. I recommend reading:
- Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
- Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard
- The Music Lesson by Victor L Wooten which is best listened to as an audiobook
- 10 Secrets For Success and Inner Peace by Wayne Dyer and
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
These five books are a great start on your journey to integrating your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual beings into one harmonious force of awesomeness! You can find all these books in the Book Reading Club on the Whole Guidance website at wholeguidance.com/brc.
To enhance your relationship with others try finding ways to be of service to them. Giving is a fantastic way to serve. You can give your time and attention. You can give money. You can give knowledge or you can give others responsibility.
Receiving is another way to serve where you can receive what other people have created like a beautifully cooked meal and you can receive by letting others authentically express and share with you what’s really on their mind without judging them.
By giving and being open to receive others in their true and honest form you will see your relationships with the people in your life go from artificial and superficial to rich and more intimate.
Tips for getting outdoors in nature… get outside and get into nature!
Go hiking, walk trails, mountain bike riding, swimming, play on the beach, take your dog for a walk — don’t have a dog then get one from an abandoned animal shelter (definitely on my list to do). Get your thumbs green and get into gardening and horticulture or how about climbing a tree like you used to as a kid before getting told off.
Ideally you want to spend 30 to 90 minutes a day earthing your body to the ground, on grass, soil, or sand to reduce the stress of EMFs and boost your immune system.
At the same time why not get some sun exposure to produce some vitamin D.
You want UVB vitamin D producing rays not UVA cancer causing rays. While UVA rays penetrate the atmosphere and reach the Earth’s surface at all times of the day and throughout the year UVB rays only come through the atmosphere when the sun is high enough in the sky and this is usually around 10a to 2p during the summer and warmer months of the year (remember the sun doesn’t run by daylight savings time so keep that mind if you have that where you live). Also if you live in the upper and lower latitudes of the globe during the winter months UVB rays will not reach the surface of the planet even between the hours of 10a and 2p. So be sunsmart and protect yourself when the sun is low in the sky and expose yourself (go on I know you want to) when the sun is way up high.
Your skin colour will determine how much time you should be exposing your skin to the sun. Fare and white skinned people only need as little as five to 20 minutes a day in the sun. Dark skinned individuals may need to spend 30 to 60 minutes. Basically you want to be out long enough where you see the first signs of a tan happening on your skin, but not so long that you get burnt. You can gradually increase your time out in the sun as your skin will get used to being in the sun for longer periods. Keep in mind though that too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing.
Now Shakespeare wrote:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
So you could choose not to be, but that’s no fun at all!
So I’ll leave you with this poem I was inspired to write describing who we are all to be in relation to everything else.
You were designed
To be
Under the sky and
On soil
On sand and
In the sea
You were created
To be
In the bush and
In forests
With plants and
The trees
You were embodied
To be
The same as animals and
Bugs
As well as the birds and
The bees
You were born
To be
Giving
Loving
Happy and
Healthy
You are
To be
A unique
Expression of
The Universe living
Your own reality
Links and Resources
- Earthing and Grounding — EarthingInstitute.net
- ‘We Are The World’ music video
- Way of the Peaceful Warrior — Dan Millman
- Motivation Manifesto — Brendon Burchard
- The Music Lesson — Victor L Wooten
- 10 Secrets For Success and Inner Peace — Wayne Dyer
- The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success — Deepak Chopra
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring Movement:
- I’ll explain how movement is one of the most essential nutrients for your body
- I’ll talk about how a lack of movement affects your health
- Finally, I’ll talk about the different types of movement that your body expects and how to increase your consumption of real movement nutrition
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Movement is life. Life is movement. If you’re not moving you’re not living. Movement nourishes your body and mind.
Your body and mind are actually one and the same. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Dr Dan Siegel defines the mind as the following:
“The mind is an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”
Your mind is embodied within your entire being, your whole body, cultivating the many different life processes happening within. From your left pinky toe to your right ear lob.
Whenever I refer to your body I’m also referring to your mind and vice versa. So you can think of your body and mind as one entity called the bodymind.
Movement then moves not only the body, but the mind your entire bodymind.
Movement acts as a pump. Every time you move you contract and relax different muscles in your body and this process of restriction and expansion within each muscle acts like a pump. These pumps move water, blood, oxygen, nutrients, energy and information throughout your body. No pumping action means no nutrition for your cells.
Your lymphatic system is your waste management system and does not have a pump of its own as does your circulatory system that has the heart as a pump. Lymph fluid in your lymphatic system only moves when you move. If you don’t move then all that toxic waste just sits around in your lymphatic system and doesn’t get into your bloodstream where it can be processed for detoxification and elimination. Overtime this causes a toxic buildup in your body and when you do decide to move this will eventually overwhelm your detoxification organs such as your liver, skin, lungs, and kidneys.
You must get into the groove and move in order to transport nutrients to where they are needed the most inside of your cells and in order to transport and eliminate waste out of your body.
If you’re not moving and remain in one position for long periods of time and I’m not just talking about sitting, this applies to any long held position standing, kneeling, then your cells begin to starve due to a lack of nutrition and you also create a buildup of waste.
One of the symptoms you will experience due to a lack of movement is tiredness and low energy. When your cells do not receive the nutrients, energy and information that they need to function your metabolism begins to slow down, your bodymind begins to slow down because it’s low on nutrition and energy. Even though the energy is there inside your body your lack of movement is not transporting that energy to where it’s needed the most.
Not only does a lack of movement cause you to feel tired, but because the nutrients aren’t being transported to vital organs in your body such as your gut, heart, and brain your bodymind begins to lose focus and attention and you also begin to experience unstable mood swings and can begin to feel irritable.
Having unstable energy levels isn’t just due to a lack of nutrients reaching your cells, but also due to your inability to handle carbohydrate and sugar. Eating excess carbs and sugar creates many issues in the body including having unstable levels of blood sugar. So while you may experience an energy high at first after a carb-heavy meal or snack as the sugar rushes throughout your bloodstream it’s not too long before your energy comes crashing down as all that sugar gets quickly burnt up for energy and any excess sugar gets put into storage and then you begin to feel hungry again. You may get hungry or you may feel angry after such a sugar crash, but for me I definitely get both hungry and angry after I eat too many carbs. A phenomenon known as HANGRY!
Muscle is one area of your body where excess sugar (glucose) gets stored as glycogen. Now if you do not have enough lean muscle mass then your tolerance for carbs will be lower than someone else who has more lean muscle. One way you can maintain lean muscle is by moving. Move it or lose it right.
Also movement makes muscle cells more sensitive to the carbs you eat. After doing some high-intensity movement your muscle cells begin to scream out for nutrients and they are extremely hungry for carbs. Now your fat cells are always screaming and always hungry for additional fats made from the excess carbs and sugars you eat. But by moving your body you can at least make your muscle cells scream louder for nutrients compared to your fat cells.
So by moving you can maintain lean muscle while at the same time you can tell your muscle cells to take up most of the sugar you’re eating keeping your blood sugar levels from rising and falling too quickly. This allows you to step off and skip the next ride on the energy roller coaster.
Peristalsis is the wave-like contraction of the muscles that make up your digestive system and the more you move the more peristalsis occurs in your body meaning you will have better elimination of faecal matter — that is to say you’ll poo like a champion. Lack of movement reduces peristalsis and can make you constipated. When you’re constipated your poo sits in your colon longer than it should and water and toxins in the poo will be absorbed into your body. This reabsorption of toxins that were meant to be eliminated creates double overtime work for your liver. This extra work for your liver makes it very hungry for energy and this will cause you to feel tired and fatigued as other areas of the bodymind are not getting the energy that they need.
Also chronic constipation and exposure to toxins in your environment (such as chemicals in food and in personal and home care products) will overwhelm your liver and it will not be able to do its job 100% and usually the next organ that takes the hit for an over toxified body is the largest organ — your skin. So crap starts to come out of your skin and you can get rashes and acne all because you’re constipated and all because you are not moving and of course if you’re not well hydrated.
So if you want to move-it move-it down there you’re going to need to move-it move-it up here.
Your heart pumps blood through your circulatory system, however, it’s not a lone ranger. Your heart is part of your bodymind and works together with all other parts of your body. When you’re moving, even if it’s just fidgeting. anytime you use your skeletal muscles you’re providing additional pumps to move blood and nutrients around your body. This supports the heart so the heart no longer has to work as hard. Movement can create less strain and less stress on your heart… unless you’re doing long duration cardio, but I’ll talk more about that later.
Now this is also why sitting has been called the new smoking and why chronic sitting can lead to heart disease because without frequent movement you’re causing your heart to do more work on its own. This can create constriction in your arteries causing high blood pressure and gradually overtime due to the chronic high blood pressure and constant rushing of blood through constricted passageways in your circulatory system this will cause damage to your arteries.
Another issue with a lack of movement is your body can no longer grow and repair itself. Living life causes wear and tear on your body particularly in your muscles and joints. These are the workhorses of your body the slave workers doing hard physical labour. The cells in your muscles and joints are constantly being damaged and are dying off. If these cells are malnourished and not getting enough nutrients and energy they will not be able to repair the damage done by daily activities and the dead cells will not be replaced as quickly as they should be or will not be replaced at all. This will lead to muscle aches and joint pain. This is where slow energy-building movements come in and I’ll talk more about these soon.
So does this all mean you have to be moving 24/7 even in your sleep? No. But you do need to be moving often and change up your physical position throughout the day.
There are many different ways to incorporate movement into your life. There are informal types of movement that include play and random bouts of physical expression where there is no end goal in mind when you’re participating in the activity. So you can play outside, you can walk, run, hop, skip, jump. You can climb trees and literally just hang out and pull yourself up. You can swim, ski, go hiking, or mountain climbing. All this movement counts and yes this even includes sexy times.
Formal types of movement include training and exercise where you have particular disciplined movement patterns that require skill, proper form, and correct technique to perform.
Just as there are nutritious foods with different types of nutrients and fake foods with no nutrition whatsoever, there are also nutritious movement patterns with different types of movement nutrients and fake movement patterns with barely any movement nutrition.
One fake movement pattern that does more harm than good overtime is chronic long duration cardio. Yes joggers, cyclists, and marathon runners alike are all performing an unnatural act as it relates to your bodymind. Long duration cardio has many benefits as most movements do, but unfortunately chronically performing this type of exercise has one massive downside and that is the increase in heart muscle mass and rigidity. Your heart is a muscle and with chronic overuse this turns to abuse as the heart becomes rigid leading to heart conditions as endurance athletes age.
Another fake movement is seen in the competitive sport of bodybuilding. Again another unnatural act that puts too much strain on the bodymind as a whole and couple that with the use of artificial enhancements and drugs and it’ll lead to a lower quality of life as these athletes age.
Now there’s nothing wrong if you participate in these activities to a point. You can run marathons and become a bodybuilder for health reasons, but once you get competitive at these sports health tends to go out the window. Once you realise that you are doing something your body was not designed for and knowing that you may have to do unnatural things in order to participate you will be able to modify other aspects of your lifestyle to compensate.
There are three main types of nutritious movement your body really loves and was designed for in terms of living a happy, healthy, and long quality life.
Now before I get into these three nutritious movement patterns understand that your body doesn’t run off calories alone. Hormones play a huge role in determining the health of your mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. These three nutritious movement patterns turn on fat-burning and growth hormones, and increase sex hormones. While these three types of movement may not burn as many calories as other forms of exercise they also won’t put your body under massive amounts of stress like other forms of exercise [cough] chronic long duration cardio. Anyhoo…
First nutritious movement is lifting really heavy things aka high intensity training. Strength training can involve weights and machines, but there’s nothing wrong and everything right with using your own body as resistance. If you’re new to lifting heavy things you will want to go through three different stages of body conditioning and preparation work beforehand to reduce your chance of injury: mobilisation, stabilisation, and flexibility. By making sure your joints and muscles are mobile and flexible enough to handle weight and by conditioning your core muscles to share the load evenly you will dramatically reduce your risk of injury. You’ll need to find a skilled exercise coach and personal trainer for this and I suggest looking for CHEK Practitioners in your area. Highly skilled with holistic and functional training CHEKkies are one the best trainers, rehabilitators, and physical therapists in the world. You can find them at chekconnect.com.
Two more great resources for conditioning your body are the books Foundation by Dr Eric Goodman and Peter Park and Becoming A Supple Leopard by Dr Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza.
With this strength training you want to be lifting at high intensities. So this doesn’t mean 5 sets and 30 repetitions of the same exercise. High intensity is more like 1-5 sets of 3-5 reps of a single exercise with 3-5 minutes of rest in between each set. You only need to spend about 30-50 minutes in the gym for one of these workouts. Another way to perform at high intensities is by lifting and lowering weights very slowly. This type of slow resistance workout takes less than 20 minutes to complete and can be done by anyone over the age of 16. Check out the book Body By Science by Doug McGuff and John Little for more on this slow resistance training.
Next nutritious movement pattern is sprint intervals or high intensity interval training. If you were to look at a marathon runner’s body compared to a sprinter’s body you’ll notice one isn’t quite as lean and muscle bound as the other. The sprinter’s body looks healthier because of the hormonal effects that sprint training provides.
Sprint interval training involves warming up for a few minutes and then going all out for a certain period of time and then resting for a certain period of time and repeating this pattern a certain number of times. You can use a spin bike, treadmill, or a real bike and sprint for real. You can even use weights. Any movement can be turned into high intensity interval training as it’s based on working at your hardest energy output for a set period then resting. I personally use a spin bike and warm up for three minutes. My first interval starts off with 30 seconds of going all out and then resting for 90 seconds where I go at an extremely slow recovery pace. I repeat this interval seven more times with a five minute cooldown afterwards. So that makes a total of eight sprints and a total of four minutes of actual physical high intensity activity.
I used to do 40 mins on the bike before I learnt about sprint training and it’s made me more time efficient and has been a lot more effective at improving my health.
So right away you can see these first two movement patterns are not exactly long workouts, but they are definitely intense and once done your bodymind bathes in the positive hormonal afterglow that follows.
Final nutritious movement pattern involves moving slowly and moving often aka not being stuck in one position all day every day. These movement patterns you can call working in instead of working out. Workouts drain your body of energy, whereas working in cultivates and builds energy within your bodymind.
The most simplest and easiest work-in of them all is to breathe. You don’t even have to get out of bed for this one. Taking relaxing diaphragmatic belly breaths through the nose as described in a previous episode I did on breathing moves your body in all three dimensions as your belly expands forward, ribcage expands sideways, and your spine expands up and down.
Another easy work-in movement pattern is walking. Very simple, you don’t have to strain yourself, just walk. Maybe start off with 30 minutes a day so get a timer, set it for 15 minutes, start off on your walk and once the timer goes off you walk back.
Next work-ins are Tai-chi and Qi-gong. These are very slow forms of movement and are more meditative in nature. Along these lines of movements are Zone exercises which are a form of Qi-gong where you do the exercise not so much for meditation (but they can be used this way), but more for healing a specific health complaint that you may have. To find out more about these Zone exercises look up the book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! by holistic health practitioner Paul Chek.
Yoga is another form of working in. Now I’m not talking hot Bikram melt-in-your-clothes yoga that’s more of a workout, but Hatha and Iyengar yoga. That’s the yoga you want for working in.
One final tip for those stuck in a chair most of the day or stuck being in one set position for long periods of time. No amount of movement can reverse the damage caused to your arteries from being chronically stuck in the same position all day. You need to break up the static pattern with either frequent dynamic movements or by simply changing position. So set a timer to 25 minutes and every time it goes off get up for a few minutes and go for a quick stroll around the building or go outside or simply do air or chair squats, lunges, or march on the spot. If you’re fortunate enough to have a workstation that can be raised and lowered simply change from a sitting to a standing position throughout the day.
Just don’t stay in the one position for longer than an hour.
I’ll leave you with this:
“Life is a dance and Mother Nature only dances with those who dance and move along with her.”
If you ain’t movin’ and you ain’t groovin’ then Mother Nature’s bouncers aka bacteria, fungi, and parasites will gladly show you the door.
Links and Resources
- ChekConnect.com for Holistic and Functional Exercise Coaches and Therapists
- Body By Science — Doug McGuff MD, John Little
- WGP 004: How to Breathe for an Awesome Life
- Foundation — Dr. Eric Goodman, Peter Park
- Becoming a Supple Leopard — Dr. Kelly Starrett, Glen Cordoza
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! — Paul Chek
Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring a topic I’m very familiar with Digestion:
- I’ll explain how proper digestion works and its many different stages
- I’ll talk about poor digestion and how it can affect your health
- Finally, I’ll give some digestion rituals that you can practise to increase the absorption and usage of the nutrition and energy and information you get from eating real food
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Digestion can be broken up into two main phases. First is the psychic phase. Second is the physical phase.
The first phase deals with your mind, with your emotional and mental state and the choices you make when it comes to eating. So what you choose to eat, when you choose to eat, how you choose to eat, and the whys behind each choice are the beginning of your digestive process.
I will focus on the second phase of digestion in this episode the physical phase and there are many different stages.
Remember from a previous episode that your enteron, your alimentary canal, your entire digestive tubing from your mouth hole to your south hole is technically outside your body. It is your body’s first line of defence against anything you put into your mouth. It is in your gut where the stuff you eat finally gets absorbed into your body.
The first stage of physical digestion begins in the mouth when you eat and chew your food. Mastication, that is the mechanical physical act of chewing, breaks up the food into smaller pieces making it easier to swallow and mixes it with the digestive enzymes in your saliva. These enzymes begin to break down the macronutrients in the food, specifically carbohydrates into smaller starch molecules. So properly chewing your food makes it easier for later stages of your digestive process to function.
The second stage of physical digestion happens in your stomach. The acidity of your stomach is very high. It can burn skin and dissolve metal and if it wasn’t for the thick mucous membrane that lines your stomach it would eat itself. One reason for the high acidity in your stomach is to further digest and breakdown food molecules, specifically proteins from long chains of amino acids (polypeptides) to smaller ones. Another big reason for a very low pH (meaning a very high acid level) in your stomach is to ensure that any bacteria, fungi, or parasites that have stowed away in the food and come along for the ride are killed and destroyed. You do not want these bad bugs to go any further than your stomach.
The next stage of physical digestion is in your small intestine. Now your small intestine has a very different pH level compared to your stomach meaning it is more alkaline and not acidic at all — in fact its neutral. This is because your pancreas, an organ that secretes digestive enzymes and hormones, also releases bicarbonate into your small intestine to neutralise the acidic foods coming from the stomach.
The digestive enzymes secreted by your pancreas further breakdown the carbohydrates into saccharides (smaller sugar molecules) like glucose and fructose, the proteins get broken down into individual and very small chains of amino acids, and fats are also broken down into individual fatty acids. As the food travels further into your small intestine the digested macronutrients and micronutrients (remember micronutrients include vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and plant nutrients) so the macros and micros begin to get absorbed through the gut wall of your small intestine. Once absorbed saccharides and amino acids travel to your liver to be processed and detoxified before they enter your bloodstream. Fats take a different route to your bloodstream by hitching a ride through your lymphatic system, your waste management system.
Once in your bloodstream the absorbed macros and micros get transported to where they are needed most and assimilated by your cells and metabolised, used for cellular function. The waste products of metabolism are then taken back to the liver for processing and elimination through the skin by sweating, lungs by breathing, kidneys by urination, and the large intestine your colon by defecation, that is pooping.
Now going back to the small intestine any undigested food particles, macros, micros, and fibre that are not absorbed through the gut wall of your small intestine will move on to your colon for the final stage of digestion.
The colon is where your gut microbiota lives and has a lower pH and higher acidity level than your small intestine, but still nowhere near as acidic as your stomach. You will have a diverse population of microorganisms here and what you really want is a well-balanced ratio of good bugs (probiotics) to bad bugs (pathogens). That ideal ratio is about 85% probiotics to 15% pathogens. The more probiotics in your gut the more lactic acid they produce. The more lactic acid produced the higher the acidity of the colon. The higher the acidity of the colon the lower the number of pathogens as the bad bugs cannot thrive in an acidic environment.
Your gut microbiota take up any undigested food particles, macros, micros as well as prebiotic soluble fibre and use these as their food. As a result of your gut microbiotas digestion more nutrients and waste are created.
Nutrients such as vitamin K, some B vitamins, and short chain fatty acids are produced by the probiotics. The pathogens on the other hand produce toxic waste products. These additional nutrients produced by the probiotics as well as water in the colon will be absorbed into your body. At the same time any leftover foods, macros, micros, and fibre that are not digested by your gut microbiota along with any waste products made by the pathogens and also any dead cells of your gut microbiota these will all form into faeces, into poo for final elimination.
So to summarise the many different stages of digestion in a sentence: digestion begins in the mouth and ends in the south and involves mastication, digestion, absorption, detoxification, transportation, assimilation, metabolisation, and elimination.
If there is a problem in any one of these stages you will encounter many symptoms of poor digestion including:
- Diarrhea
- Constipation
- Gas
- Bloating
- Belching
- Stomach reflux
- Feeling tired after meals
- Feeling hungry after meals
- Muscle and joint pain including neck, shoulder, and back pain
So a few causes of poor digestion include dehydration due to not drinking enough water.
Your saliva, mucous membranes in your stomach and small and large intestines are mostly water. If you’re dehydrated you won’t be providing enough enzymes in your mouth to begin predigesting your food. Your stomach lining which protects it from the acid will be weak leading to the formation of stomach ulcers. Your small and large intestines will not be able to breakdown food and push the food through your gastrointestinal tract effectively causing lack of nutrient absorption and blockages.
Your poo is also mostly water so when you become dehydrated you get constipated. The longer poo remains in your colon the more water is extracted and absorbed into your body and the more constipated you get. Not only that, but the waste in your poo which is meant to be eliminated begins to get absorbed into your body as well. So you want to make sure you’re hydrated otherwise you will begin recycling your waste back into your body.
Another cause for poor digestion is eating the wrong foods and taking pharmaceutical drugs and prescribed medications. So if you’re eating processed fake pretend food-like products such as vegetable oils, table salt, instant coffee, pasteurised dairy, wheat and any other packaged junk foods you will cause problems with your digestion. This is due to the fact that these foods are very micronutrient poor and are filled with chemical agents, preservatives, additives, colourings, thickeners, emulsifiers, synthetic minerals and vitamins which are very damaging to your gut and feed more of the pathogens and less of the probiotics. Medications have the same effect.
Eating a lot of these foods and taking drugs also causes your liver to work overtime to get rid of the toxins and because there’s more energy being drawn to your liver to process this junk there’s less energy available to other areas of your body. So instead of building muscle, burning fat, thinking clearly, healing and repairing, fighting off infections your body is too busy trying to detoxify what you’re putting into your mouth.
Plus by not eating enough micronutrients you end up with cells in your body starving of nutrition unable to function leading to illness
Drinking municipal town and city water that has chlorine in it can also upset your digestion. Chlorine is an antibiotic meaning it will kill a lot of your gut microbiome leaving behind the perfect environment for opportunistic pathogens to takeover leading to less nutrient production, more waste production, a weakened immune system and eventually sickness and disease.
So if you’re not drinking enough water, not eating real food, not staying healthy and so not having to take medical drugs, and if you’re not drinking high quality living structured water then you are putting more stress on your body than it can handle.
Stress of any kind whether it be physical, mental and emotional, or biochemical and physiological will cause digestive issues.
How you think and feel about events in your life affect your stress levels and determines whether your body stays in parasympathetic mode your rest, digest, calm, and connect mode or shifts to sympathetic mode your fight, flight, flee or freeze mode. Remember sympathetic mode is all about survival and not about digesting, growth or repair which is what parasympathetic is all about.
So even though you may be eating the highest quality organically farmed, naturally raised food blessed by the Pope himself you will not be digesting and absorbing any of the nutrients if you are in a high stress state. If you’re rushing out the door late for something, arguing with someone, getting frustrated in traffic, watching and reading bad things in the news, these are all causing your body to shift from digestion to survival mode.
So the first phase of digestion, the mental game is really huge when it comes to properly digesting your food. If you can correct the psychic phase of digestion your physical digestion will work a lot better.
The biggest problem with stress of any kind is that it causes physical damage to your gut. Your gut wall is made up of finger like projections called villi that stick out to breakdown food and absorb nutrients and they are connected to each other by tight junctions at their base. When you eat the wrong foods or a toxin or experience stress which will cause the release of stress hormones and other chemicals, all of these act as irritants in your gut causing those tight junctions between your villi to open up. This is bad news as only nutrients should be allowed through your gut wall, but now your gut has become leaky meaning any substance in your gut whether it be nutrient or toxic or parasite, small or large, can slip into your body. This causes a whole cascade of stress, immune responses, inflammation and damage to whatever bodily tissue that foreign substance attaches to. It may attach to your arteries, your joints, your thyroid, your bones, your muscles, your brain, leading to a whole bunch of diseases.
Remember what Hippocrates said:
“All disease begins in the gut.”
A leaky gut is serious business and I should know because I used to have one!
So you must be very aware of what you’re thinking and how you’re eating and that’s what I’m going to go into now — how do you eat for better digestion?
As I mentioned in a previous episode on water drinking a huge glass of water 20-30 minutes before a meal will improve digestion by lubricating your gut and your stomach and helping with the production of stomach acid as well as more saliva in your mouth giving you more enzymes to breakdown food.
The biggest tip I can give you is to eat real food and drink high quality water. The less toxins you ingest the more nutrition you will digest, absorb, and assimilate.
There’s an old saying:
“Drink your food and chew your water.”
You want to chew your food until it turns into a liquid. There’s no specific number of bites, but you’ll know what it is by the fact that you should not need to drink during a meal. If you’re finding yourself having to drink during a meal to get your food down that’s a huge sign telling you that you ain’t chewing enough.
Chew your liquids. Swirl your drink around in your mouth to allow your saliva and enzymes to infuse into the liquid so that your stomach and later stages of digestion recognise it as food and digest it as normal. Not chewing your water leads to it going right through your body with hardly any absorption at all.
Don’t watch or read the news. 99.9% of it is negative causing stress in your subconscious and your body. If you want to watch something or read something it should be a comedy. It should be inspirational and motivational. Or listen to music that makes you more mindful. Calming music not rev-yourself-up music. Me I love to watch the Food Channel of course or I’m listening to empowering podcasts while I eat.
Final tip if you have to go, number two that is, then go! I used to hold it in and I had trained my body to not go even when it wanted to go and eventually that lead to constipation with acute and sudden bouts of diarrhea, also known as constirrhea. If you’re currently fighting the urge to go number two it’s not too late to retrain your body back to its natural state by listening to it and when the urge comes you go and you go hard.
I’ll leave you with this:
“You’re not just what you eat, you’re how you eat as well.”
So eat real food and eat it well to keep your gut happy, healthy, and leakproof.
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring once again my favourite topic Real Food:
- I’ll share which fake processed pretend food-like products you should never eat… ever
- I’ll be offering a master list of real foods that you should be eating plenty of on a regular basis
- Finally, I’ll explain how to best use this real food manifesto for your individual goals
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
Remember the definition I gave in the previous podcast describing what real food is.
“Real food is any organic and natural plant or animal that fuels and nourishes the human body with energy and nutrition.”
Well the first group of foods I’m about to share now are the exact opposite because they are not food, but are marketed to you as being food. You should never and I mean ever intentionally buy, store at home or work, eat or even think about including these fake processed pretend food-like products in your diet and your life. No human, no mammal, no animal, no plant on this planet should be consuming these products.
That’s not to say that you won’t ever be exposed to these pseudo-foods these fake foods, but you can at least minimise the damage they cause to your body and health by reframing how you look at these foods and changing your perspective from seeing foods to seeing crappy industrial commercial products instead that do nothing more than expand and fatten your waistline as well as the bottom-line of big corporations.
First pseudo-food are industrial seed oils also marketed as healthy vegetable oils.
- Canola — aka rapeseed
- Corn
- Soya
- Cottonseed
- Safflower
- Low-oleic sunflower
- Peanut and groundnut
- Rice bran
- Grape seed
These oils all come from seeds, grains, and legumes, not from vegetables. The way these oils have been manufactured, produced, processed, stored and packaged damages the delicate fatty acids in the oils making them go rancid. Rancid oil is off, it’s stale and dead and when you eat rancid oil you get turned off to life as well.
Ever wonder how they turn a liquid oil like canola into a solid? By using biochemical processes such as hydrogenation and transesterification companies can do amazing things. Too bad the end products are one molecule away from being plastic! So next time you see hydrogenated or transesterified on a label you run. Run literally like your life depends on it.
So do not eat industrial seed oils or any product made with them such as:
- Margarine and other buttery spreads
- Sauces
- Salad dressings
- Mayo
- Chips
- Baked goods
- Gluten-free foods
Virtually all processed food-like products have been made with these damaged rancid industrial seed oils. Also a lot of restaurants and food outlets fry and cook foods with these industrial seed oils because it’s cheaper and they believe they’re doing the right thing in terms of giving customers a healthier end product.
Now if you have a heart healthy program in your country you will see a lot of these fake foods with a heart healthy mark on them. Again don’t believe the hype and the marketing. In New Zealand where I live we have the the Heart Foundation Tick programme where over 1100 products (products!) in 62 food categories have purchased the right to proudly display the healthy red tick. Yes it’s a paid for service. Unfortunately most of the products use industrial seed oil as the main ingredient.
Be alert, be wary, but don’t be afraid because now that you know better you can do better.
Next pseudo-food is regular table salt. Table salt has been processed and stripped of its minerals and trace minerals meaning there’s no micronutrients in table salt as there is in naturally occurring salt leaving behind a very bright white powder. Also there are anti-caking agents and other chemical additives added to table salt to prevent it from sticking and clumping together.
Table salt, not natural sea salt, is associated with blood pressure issues. Your body requires natural salt for many bodily functions such as keeping your water, sodium, and potassium levels in balance.
Salt should not be a pure white colour. It should be grey, pink, red, any colour besides white. It should be of the ocean and earth it came from. It will be full of Earth minerals and trace minerals as well as Earth energy and information.
You’ll find table salt in extremely high amounts in processed and packaged fake food-like products, salted butter (unless it says sea salt on the label), in takeout and fast foods, and even restaurants use the cheaper salt.
I love my New Zealand sea salt and Celtic salt is another great sea salt. Rock salt like Himalayan salt is awesome too.
Instant coffee is pseudo-food number three. Instant coffee is to organic whole bean coffee as a McDonald’s Fillet ‘o Fish burger is to a baked fillet of wild-caught salmon served over mesclun salad drizzled with lemon juice and extra-virgin olive oil.
Instant coffee is junk food. Usually the worst of the worst coffee beans, the bad, the ugly, the deformed are ground to make instant coffee. Also the way it’s processed and stored leads to a build-up of mould and microorganisms that create toxic products, which they happily leave behind in the powder. Personally I find instant coffee just tastes like crap.
Another thing to keep in mind for those with coeliac disease and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity is that instant coffee has high cross-reactivity with gluten meaning your body may process instant coffee the same way it processes gluten.
So instant coffee — don’t even go there.
Fourth pseudo-food I believe that no life should be consuming is pasteurised milk. What is pasteurisation? Pasteurisation is the processes of heating a liquid to kill all the microorganisms in it. Well that’s actually marketing. That was a legitimate reason back in the day when cows were literally living in their own filth. But the reason pasteurisation of any food is still used today by the food industry is so that fake foods have a longer shelf-life meaning more sales, more money, and a new BMW or Audi for food company executives.
Now raw milk from any mammal is full of nutrition and energy and information that supports the growth of life. It’s full of naturally occurring macronutrients and micronutrients. It’s full of good microorgansims, the probiotics that keep the bad microorganisms, the pathogens from infecting and spoiling the milk. It’s also full of native enzymes that help digest and breakdown the milk.
Pasteurised milk that has been heated to kill the bad bugs has also killed the good bugs. So now you have a milk that’s lost its defence system and if pasteurised milk gets infiltrated by even a tiny amount of pathogens it spoils. It spoils quickly and it spoils hard because there’s no probiotics to protect the milk and fight off the bad guys.
Also the enzymes that would usually help you digest the milk have been destroyed and the macros and micros have all been modified and denatured to the point where a lot of people get sick drinking this stuff.
There’s no point to pasteurised milk it’s been killed, it’s a dead product.
Seriously raw milk is the only way to go.
Final pseudo-food to keep away from your life forever (forever ever?) forever is wheat. The wheat of today has been commercially purposefully hybridised and bred to be smaller and contain a lot more gluten compared to its distant ancestor that is associated as being the staff of life in biblical times.
Wheat producers have made wheat a lot smaller so that their industrial agricultural machinery can more easily harvest and process the grain. Plus they’ve dramatically increased the gluten content of wheat to make it a lot easier to bake with as gluten literally is the glue that makes baked products nice and doughy.
Problem is no mammal on this planet can fully breakdown and digest gluten. I will repeat no mammal on this planet can fully breakdown and digest gluten.
Gluten is a protein made up of a long chain of amino acids. So if you can imagine a pearl necklace as a protein molecule and each pearl being an amino acid gluten is a very long pearl necklace a very long protein molecule compared to proteins found in animal and other plant foods. Gluten will get partially broken down say to a smaller necklace, but our body only accepts individual pearls and extremely tiny necklaces and these larger protein molecules are what cause people with coeliac disease to digestively explode and for other people with non-coeliac gluten sensitivity to experience other non-digestive issues. For me my mind gets all screwy when I eat gluten.
Not only that, but many people are also allergic and sensitive to other components found in wheat.
So the wheat of today has broad health implications for humans due to the way it’s been modified and manufactured and farmed and is definitely not the same grain that was eaten by our pioneering agricultural ancestors.
As an alternative to wheat the best and highest quality grain you can eat is known as einkorn. It contains none of the many allergenic stuff you’ll find in wheat and yes while einkorn still has gluten in it, it is in a different form and in different proportions compared to the gluten in wheat meaning people who may not tolerate wheat or gluten may find einkorn doesn’t upset their body and mind so much. I haven’t tried einkorn as I’m gluten-free, but it’s on the horizon for me to try out to see if it works for me or not.
You can also eat barley, rye, oats, and spelt if you enjoy grain-based products.
Your mission if you choose to accept it is to make sure you don’t intentionally eat any of these five pseudo-foods. Chronic consistent everyday exposure to these fake foods will overwork your body to the point where one day it’ll finally give up. All because you haven’t been eating enough real food that would have the nutritional and energetic and informational resources to eliminate the fake foods from your body. If you eat plenty of real food on a regular basis then the nutrition and energy and information that you receive will make sure that any time you are accidentally exposed to fake pretend food-like products your body will have the resources to repair the damage caused by eating that crap.
I’m about to layout the real food manifesto, but first let me explain what a manifesto is.
A manifesto is a declaration of what you believe to be true.
A manifesto is also a platform and a base that one can use to build upon and improve any given situation.
This real food manifesto is what I use to heal myself and what I also use to help others reach their health goals. It’s not the be all and end all of healthy food recommendations as I’ll talk about later in the show, but it’s a great starting point for anyone who is just starting out on their health journey or is confused on where to go next.
Remember as I stated in the previous podcast on real food quality absolutely matters. You want real food that has lived by the laws of Mother Nature in its natural environment eating a species appropriate diet without added industrial toxic chemicals and with no genetic modifications.
Let me now list all the real foods you should be eating in order to get the nutrition and energy and information you need for your body, your mind, and for an awesome life.
Fats
- Egg yolks
- Ghee
- Clarified butter
- Butter
- Lard
- Bacon fat
- Tallow — beef and lamb fat
- Duck fat
- Coconut oil
- Palm oil
- Cacao butter
- Macadamia oil
- Extra-virgin avocado oil
- Extra-virgin olive oil
- Sesame oil
- Raw nuts and seeds
Proteins
- Organ meats — liver, heart, kidney, brain, pancreas etc
- Fish
- Seafood
- Eggs
- Wild game
- Lamb
- Beef
- Fowl
- Pork
Carbohydrates
- Sea vegetables
- Land vegetables
- Fruits
- Dates and dried fruits
- Raw honey — local
- Maple syrup — 100%
- Natural sweeteners — stevia herb, lo han guo, erythritol, xylitol
- Refined sugars — molasses, rice and pure glucose syrups
Grains (carbs)
- Organic white rice
- Non-GMO organic corn
- Pseudo-grains — actually seeds like quinoa, buckwheat, millet
- Whole grains — einkorn being the preferred choice
Legumes
- Green beans
- Peas
- Organic peanuts
- Fermented organic soy — natto, miso, gluten-free soy sauce, tempeh
- Other beans
Fermented foods (include but not limited to)
- Fermented cod-liver oil
- Sauerkraut
- Kimchi
- Kombucha
- Amasai
- Kefir
- Soy sauce — gluten free
- Tempeh
- Miso
Dairy
- Amasai
- Kefir
- Yoghurt — fermented for at least 18 hours
- Goat
- Sheep
- Buffalo
- Camel
- Cow
- Ghee, clarified butter, and butter oil — 99.99% fat
- Butter — unsalted, 80% fat
- Cream — 35-50%
- Cheese — 4-40%
- Yoghurt — 4-10%
- Milk — 4% fat
Salt
- New Zealand kelp salt — sea salt with added kelp
- Celtic sea salt
- Himalayan crystal salt
Herbs and spices (include but not limited to)
- Parsley
- Oregano
- Rosemary
- Basil
- Thyme
- Garlic
- Turmeric
- Ginger
- Cinnamon
- Cumin
- Nutmeg
- Raw unsweetened cacao powder — my personal favourite spice
Water
- Spring and artesian well water
- Filtered water — chlorine and fluoride filters or reverse osmosis, but you must add back minerals to RO water
- Bottled water — glass and stainless steel
- Coconut water — full of electrolytes
Phew! I will put this manifesto into a PDF document that you can download in the show notes for this episode. You can find that at wholeguidance.com/blog.
Everyone is different, we are all different. The way we think, the way we feel, the way we live our lives and also the way our bodies digest, absorb and assimilate, metabolise and detoxify, and finally eliminate the food that we eat. We all do it differently.
So while this real food manifesto is a great starting point for you on your health journey you have to listen to your body, read the signs and symptoms and go where it flows.
For example I said pasteurised milk is fake food and raw milk is real food, but if you find when you drink fresh raw milk you get skin outbreaks or gas or mucus building up in your body, don’t drink it. Maybe you’ll do better with higher fat dairy products such as cream or butter and if you can’t even do butter you may find you do just fine with high quality ghee or clarified butter which are virtually 100% fat with extremely low-to-no dairy proteins present.
Other examples are maybe you don’t tolerate cooked eggs and figure out you can eat raw egg yolks without any problems (that’s me!). Maybe you can’t do beef right now, stick to lamb or fish. Maybe seafood isn’t for you.
Another thing is macro ratios and serving size. You may find you do better on a higher carb diet due to the high-intensity exercises you perform on a daily basis. Perhaps high fat low carb works for you because you’re doing more low-intensity and more endurance based activities and you find eating this way gives you better clarity of thought and you’re able to focus on tasks longer without being distracted.
“There’s so much individuality when it comes to diet.”
One way to find out which foods and in what proportions work and don’t work for you is to listen to your body and take note of your body language.
Are you able to isolate any health symptoms you’re currently experiencing like acne, constipation, back pain, and migraines and blame it on a particular food or food group? For example I know that when I eat gluten while I don’t get any obvious digestive symptoms I do get pretty moody and my ability to think straight and focus goes down the toilet. Stinkin’ thinkin’ begins to brew and if I were to continue to eat gluten on a regular basis and become a chronic consumer of the stuff dark thoughts start to creep back into my life. I basically become a lifeless zombie with a foggy brain.
The elimination diet is the best tool around to help you figure out which foods promote your well-being and which foods turn you into the walking dead. Best book on this topic is The Elimination Diet by Tom Malterre and Alissa Segersten.
Okay so for macro ratios if you find yourself tired, feeling full yet hungry, and with sugar cravings after a meal you probably ate too much fats and protein. If you get a headache, don’t feel full and get hungry quickly, feel tired but wired you know like the jitters, with up and down mood swings you may have eaten too many carbs.
Keep a track of how you look and feel after every meal for 7 days and you may see a pattern emerging. The longer you keep track of this stuff and the more data and information you gather the better off you will be long-term as you can now make more well-informed food choices.
With this manifesto you could still blindly eat all the real foods on this list and not listen to your body and while you may experience some issues with your health you will not get anywhere near as sick as you would have if you were to eat foods according to some other recommendations, e.g. the Cookie Diet or the United States Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid.
Okay so this real food manifesto I hope will provide you with a clearer picture on what real food really is and what fake pretend food-like products you should never touch again.
Remember to listen to your body and eat what works for you in the proportions that fit your current lifestyle requirements and don’t eat what doesn’t work.
Hippocrates said:
“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.”
Have you had your medicine today?
I would like to build upon that quote and say:
“Let real food be your guide and let your guide be real food.”
If you’re feeling lost in life try a morsel of real food. It will light up the path, your life purpose, that has been hidden from your view.
Real food has definitely enlightened my life.
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Please leave a 5-star iTunes review for the Whole Guidance Podcast
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In this podcast I’ll be exploring my favourite topic Real Food:
- I’ll explain what real food really is and its different nutritional components
- I’ll talk about how eating real food and fake food affect your health
- Finally, I’ll share how to recognise real food and simple ways to make it a part of your holistic healthy and happy lifestyle
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WHAT ARE THE BEST FOODS TO GET YOU LEAN
What is real food? If I were to sum it up in one word — QUALITY. Quality food makes for quality humans, which makes for a quality planet, which makes for quality soil, which makes for quality plants, which makes for quality animals, which makes for more real quality food and here we have the circle of life.
If I were to use a few more words real food is any organic and natural plant or animal that fuels and nourishes the human body with energy and nutrition.
Now if I were to use some poetic words to define real food it’ll go a little something like this:
Real Food
Lived on the Earth
In the Sky
Under the Sun
Real Food
Is fished from pristine Oceans
Harvested from organic Soils
Plucked from vibrant Trees
Real Food
Has abundant Nutrition
Limitless amounts of Energy
Universal intelligence and Information
Real Food
Is loved by Mother Nature
Lives giving Love
Dies receiving Love
Real Food
Eats
Real Food
So hopefully by now you’re getting the idea that real food isn’t invented, created, and made-up in a lab by Father Industry.
Real food is birthed, grown, and raised by Mother Nature. Real food comes from the land, the sea, the sky, and is lovingly cared for, cherished, and blessed before it’s harvested from the bosom of Mother Nature. Real food is of the Earth not of the petridish or chemistry set or factory line or a corporation’s bottom-line.
Real food is the highest quality of nutrition, energy, and information infused with the life force of Mother Nature herself.
Let’s talk about real food nutrition and here I’m talking about macronutrients (macros) and micronutrients (micros).
Macros include fats broken down in the body and used as fatty acids. Proteins broken down in the body and used as amino acids. Carbohydrates broken down in the body and used as saccharides (sugar). Fibre a form of carbohydrate is not broken down and used by our body and mainly comes in two forms. One form is broken down and used as food by your gut microbiota (that’s all the microorganisms that live in your gastrointestinal tract) and this fibre is called a prebiotic. The other form of fibre isn’t digested by your body or your gut microbiome and is eliminated. Last macro and possibly most important is water. Water is a massive component of real food and the quality of the water in real food depends on how the food was grown and raised.
Micros is where we get into the teeny tiny small world of nutrition. However, micros have a far bigger impact on your health than macros ever will. What real food really gives you in terms of happiness and health are these micros in huge amounts.
Micronutrients include vitamins. There are fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamins A, D, K, and E (sidenote vitamin D is actually a hormone), and water soluble vitamins the B complexes and the most well known vitamin of them all vitamin C.
Another group of micronutrients found in real food are minerals such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, and sulphur, and trace minerals like zinc, iron, copper, manganese, selenium, and cobalt.
Phytonutrients are another group of micros. Phyto comes from the Greek word for plants so these nutrients are found in plants, but they can be passed on to animals that you eat as well. The list of phytonutrients goes on for days and includes polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids, isoflavonoids, indoles, lignans, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, catechins, thiocyanates, isothiocyanates, etc etc.
You can think of macros as providing the basic building blocks of the body giving the body its physical structure. But what’s holding these building blocks together? What’s the glue, what’s the cement, what’s the duct tape that keeps the fats, proteins, carbs, fibre, and water all working together are the micros.
All cellular functions and metabolic processes in your body require assistant molecules called cofactors and micros are these cofactors. If you’re eating macro-rich yet micro-poor foods your body turns into a house of cards where any second now, any minute, any day, month or year it’s going to break down and fall apart. Without the micros the macros you consume are like a classroom full of unsupervised misbehaving teenagers up to no good. No good at all.
Macros and micros are present in all real foods, but in different ratios. Vegetables and fruit from the same garden or tree for example can have very different levels to each other due to environmental factors such as the angle of the sun, temperature differences, and water availability.
The last nutrient I’ll talk about when it comes to real food is difficult to measure in a lab, but exists nonetheless — Energy and Information. This energy is the vital life force that comes from Mother Nature and the planet and the information is linked with the universal intelligence that lives inside all matter. Yeah yeah sounds woo-woo hairy-fairy, but do you think that’s you that’s breathing you now?
Anyhoo…
Real food contains quality energy and information and the quality depends on how the food was grown and raised. Was it in sick soil? Was it sprayed with chemicals? Was it given growth hormone or antibiotics? Was it genetically modified? How fresh is it and how long has it been sitting out?
“Sick food makes for sick humans, makes for a sick planet, makes for sick soil, makes for sick plants, makes for sick animals, makes for more sick food and here we have the wheel of death!”
If you had an apple freshly picked from an apple tree in your backyard and another apple that was imported and flown in from halfway around the world or local and sprayed with chemicals and you took a huge bite out of each apple, now I’m not talking about flavour, taste, texture, macros or micros I’m talking about energy and information, you will feel, you will sense, and you will receive more abundant energy and information from your backyard apple compared to the journeyman drugged apple.
The food you’re eating may look real on the outside, but in fact could be empty of energy and information and be close to dying on the inside and you wouldn’t even know it because it’s been waxed or coloured and injected with preservatives. Fake food is stripped of Mother Nature’s life force and is full of mucked up scrambled information because of the way Father Industry has treated that food.
Energy and information transcends appearance.
I know people who others would say look a bit rundown and a little bit dodgy, but when you actually take the time to sit down and have a chat with them their attitude, their vitality, the vibration that they give off you totally receive it and then you get infused and inspired by that same attitude and energy and information they’ve shared with you. Then there’s the other type of people I call fit-sick people and I used to be one of them. Fit on the outside, but sick on the inside. These guys can look like Greek gods and goddesses, but being around them just drains the living life force out of you and that’s the same with food.
There are some foods that are so sick on the inside they draw energy and information out of you when you eat them.
Then there’s food that’s so chock-full of energy and information you get inspired by them. For me I love blueberries especially the teeny tiny small ones, they’re so tart and sometimes surprisingly sweet. They have a lower flesh to skin ratio compared to larger berries meaning less sugar and a whole lot more phytonutrients and antioxidants from the skin. For some reason I can eat a whole bowl of big berries and feel ‘oh, that was nice’, but when I eat a whole bowl of little teeny tiny berries I feel a whole lot more vibrant, vital, energised, inspired, and happy!
So when you go on nutrition websites or use nutrition apps and look for the fats, proteins, carbs, fibre, water, vitamins, minerals, trace minerals, and phytonutrient contents of a food there’s one last thing you need to keep in mind. Don’t forget that there’s energy and information, life force energy of the planet and universal intelligence that you’re downloading into you when you eat food and uploading into your brain as you absorb and assimilate that food. You really are what you eat. Your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and your results are hugely, significantly, massively impacted by what you eat.
Eat low energy low information low intelligent food and you will feel the exact same way.
Now the health impacts of eating real healthy food compared to eating fake sick food.
I’m going to focus on three areas of your health.
The most important health aspect of them all is your immune system and your gut microbiota or more specifically the probiotics in your gut. Pro meaning for and bio meaning life so probiotics are the good bugs in your gut. Okay so what’s the link between your immune system, probiotics, your gut, and your health.
There’s a few ways foreign objects can get into your bloodstream. Your skin, your lungs, your mouth hole and your south hole. Guess where more than 80% of your immune system and most of the microorganisms are located in the body? In your gut. Believe it or not, but from mouth to south, the enteron, the alimentary canal, your digestive tube is actually technically outside of your body. Now you ingest foreign objects via the mouth 3-6 times a day and that stuff goes down your oesophagus your throat into your stomach and then your small intestines to your large intestines where any leftovers and other bodily waste products are eliminated. This is why almost all of your immune system and microorganisms in your body live in your gut as they deal with a lot of foreign stuff coming down the pipe.
The immune system works side-by-side with your gut probiotics. They’re besties, tight, friends for life. Always liking and sharing each other’s Facebook posts and Snapchatting non-stop. Your immune system and probiotics are essentially linked together fighting the good fight on your behalf. Together they decide who and what can stay. They decide what can be absorbed and assimilated through your gut wall and allowed to enter inside your body and they decide who and what must go.
When your immune system and probiotics aren’t working together as they should your immune system begins to weaken meaning you get sick a lot easier than usual. Also one of the main roles of probiotics is to keep the peace within your gut microbiome meaning no pathogenic microorganisms take over the joint. Patho means disease and genic means to create so pathogens are the bad bugs. So if your probiotic population gets upset and begins to shrink you increase your chances of getting a parasite, fungal, or bacterial infection in your gut.
When you’re eating real food guess what happens to the probiotic population in your gut? They thrive. Probiotics love fibre, they love prebiotics. It’s their real food.
Your immune system and the processes that depend on it loves macros and micros. However, if you’re eating cookies, if you’re eating pastries, if you’re eating kids cereals, if you’re drinking pasteurised skim milk or juices, not only do these foods have denatured damaged macros and micros in very small amounts, but the sugars from the highly processed and refined modified carbs feed the bad bugs, the pathogens. At the same time you’re starving the probiotics of fibre of prebiotics of their food because processed fake foods have no fibre.
Eating fake foods grows the population of pathogens and shrinks the population of probiotics and then your immune system no longer has the support of the good guys to do its job properly and becomes weak. Then the pathogens continue to grow getting stronger and they start fighting your immune system, oh the horror! This is what happens when you don’t give the body what it needs.
Another area of your health I’ll talk about is epigenetics.
Most people know about genetics, genes, and DNA and how they influence your eye colour and hair type etc and how they come from your parents.
So what is epigenetics? Well epi means above so epigenetics is above the genes and it’s all about how external environmental lifestyle factors control genetic expression. That is how the way you live your life can turn certain genes on and off. Epigenetics is telling you that your environment, your thoughts, your feelings, who you interact with, how you respond to events in your life, what you eat and drink, how you move, the type of sleep you’re getting, how much time you spend with Mother Nature, and your toxin exposure all of these affect your genes!
Let’s say for example you have a gene for breast cancer. Well just because you have the gene for breast cancer doesn’t mean you’ll get breast cancer. What it means is depending on your epigenetics how you live your life will determine whether this gene turns on or off.
Epigenetics gives you control of your genes. Now you won’t be able to change your eye colour or hair type (well the jury’s still out on that one actually), but you can turn genes on and off based on how you live.
In terms of food eating real food, again with natural forms of macros and micros along with plenty of energy and information this tells your body one thing — this person is in an environment of abundance therefore I’m going to turn on all my happy genes. All genes that make me feel good, that fulfill me, that provide me with vitality because in this moment life is good.
But when you’re eating fake food without the cofactors, without the nutrition, lacking the energy and information that your genes require change of plans people. Now your body thinks you’re living in a place of scarcity. It’s saying to itself, ‘this person is starving, they’re eating too much crap, they’re overfed, but undernourished so we need to make sure that we can keep their body running because they’re killing us right now.’ So your body starts putting all these backup survival plans into action and starts turning off health affirming genes and turning on disease affirming genes at different intensities in order to keep it alive. Yes, disease is your body’s attempt to survive.
As an analogy I’ll use what the USA use for determining alertness and readiness levels in their military. First up:
- Defcon 5 — Shut down digestion, growth, and sex hormones; switch on stress hormones.
- Defcon 4 — Shut down energy production; switch on pain genes.
- Defcon 3 — Shut down health genes; switch on disease genes.
- Defcon 2 — Shut down immune system; switch on auto-cell destruction.
- Defcon 1 — Shut down tumour destruction; switch on cancer production.
I’m talking about end of the world stuff happening in your body and while the end result is the same for everyone, death, the path to get there is very individual based off your own genetics. For some people their body will turn on the fat gene the obesity gene. For other people they’ll turn on the diabetes gene or both the fat and the diabetes gene (ever heard of diabesity). But as there’s a 1 in 2 chance for women and a 1 in 3 chance for men getting cancer today guess what most genes are getting switched on when you’re not eating and living a holistic, healthy, and happy life? Yeah, cancer genes.
Your body and your genes have worked for so long with so little that they’ve enough. They’ve broken the emergency glass to grab the key of last resort and then they’ve inserted that key into your control centre and turned it in order to enable and uncover the button of last resort and finally your body and your genes who are sick and tired of being starved and mistreated look you in the eye, give you the finger, and say ‘freak you south-hole!’ as they hit that self-destruct button.
You cannot run a fully booked 100 seat restaurant with one chef, one server, and no manager. You cannot run a hospital on generator power with half the usual staff.
You cannot run your body on the wrong nutrition for it won’t be too long before it breaks down and falls to pieces.
All that to say, that’s what happens to your genes when you eat fake food.
Last thing I’ll about when it comes to how food impacts your health is aging.
Aging I’d like to reframe as dying. You are living and dying at the same time. Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take is bringing oxygen into the body and every time that oxygen is used by the cells it produces waste products and this waste causes rust and damage to your body. Every time your immune system has to switch on and get into action and clear out the bugs there’s a little damage left behind. Luckily your body has mechanisms and processes in place to clean up that rust and repair damage such as the use of antioxidants that cleanup the rust and heat shock proteins that repair the damage.
But no matter how many antioxidants you take you will continue to age and eventually die. That’s the natural process of life.
Now real food provides plenty of antioxidants, provides plenty of protein, provides plenty of energy and information for your cells and genes to do their job as well as clean up after themselves. There will still be a little mess lying around, but not as much as compared to eating fake food where your cells don’t have the necessary materials and aren’t given the correct energy and information and where your repair genes stay switched off and don’t get turned on leaving a lot of rust and mess and damage to build up in your body, which makes you age quicker and die faster. Age quicker die faster sounds like a Hollywood movie. ‘Age quicker die faster coming to a theatre near you.’
Anyway…
So if you want to live not just longer, not just in a wheelchair, not with dementia, not being able to look after yourself, if you want to live a long quality life full of vim and vigour and vitality give your cells and your genes what they need in order to clean up after themselves and repair the damage. Cell and DNA dam-age will age you. You see what I did there? That’s right damaging is aging.
Alright so how do you recognise real food?!
One simple test. If it has an ingredients list it’s probably not real food because real food is an ingredient. A real food is a single whole food ingredient. There is no list of ingredients.
Second real food tip. Would your great grandparents recognise it and have called it food or would they have asked you ‘what is this concoction?’
“If it wasn’t around 150 years ago and if it’ll sit on the shelf for another 150 years there’s a good chance you shouldn’t be eating it!”
Another real food tip. If the food you’re looking at is a bit processed and does have an ingredients list how do you know whether you’re getting enough nutrition and energy and information. Well can you pronounce the list of ingredients, do you understand that list, do you know the meaning and what those ingredients are? I mean there’s things like sodium sorbate, potassium bromate, monosodium glutamate, and polyvinylpyrrolidone, blah blah blah. If there are all these chemical compounds in the ingredients list, definitely not a real food. Now can you say chick-en or broc-co-li. Pretty simple right. Real food is simple too. If there’s less science and more life in the ingredients list then you’ve got yourself a better choice of food.
Now there are a lot of pretend fake food-like products out there that have been pumped full of artificial colourings, preservatives, additives, thickeners, emulsifiers, bulking agents, flavourings, texturants, and synthetic vitamins. Fake foods have also had their genes modified also known as GMO foods. These fake foods have been modified and treated to the point where your body, your digestive system, your immune cells, your gut probiotics, and your genes they don’t recognise it as a food and this causes a whole bunch of fuss and confusion. It’s like showing up to a fancy party without an invite or forgetting to RSVP. It causes a lot of trouble and you might get in or you might get kicked the freak out, but either way it creates an issue for all involved. So in terms of food labellings look for non-GMO foods with no added chemicals.
Along these lines look for foods that are certified organic or biodynamic. Certified organic means that food is non-GMO and not sprayed or treated with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, paracides, bactericides, rodenticides, antibiotics, and hormones. Biodynamic means the same as organic, but with a stronger emphasis on the sustainability and regenerability of the environment.
Spray-free is another label you may see and I see this alot in farmers markets and it means the same as organic, but it’s not certified as organic. You have to pay and follow strict guidelines for three years to have the right to say your food is organic and many farmers just can’t be bothered with the cost and the time, so while they may not have the fancy certification their spray-free food is just as good.
So you want to make sure that your food was grown by the laws of nature and ate real food having had a diet that was appropriate for its species. Was that plant grown in soil with plenty of nutrition and energy and information? Was that animal raised in its natural habitat eating the food it was designed to eat? This goes back to either the circle of life or the wheel of death depending on the health of the soil, plant, and animal.
Pigs can eat just about anything. Chickens, they’re omnivorous as well and will eat bugs, they eat insects, and they also eat grass and plants. Sheep, goats, cows — grasses, shrubs, and other plants is what they eat. Animals should not be eating anything, but what they’re evolved to eat.
In CAFOs or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, which are massive factory farms, you find cows eating grains — GMO grains. Now why do you think they give grains to cows? Because it fattens them up quicker! Even then greedy meat producers aren’t satisfied and inject cattle with growth hormones or better yet GMO growth hormones. Now because the cows are getting bigger faster than they would naturally a lot of them get sick and are injected with antibiotics.
Don’t forget about the chickens and pigs in CAFOs. These poor animals have it even worse than the cows. At least the cows get some time outdoors on pasture with fresh air and sunlight. Chickens and pigs are not only eating fake foods and being injected with hormones and antibiotics, but they are stuck literally stuck they cannot move in their cages or even in massive barns because there’s just too much of them.
So the worst meat you could ever buy the sickest meat on the planet is from one of these CAFOs, factory farms.
Now I’m not going to talk about what happens when humans eat grains as I’ll leave you to meditate on that idea yourself.
You’ll see labels like natural and cage-free and free-range and grass-fed or grass-finished, but in all honesty it’s all marketing. Buy direct from the farmer who can answer any questions you may have about their food or pickup the phone and call the company selling the food. Ask them what do they mean by natural and free-range and are the cows on the farm 100% grass-fed throughout their lifetime or how long was it before they went back to eating grains to be fattened up for the kill.
If your food is not organic or biodynamic and was not raised as Mother Nature intended it’s not real food and it’s not going to fully nourish you.
Remember fake food is from Father Industry. It’s an unnatural man-made and lab manipulated food-like product just like a television, a watch, a shoe, or a mobile smart-device. It’s a product it’s not food. We as humans cannot fully digest these fake foods, which will have thousands of ingredients in them. It’s basically dead food. It’s been processed beyond life itself to the point where most of the nutrition is no longer present and the energy and information has been altered. You’ll know a fake food as it’ll usually come in a packet, but that’s not to say all packaged food is fake, but definitely processed and packaged foods are the lowest of the low.
So here’s a quick five step guide to real food:
- It’s all natural — provided by Mother Nature herself
- Food the human animal has evolved to eat
- Single whole food ingredient
- Still has its life giving properties of energy and information with minimal processing and packaging
- No chemicals added
The best and most effective way to get real food into your life is by growing and raising it yourself. I’m not just talking a herb garden or vegetable garden or fruit trees. I’m talking about backyard chickens and also buying into a cow-share program where you get together with a bunch of people and buy a whole cow to be split up between you all when the time comes.
Next level down would be to eat local direct from the source. At farmers markets you can always ask the grower or farmer what they used to raise that food. Eating local isn’t just good for your health, it’s not just good for the farmer, it’s not just good for the local economy and community, but it’s awesome for the environment as a whole. There’s a very small carbon footprint when you buy locally. So vote with your dollars and save the planet as they say and it all starts by looking after and saving yourself.
Now if you can’t source anything local go certified organic or biodynamic even though it comes from out of town or overseas at least you’re certain it’s toxin free.
Eat seasonally. This is really important. Most people today only eat about 12 different foods on average — 12 foods! When you eat with the seasons you get a lot more variety in your diet
“Variety is the spice of life.”
Eating the same foods over and over causes your body to become resistant to that food and eventually sickness and disease show up. Even if you’re in a place that doesn’t have dramatic seasonal changes like the tropics you can still eat seasonally by rotating your food manually.
So eat local and eat seasonal for the best real food experience.
If you cannot find or afford high quality real food then relax. Don’t worry, be happy. Your food doesn’t have to be blessed by a one-armed Tibetan monk high up in the Himalayan mountains to be the best tasting and nutritious food in the universe giving you better health and happiness.
I understand not everyone has the ability to access local hormone-free, antibiotic-free, pasture-raised, free-range, grass-fed, organic animal foods or local pesticide-free, GMO-free, organically or biodynamically grown plant foods.
I’m not saying if you eat fake food you will die.
What I’m saying is the majority of food you eat throughout your lifetime will determine the quality of life you experience for the majority of your time.
A couple books I recommend reading to find out more about the different effects real food compared to fake food have on the health of the human animal is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price and Deep Nutrition by Catherine and Luke Shanahan.
A couple cookbooks on how to eat real food. One of my favourite ancestral cookbooks is Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig. My favourite recipe in this entire book is the vanilla ice cream. That’s on page 550. Best ice cream ever! Another awesome real food cookbook is Practical Paleo by Diane Sanfilippo and my favourite recipe here is the lemon rosemary broiled salmon. Delicious.
Remember real food is about feeding your immune system and probiotics. It’s about telling the good genes to switch on and the bad genes to switch off. It’s about repairing the damage that’s happening inside your body every second so you can live happier for longer.
Links and Resources
- Nutrition and Physical Degeneration — Weston A Price
- Deep Nutrition — Catherine and Luke Shanahan
- Nourishing Traditions — Sally Fallon and Mary Enig
- Practical Paleo — Diane Sanfilippo
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The Highly Sensitive Person – Elaine N. Aron PhD
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Are you a highly sensitive person?
Do you have a keen imagination and vivid dreams? Is time alone each day as essential to you as food and water? Are you “too shy” or “too sensitive” according to others? Do noise and confusion quickly overwhelm you? If your answers are yes, you may be a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP).
Most of us feel overstimulated every once in a while, but for the Highly Sensitive Person, it’s a way of life. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Elaine Aron, a psychotherapist, workshop leader and highly sensitive person herself, shows you how to identify this trait in yourself and make the most of it in everyday situations. Drawing on her many years of research and hundreds of interviews, she shows how you can better understand yourself and your trait to create a fuller, richer life.
In The Highly Sensitive Person, you will discover:
* Self-assessment tests to help you identify your particular sensitivities
* Ways to reframe your past experiences in a positive light and gain greater self-esteem in the process
* Insight into how high sensitivity affects both work and personal relationships
* Tips on how to deal with overarousal
* Informations on medications and when to seek help
* Techniques to enrich the soul and spirit
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Compost City – Rebecca Louie
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These days, everyone’s talking about compost.
Along with backyard chickeners, balcony beekeepers, rooftop farmers, and community gardeners, urban composters are part of a bumper crop of pioneers who are redefining the green space of crowded towns and cities.
You may think you need a big yard to compost. Think again. Compost City teaches you how to easily choose and care for a compost system that fits perfectly into your (tiny) space, (busy) schedule, and (multifaceted) lifestyle.
Whether you live in a cramped apartment or a sprawling town house, or you dream of composting in a shared space with a group of friends or colleagues, Compost City provides simple and effective indoor and outdoor composting options.
Packed with research, expert testimonies, and a healthy dose of humor, Compost City will help you:
• Compost your food scraps and yard waste with ease
• Ease your fears of backbreaking labor, obnoxious odors, big messes, and creepy crawlies (hint: you can compost successfully without any of the above!)
• Convince compost-wary family, friends, neighbors, and community leaders to green-light your compost dreams
Compost City serves all eco-curious citizens from casual hobbyists to staunch activists.
Put your compost cap on. Whether you compost one tea bag or whole honking barrelfuls of scraps at a time, you’re about to have a whole lot of fun.
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How to Grow More Vegetables – John Jeavons
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Decades before the terms “eco-friendly” and “sustainable growing” entered the vernacular, How to Grow More Vegetables demonstrated that small-scale, high-yield, all-organic gardening methods could yield bountiful crops over multiple growing cycles using minimal resources in a suburban environment. The concept that John Jeavons and the team at Ecology Action launched more than 40 years ago has been embraced by the mainstream and continues to gather momentum. Today, How to Grow More Vegetables, now in its fully revised and updated 8th edition, is the go-to reference for food growers at every level: from home gardeners dedicated to nurturing their backyard edibles in maximum harmony with nature’s cycles, to small-scale commercial producers interested in optimizing soil fertility and increasing plant productivity. Whether you hope to harvest your first tomatoes next summer or are planning to grow enough to feed your whole family in years to come, How to Grow More Vegetables is your indispensable sustainable garden guide.
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