The majority of people now progress into bad health as a result of poor nutrition.
Here are 14 topics you need to know.
1. Why are you addicted
to Food?
Food; it's delicious!
That's because you have between 5,000
and 10,000 taste buds in your tongue that are constantly assessing what you are
eating. These buds are directly connected with your brains database of flavours
and textures of food and they can have a direct influence on your happiness or
disappointment.
The buds are designed to detect five basic flavours:
- Salty
- Sour
- Bitter
- Sweet
- Savoury
As you get older, past 45, your taste buds detection rate
may start to diminish.
Hence to get a kick out of food, you may require a heavier
dose of the flavour and/or an increased volume of food to feel happy. Yes happy because the
detection of flavours and satiation (the feeling of being full) are connected
with the production of dopamine, your body’s natural happiness drug. This drug
is produced in the brain to reward you for your brain’s definition of success.
Fact number one: You
are addicted to food and flavours.
If you don’t satisfy this addition you will be tormented by
hunger pangs and in many cases, depression. Your digestion system is basically
a child that only understands a few concepts and it will use a variety of
simple tactics to get what it wants, irrespective of the consequences. It
doesn’t care if you put on weight, feel sick, or even gain a health problem.
If you don’t feed it, it will throw a tantrum! This
addiction has been going on since you were born and it has trained you from the
very first day you arrived on the planet, just ask your mum!
Without a solid
tactic, you are a victim of your reptilian digestive system.
This is the first concept you need to understand if you want
to get in control of your eating habits. This addiction is a cultural obsession.
As you grew up you have become accustomed to eating certain foods and as you
got older, you needed more flavour and more of it to be satisfied. The good
news is that you can change this. Like any addiction, you have to go through a
period of re-education, withdraw, and introduction to better habits.
2. The Basic Nutrients
There are three basic nutrients that your body needs to
maintain your organic structure:
- Protein
- Carbohydrates
- Fats
Depending on your activity level, you need a specific
balance of these nutrients.
I won’t talk too much about this yet because it’s a big
subject and you need to understand a lot more before we cover the topic.
3. Why do you have to
eat?
Your body is made up of organic cells. An educated guess is
that you have between 30 to 40 trillion individual cells. (30 >
40,000,000,000,000). Each of those cells* contains between 1 and 2,000
mitochondria. Think of mitochondria as an engine and they all need fuel.
However they are very efficient and so a little bit of fuel goes a long way.
The only problem is the mitochondria produce waste and many people’s eating
habits create more waste and does not allow this waste to be removed very
easily.
Basically you are eating to fuel cells and the process
produces waste.
* Red blood cells do not have mitochondria because they are
there to transport oxygen and carbon dioxide via the blood flow and do not have
a need for energy to do this.
4. Vitamins, Minerals
and Essential Fatty Acids
Your body needs over 90 essential minerals and vitamins
every day to maintain all of the features and functions of its original build.
Although your body can produce some of the vitamins it needs, it produces no
Minerals and Essential Fatty Acids. If you do not get these essential
components, your body will degrade, run out of energy, and cause a wide variety
of ailments including poor health, mental impairment, and even death.
Fact Two: The
majority of people’s diet is short of all the vitamins, minerals, and essential
fatty acids required to maintain the body’s functions.
5. Nutritional Opportunity
Each time you eat, you have an opportunity to deliver to
your digestive system, all the nutrients it requires. However the driving force
behind you feeding your body is either:
- A
planned nutritional program
- Driven
by hunger and food availability
If driven by hunger, you lose nutritional opportunities to feed your body what it actually requires.
For example,
Aroha has a planned nutritional program. She has shopped for
specific foods that she will eat during planned meal breaks. As a consequence
she has energy and mental clarity throughout the day and is able to maintain
her body composition.
Where as Rawiri gets hungry and grabs a steak pie and a coke
for lunch. Then for dinner, some pizza, chips and a few beers. Rawiri is going
to have a great deal of difficulty maintaining his body composition.
I have been dramatic here to try to make a point. The only
way you can have a long term nutritional plan is to:
a) Learn
what foods are good for your particular circumstances
b) Buy
them before you need them
c) Eat
them before you get hungry
Rawiri gets hungry and is driven by the need to get rid of
the hunger pains.
Aroha has researched what she needs and has planned to
fulfil her nutritional requirements.
Long term Aroha’s plan wins. It is that simple.
6. The Benefit of Fasting
I mentioned before that cells contain waste but that some
eating habits do not allow for this waste to be cleared. This is because people
eat constantly. For example:
==========================
6:00 am
2
toast with jam and a cup of coffee with two sugars
10:00 am
Pie
and a coke
12:00 pm
Filled
role and a cup of coffee with two sugars
3:00 pm
Chocolate
bar and an energy drink (crash food)
6:00 pm
Mashed
potatoes, sausages, eggs, and gravy
8:00 pm
Chocolate
biscuits and a cup of tea with two sugars
10:00 pm
Cup
of Milo with two sugars
==========================
It takes at least 3 hours for your digestive system to
process your last food intake (yes the Milo is
food) so at about 1:00 am, your digestive system is finally at rest.
At 6.00 am it all starts again when you break the fast of
the night with breakfast.
In this meal plan there were 5 hours of fasting, 1 am to 6
am.
I won’t mention the number of calories yet but I will so make a note of the
situation.
Fasting is the body’s opportunity to scavenge its
nutritional requirements from your body’s cell structures and the longer you
can fast, the better things are going to be.
Let’s take a look at another meal plan:
==========================
6:00 am
Water
+ black, fresh ground, filtered coffee + cinnamon
11:00 pm
Fruit
+ natural yoghurt with zero sugar and chia seeds
12:00 pm
Fish
salad with 200 gms boiled red potatoes and a protein plus water drink
3:00 pm
Vegetable
smoothie + multi vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids
5:00 pm
Quinoa,
dark green salad, walnuts, avocado, beetroot, and boiled broccoli
8:00 pm
Small
glass of water and fresh lemon juice
==========================
The first meal is 11:00 pm and the last meal is 5:00 pm
because the lemon drink does not count as a meal. That is a six hour eating
window plus 3 hours for the last meal to digest so a total of 9 hours digesting
and 15 hours fasting.
There is absolutely no comparison between the two meal
plans.
One completely fails and causes you to be constantly hungry,
lacking energy, and gaining weight. The other brings you under control, gives
you abundant energy, even if you are a construction worked or athlete, and
satisfies your body’s nutritional requirements.
The difference is; one is an educated plan, the other is
your child like digestive system controlling your life.
Fact 4: You need to
plan your meals
7. Calories Count
There are three basic rules about calories:
a) To
lose weight you must be in a caloric deficit. Meaning if you eat less
calories than your body burns for energy, you will lose weight
b) To
gain weight you must be in a caloric surplus.
c) Your
calorie requirements vary depending on your activity level
BUT
Fact 5: You need to understand Insulin and how it
affects fat storage
because calories or not; Insulin is what lays down fat.
8. Insulin, the Vehicle of Fat Storage
Insulin is activated in your bloodstream every time you eat
a carbohydrate or sugar and it's Insulin that delivers fat to your cells.
When insulin is activated, your body cells will be offered
fuel. If the cell does not need the fuel, fat cells will take up the fuel and
store it as fat.
It does not matter what the source of sugar is. Excluding
special substitute sugars which you should avoid anyway, all sugars activate
insulin. This includes fructose in fruit (but not lemon), honey, brown raw
sugar, and white sugar.
Carbohydrates are found in bread, sourdough, grains, cereal,
and fruits (dried or fresh).
Vegetables are also carbohydrate BUT they are a special
exception.
They are low carb and have a very slow digestion rate (GI)
and almost come under the insulin radar.
As an example of why fruit is bad for losing weight, a
large banana (often thought as a health food) contains 17 grams of sugar and 27
grams of carbs. It will spike your insulin levels for about 3 hours and use the
nutrients in the banana as fat cell stuffers.
If you want to lose weight, forget bananas and fruit.
However if you are not losing weight, then use fruit to maintain some body fat
is beneficial.
9. Drinks and losing weight
One of the first places to look at reducing weight is what
you drink.
Fact 6: Don’t drink
your calories
Drinking sugar and or carbohydrates is the first food you
should look at resolving if you want to loose and maintain your weight. It is a
complete nutritional waste of time and will only cause you to gain weight.
Those energy drinks are actually energy sapping drinks because
they will spike your insulin level. Within 30 minutes you will crash as a
result of drinking them. Plus they are seriously fattening and a complete waste
of your hard earned dollars.
Coke does not refresh you. The few minutes that coke dances
across your tongue seem like it holds promise but it’s a sugar and as we just
learned, It will spike your insulin levels for a few minutes, and then drive
you under the crash line unless you are able to use the energy at that moment.
Water is by far the best drink to satisfy thirst. The trick
is to not get thirsty by drinking a small glass of water on a regular basis.
You can make water more desirable by adding a slice of lemon and I do have a
preference for mineral water because most tap water contains chemicals of
chlorine and fluoride, both poisons to your system. Filtered water is
technically dead where as mineral water should be alkaline and alive teaming
with those minerals your body needs.
10. Foods that actually
make you hungry
There are three foods that keep you locked into the hunger
games. They are:
a) Bead
b) Rice
c) Sugar
Like cigarettes have nicotine as the addictive substance,
food addictions, and hunger, are activated by these three components.
Fact 7: Avoid hunger by NOT eating Bread, Rice, or Sugar
11. Inflammation
Foods are either healing or inflammatory. For example, seeds
have one goal and that is to germinate when they are in soil and watered. To do
this effectively, Mother Nature has protected seeds with a chemical called
Lectin. It is washed off the seed with rain and allows the seed to germinate.
However, when you eat seeds that have not had the lectin washed off, that
chemical can dramatically affect you gut.
This is where ‘activated seeds’ are a healthier choice.
It is also worthwhile to introduce healthy probiotics on a
daily basis to further improve the guts ability to digest foods and extract the
most amount of nutrients.
Fact 8: Look after
your gut
12. Cooking and the
reduction of Nutritional Content
Each type of food requires different cooking techniques.
Some foods do require heat for the nutrients to become
easily digestible.
Whereas others lose their nutritional content the more you
cook them.
Fact 9: The more
nutrients retained in food, the less you need to eat
Microwave cooking is a no no simply because you cannot
control the cooking function. Basically the food is going to be overcooked and
the nutrient content reduced.
Where as a reheat on the stove top is more controllable.
Don’t reheat + reheat food. Only heat the amount you need by
the amount of heat required to retain the nutrient content.
There are lots of ways of cooking food where the nutrient
content is maintained and of course, some foods don’t need cooking. These are
some of the best foods.
13. Glycemic Index and
Glycemic Load
This is the rate at which our digestive system will digest
the food and affect our blood sugar level. This is an absolutely essential
study regarding the foods your diet plan involves.
Basically vegetables will be fine. Anything else, research
their GI and GL values.
14. In Summary
So there it is. A foundation of knowledge about eating and nutrition.
It is by no means
everything but within these few topics is the essence of what you need to know
to approach your diet and eating regime. There is still a lot to learn but if
you grasp these fundamental topics, the design of your future nutritional plan will have meaning.
Forget the word diet. You are after a complete cultural
change. Up to now you have probably simply expanded your diet based on what
your parents taught you, what you have seen on TV, and what you have found as
being convenient. When you understand your actual digestion mechanisms you will
realise that what we have been taught historically, simply leads to bad health
and functional decline.
To live beyond the limits of your diet, you are going to
need to reinvent your nutritional plan.
In the next dietary topics I will be giving you some ideas.
Take a Photograph
Take a photo of your fridge and food cupboard now.
As you progress you can use these to compare what you used
to have on hand, to what you eventually end up with.
