FOOD COMBINING FOR HEALTH

AND WEIGHT MANAGEMENT

    THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM MY NEW BOOK  - HEALING WHAT'S EATING YOU.  IT IS DETAILS MY ENTIRE HOLISTIC PROTOCOL THAT WE HAVE SUCCESSFULLY USED AT ALOHA HEALING RETREATS FOR NINE YEARS HELPING PEOPLE RECOVER FROM ABUSE, EATING DISORDERS, GRIEF, EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ILLNESSES AND THE PURSUIT OF SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT.  It is available in E book form now and soon in soft cover from our web site and amazon.com. 

    Food combining is for everybody. I have found that it is just the best possible way to eat for anybody. It is great for your digestion and it helps you eat better foods in general. It is just a win-win situation for everyone and I think everyone could benefit from practicing food combining. It does take a bit of an effort but you won’t starve or feel deprived and after just a little while the benefits are so tremendously obvious you will be encouraged to stick with it for the rest of your life.

WHY FOOD COMBINING?

     The first rule of food combining is that you don’t mix dense proteins with dense starches as they don’t digest well when eaten together.  Some people naturally want to know the reason our stomachs can’t digest proteins and starches together and it all starts with a lesson in history.  Historically humans have been hunters and gatherers for a very long time. Early hominids go back 3.2 million years. Early walking human like creatures basically gathered vegetables and if there were starches like yams they took them back to base camp and cooked them. Meat was not a reliable or very stable source of food and when it was available it was eaten right away due to lack of proper storage methods. This went on for many years until we humans started to become civilized. Civilization meant that we stayed in one place throughout the year. We raised livestock and could kill them when needed and we also raised crops. The crops that made a huge impact on the human race were the grains, such as rice, wheat, barley, rye etc..  These grains are almost impossible to “gather” in the wild. You have to raise them in order to have enough to make them into flour for baking or enough to make a pot of rice. When civilization first occurred about five to ten thousand years ago, so did our first pains of indigestion.  Even with civilization it has really been only the rich who could afford to get gas. For most parts of the world, meat was only eaten by the rich and simple poverty kept most of us out of the throes of indigestion. There once was a presidential campaign slogan in the 1920’s that spoke of putting a chicken in every pot and it meant one chicken a week. Then with the advent of fast foods and the general raising of the economy in the 1950’s we became a meat and potatoes society. If anything green found it’s way on the plate it was given a cursory look before being put down the trash disposal! Now, we have proteins and starches at every meal.

    In our present society we over eat. We eat a lot of starchy fatty foods on top of chicken, beef or pork and we wonder why we gain weight and have to reach for the Tums after every meal.  Well, it didn’t start out that way at all. We began as hunters and gatherers and our stomachs have not evolved enough to digest the weight of all our poor food choices.

     The principle of food combining is simple, when you combine proteins and starches together you create a chemical reaction in your stomach that makes it hard to digest your food.  I demonstrate this at the Aloha Healing Retreats by using baking soda which represents alkaloids or starches and mixing it with vinegar which represents acid foods or proteins. The result is lots and lots of foam This is great for cleaning drain pipes but not good for your stomach. When you eat starches and proteins together a chemical reaction occurs that neutralizes the stomachs environment. Proteins need acidic enzymes to break down and starches need alkaline enzymes to digest. When the stomach’s enzymes are neutralized, this means that neither the proteins or starches can digest properly. This is NOT GOOD for you. There is a multi – billion dollar industry built upon acid indigestion that is due to the improper way we eat. If we ate properly, that is food combined, we wouldn’t have acid indigestion or acid reflux. I once helped a man that was taking all kinds of purple pills for acid reflux and he still had trouble with indigestion. I got him to do the food combining method and in a matter of days he was feeling great without taking any medication. He was soon telling his friends and family about the virtues of food combining.  I have personally been doing food combining for about 15 years. I do it because I tend to eat too fast at times due to being hypoglycemic. When my food doesn’t digest properly I will have constipation, which believe me is one royal pain in the rear. When I saw a workshop in our local paper about a way of eating that helped you digest your food better, I took it. A naturalpathic doctor was presenting the workshop and you could tell she was a walking advertisement for food combining, she was healthy looking but had not an ounce of fat on her.

    There have been lot’s of books on food combining and there have even been a couple of TV stars out there promoting their own version of it. However, most of the books are hard to understand and even harder to apply to your daily life. I do know that if you follow these simple steps and advice I have presented here in this book that you can make an easy transition into eating healthy for the rest of your life. I also do not call it a diet, because you are not restricting your intake of food. You are just making adjustments in how you eat your food, therefore, I call it the Food Combining Method. I think this is also important method for people who have yo yo dieted for years. Dieting doesn’t work anyway. Anyone who has ever tried dieting can tell you, that in the long run they ended up right back where they started pound wise if not even heavier and felt more depressed than when they started. Remember, moderation in all things. Food combining is eating moderately and healthy for long term results.

     When you do eat right and follow the rules, you’ll find that you can eat well and deliciously without counting calories and your stomach digests your food nicely. When your food digests well, it is broken down and assimilated by the body into nutrients that are disbursed throughout your system as energy. This means your are getting the nutrition you need and you have energy and feel good and you aren’t as hungry as you use to be. When your food doesn’t digest, it has a couple of choices, it will assimilate the food that breaks down easiest – the simple sugars and starches and stores them as fat or it will pass the rest down the tubes which will either result in constipation because it is not broken down or diarrhea for the same reason. Either way you are not getting the nutrition from your food so your body craves more food even though you just ate. This is why a lot of overweight people are constantly hungry.  A regular meal with proteins and starches will take 9 to 12 hours to digest. Since most people don’t wait that long before eating again, they just dump more food on top of the undigested food and none of that digests properly either. Now you have all that undigested food sitting there until some of it is stored as fat and the remaining undigested food is pushed out of the system. Some people are walking around with literally years worth of undigested food in their colons because the body can’t push it out. Think about it and you’ll understand why there is so much colon cancer. That’s also why we have so much obesity, the food that can be assimilated all turns into fat, with the body hoping that at some time it will catch a break in this cycle of trash to get something it needs to run on. The body makes you crave more food hoping it might get decent nutrition but when it doesn’t, it wants more food, and so on. We have a culture of overweight people who are nutritionally starved. USA is the land of the malnutritionally obese.

     Whether you want to maintain a healthy weight or just want to look forward to a pleasant experience going to the bathroom, I highly recommend this method of eating for you and for everyone. I have had some people ask me why I recommend this method of eating for anorexics especially since one of the side of effects of food combining is usually weight loss. Well weight loss happens when and if you need to let go of extra fats. Anorexics usually don’t have fat to let go. They also have major issues with fat intake and food in general. When they accept the fact that they can eat food and not automatically blimp out, it makes them feel better about eating. They feel safe to add more varieties of foods and once they really understand that if you follow food combining you will never ever have to worry about being overweight, they begin to relax about the idea of fat intake. Hence, it is a very compatible way of helping anorexics and bulimics adjust to normal food consumption. I actually encourage people to have a splurge meal that is NOT food combined about once or twice a week, once you have gotten your weight down or up where you want it. This keeps you from becoming too thin. You can eat a great variety of foods while food combining and though you will need to make some major adjustments, you are not going to starve and you will be very satisfied with your intake. However, as I mentioned earlier the woman who taught me was very thin, as she followed the method very strictly. Again, I have to reiterate moderation in all things. A few years ago I went to Japan to work with a very difficult eating disorder client. Though we had an interpreter, I felt for the woman to actually understand that she could eat well without restricting or purging, we maintained the food combining method up until the last two days I was there. I then introduced her to the splurge meal, which keeps your self sabotagers from running amok because you feel deprived. At least once a week and perhaps twice you need to have a meal that feeds your soul. I choose to do this meal at night so that I will have all night and much of the next morning to clear my stomach of that meal before I eat again. Eat something that won’t trigger a total binge, yet something that you like, perhaps a comfort food. As one past guest put it, “Once a week, I think about pizza and instead of agonizing about it, I go out and get a really nice one and then I eat until I’m full and that’s that, I don’t think about it again until the following week. I feel good that I am not deprived of my special treat and that helps me stay with the food combining.” So again, within moderation have your treat meal once or twice a week and then go back to the food combining method and you will be fine.

      You will know when you are getting the food combining right in a couple of ways. Within just a few days you will notice that you are less hungry and probably can do without snacking. You can also wait longer between meals and are satisfied with with less and less food. You will also note a considerable increase in your energy levels and you will just feel better. Your mental outlook will improve because you are finally getting the nutrition you need, not from supplements, but from your food which is the way nature intended, so you will feel less  depressed. You will have less indigestion to the point that there is none at all. You will feel less bloated because you will begin eliminating waste materials, stored fats and excess water.

      The best way to tell if you are doing the food combining method right is to take note of your stools. Here at the center we celebrate what we affectionately call the beginning of the “FLOATERS”. When you are digesting and assimilating your food properly your stool should be long and unbroken, be a light blond or wheat color and should float in the toilet. My ex husband used to call them floating anacondas. Well hey, you got to have a sense of humor when you are talking about crap.... so when you have a blond unbroken floater in the toilet, you are doing it right. OH YEAH!

      It is important when doing the Food Combining Method for you to read the labels. Many things that you might assume are proteins are actually considered fats. For instance cream cheese, sour cream, and hard cheeses such as Parmesan are considered fats not proteins because they have a low protein content -2 grams per serving and consist of mostly fat. You can have your cream cheese and bagel or sour cream on your vegetarian burrito and a bit of Parmesan cheese on your vegetable pasta or in your vegetable soup.

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