Author: Ian McAllister
Eating a healthy diet mostly means keeping it simple. Prepare your own food because most processed food is unhealthy. One man's food is another man's poison according to the old saying that is just as true now as it has always been. I can eat monosodium glutamate and it might kill you. I can eat wholemeal bread that would kill someone with celiac disease. I like peanut butter that would kill someone sensitive to peanuts.
These are the dramatic things, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Do you find that nothing you do stops you gaining weight? It could just be a food sensitivity.
Keep a record
If you want the best healthy diets to lose or gain weight, start off by keeping a record. The unsaturated oils lie would have been impossible if everyone had kept a record of what they ate.
Remind yourself of what you want to gain or lose. Keeping records is a very large nuisance and you will give up if you don't remind yourself of the benefits.
Start keeping records of everything that interests you about food and health. You will want the date, and your weight, and your waist measurement, and what you ate at each meal, and what hearth problems you are having.
Record everything that you think you might want to know later on. If you suddenly realise that you haven't had a splitting headache for a time how are you to know what cured you if you don't even know when you had your last headache or what you were eating at the time.
If your acne gives you problems or stops giving you problems, if your blood pressure or the amount of iron in your blood changes, if your thyroid gland starts working again - how are you going to know what caused the change if you don't have complete records?
Don't fake your records - you'll only be cheating yourself! Record the smallest snack that you eat. Record vitamin pills, aspirins, cups of coffee, sweetener in your drink, salt in your food, tomato sauce, vinegar, mustard, anything at all that you swallow.
Now that your record tells you what you are eating each week you know what you have to work with.
Remove all foods that you normally eat each at least twice a week. These include milk products, wheat, maize (corn) beef, chicken, mutton, soybeans. That won't leave much of your usual diet so investigate alternatives that are available near where you live. Try buffalo instead of beef. Millet porridge instead of oatmeal porridge. Lima beans instead of soybeans. Have fun!! There is a vast range of food out there.
Be particularly suspicious of the following Cow's Milk, Eggs, Nuts from trees, such as walnuts and macadamias (even though they are good for most people, they might upset you), peanuts (remember that unsaturated peanut oil is bad for you), shellfish, fish, wheat, soybeans, individual fruits such as citrus, strawberries, persimmons, pineapple, solanacea such as tomatoes and potatoes,
Avoid all food additives. I'm afraid you'll have to learn to cook.
If you are lucky all your symptoms will disappear. Wait a week until you are sure then reintroduce one of the foods again. Wait for three days to see if there is a delayed reaction, and if nothing bad happens try reintroducing the next food on your list.
When you reintroduce one of the foods that was giving you trouble you will get the symptoms again - perhaps an a quarter of an hour - perhaps in three days. You can either remove that food permanently (I favour that because there is such a wide variety of other foods that you can use instead) or you can try to work around it. For instance milk intolerance may disappear if you use raw organic milk. You may find that even though milk makes you swell like a balloon, Kefir fermented milk suits you just fine. Cabbage might be poison for you but your body just loves sauerkraut.
How do you personalise your food?
How do you get food that is just right for you? I've got some bad news for you if you don't like cooking. You will have to employ a cook to prepare meals designed for you. On the other hand, you can learn to like cooking, and I'll probably include some interesting healthy diet recipes pages on this site.
Don't let the chefs convince you that you need 6 years study to be a cook. The truth that they don't want you to know is that if you put any foods together in any quantities they will taste good. The exception of course is the strong-tasting foods such as mustard, horse-radish, radishes, garlic, curry and the list goes on... Just use common sense. If you don't like a cupful of pepper powder in your soup, don't put it there.
Don't let the chefs convince you that you need to cook everything. Raw food is usually just as tasty and is more healthy with the possible exception of tomatoes. Lycopene is a cancer-killer and is released from tomatoes by a minimum amount of cooking. I'm suspicious of the chemists. Just because they say that lycopene is the part of tomatoes that fights cancer... it needn't necessarily be true. All we know is that tomatoes fight cancer.
It's easy to learn to stew, boil, fry, roast and bake. I learned from books. You might prefer to do an evening class. But don't be brainwashed by recipes.
Do you want to know how a chef designs a recipe? He bungs together whatever ingredients come to hand (I used to like walking round my garden and picking food for the meal as I walked). One TV chef made a game of calling at a house unexpectedly and making a gourmet meal with whatever happened to be in the fridge. Once the meal is eaten to enthusiastic appreciation the chef guesses how much he used of each ingredient and writes down a recipe. You can do the same. About twice now I've added too much salt to my food. All my other random recipes have worked.
Remember not to fall for the lie about using unsaturated cooking oils for a heart healthy diet. Use coconut oil or butter for all your cooking requirements if you want to remain (or become) healthy.
You've found your personal diet
Once your records show that you've got rid of food sensitivities for a week or two you can start to think about your new perfect diet.
Firstly do you really need a new diet? What's wrong with the one you've been following for the last week? If your weight has started heading for the ideal weight for your height then you might already be eating the perfect diet for you. Learn more about using fruit and vegetables to fight cancer and heart attacks and infection, but you might have to make only minor changes such as adding broccoli or garlic to your diet.
I'll tell you more about choosing your best diet but "if it ain't broke...don't fix it". If you've accidentally found your ideal diet stick with it. I personally prefer to learn more about nutrition so that if I feel like eating witchetty grubs or crocodile eggs or kangaroo meat I know exactly where they fit into my nutritional requirements.
Do cut out as many refined foods as you can. Sugar is not poisonous in sugar cane or in sugar beet or in fruit. But one teaspoon of refined sugar switches off your immune system for three hours, so children who sip sodas all day only have immune systems during the early hours of the morning when they aren't meeting any sick people.
Potato skins are very good for you. Throw away the rest of the potato.
White bread is poisonous. Brown bread is often white bread stained with caramel. Bake your own wholemeal bread if you can't do without bread.
Don't drink fruit juices. They are refined. The pulp left behind often has the best part of the fruit, and sugar is then added to the refined stuff then colours, flavours and preservatives. You can be allergic to any of these.
What every-day food can you eat then? Not a lot! When I go out to a meal I have to select meat without sauces and uncut fruit. Have your meal before going out then sip water to be sociable or nibble some fruit. If it is a smorgasbord you can pile your plate high with roast beef.
Personally I don't mind breaking my diet occasionally if the food looks delicious enough, because if I put on a few pounds they are easy to lose again. If you have severe food sensitivities you have a bigger problem.
Remember the lies I told you about? Avoid them!
Saturated fat lie. Avoid using unsaturated vegetable oils for cooking and only cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil for salad dressing if you really want to use an unsaturated oil. Remember heating olive oil makes it toxic like the other unsaturated oils. Instead use coconut oil or butter for cooking.
Coconut oil is different from other fats and oils. It can be burned readily for your daily energy, and it even uses some of the fat that you have stored up to help burn itself. That means that if you eliminate all unsaturated vegetable oils from your diet and use only coconut oil you will lose weight, unless of course you start eating more at the same time!
Fluoride lie: Sorry, I don't know how to avoid fluoride unless you are wealthy or are prepared to move to a country that doesn't poison their water with fluoride. If you are wealthy you can buy water filters that remove a lot of fluoride, or better still you can build rainwater tanks round your house and pass the collected water through filters to get rid of all the atmospheric pollution collected by the rain.
If you live where you can only get enough vitamin D from sunlight in the summer you could take cod liver oil each day, or learn to choose foods that contain a lot of vitamin D.
Vaccines lie: That isn't really a food lie. You can take Echinacea angustifolia and Astragalus in rotation to do the job that vaccines are supposed to do. That means take echinacea for two weeks then astragalus then echinacea then...
Milk processing lie: If you can afford it and can track down a supplier use only raw organic milk products. Otherwise cut out milk products completely. It is possible. I've been doing it for a long time. Milk should not be part of healthy eating in schools.
Sterile conditions lie: Go out into your garden and pull and eat fruit and vegetables without washing them first. They will strengthen your immune system and they will be much healthier than produce that has been rotting on supermarket shelves for several weeks.
Whatever you do, avoid soybeans. They may not kill as many people as the heart attacks resulting from the saturated fat lie, but they probably make up for it by making you stupid.
Three metabolic types
Now that you've eliminated the very personal problems from your diet, you can start looking at the three general divisions of people's relation to food. These are the two extreme types (low carb and high carb) and the intermediate type.
Get your free metabolic test at http://www.mercola.com/forms/mt_test.htm to find out what metabolic type you are. Over the years I have come to trust Dr Mercola. I only wish that I could make a profit by recommending him, because he offers so much.
Are you still not sure which type you are? Good, you are probably the same type as I am - intermediate - neither high nor low carb but somewhere in between. That is the easiest diet of all to design.
High Carb
I've no experience with this, but you simply add foods that contain more carbohydrates such as carrots, pumpkins, figs, dates, bananas to your normal healthy diet.
Low carb, High protein
This is the typical Atkins diet, and I think the South Beach Diet has followed the same trail. Don't believe anything that people tell you about the Atkins diet. Read about it for yourself in the original Atkins books and then you'll know the truth. You can borrow them for free from the lending library.
After a few years of successfully following the Atkins diet (I brought my weight down with the first three Atkins diets, then held it there with the fourth) I heard about an interesting piece of research.
Students were given 2000 calories per day in one meal with no other meals. Half the students got the meal for breakfast, and half got it in the evening. The students getting it for breakfast lost weight. The others put on weight. It was found that the body's ability to tolerate carbohydrate decreases as the day goes by until it drops to zero at about 3pm.
When I heard that I applied it. I was also familiar with the experiments of Dr Pottinger with his cats. He proved a long time ago that cats receiving cooked food became more aggressive, and less fertile, and had more health problems than the cats receiving uncooked food. After a few generations the cats getting cooked food died out.
I brought these two facts together and set out to take nearly all of my Atkins carbohydrates for breakfast. Now I can follow the medium carb diet without really stretching the high protein Atkins diet rules very much. See the medium carb section.
Medium carbohydrate
I'm not an extreme person. When asked if I am an optimist or a pessimist I answer "no". People who design forms must hate me, because I refuse to fit into their little pigeon-holes.
It is the same with my metabolic type. I am neither a high carb or a low carb type. Fortunately the medium carb is also a type. I strongly suspect that I could eat food for all three carb types. I've tried the low carb and the medium carb diets successfully.
Here is an example of what I eat for breakfast. I start by drinking 1.4 litres of water with two heaped soup-spoons of psyllium husks stirred in, and three fish oil capsules. Then I blend about 14 servings of fruit and vegetables, and the new diet pyramid suggests nine. Because my teeth, made brittle by fluoride in the water, can no longer chew my food, I put it through the blender. The only exception is my one banana per day which is soft enough to give me my supply of potassium without chewing. Here is the raw food that goes into the blender.
- A heaped soupspoon of ginger - helps digestion, prevents travel sickness and morning sickness in women.
- A heaped soupspoon of brewers yeast for vitamins and minerals
- 50 ml (about 3 tablespoons) coconut oil.
- 1 tsp dried garlic powder
- Half orange with only the zest removed. The white part supplies folate.
- One apple with core removed. If I could afford organic apples I'd use the core, but it concentrates agricultural poisons.
- One tomato (fights cancer)
- One carrot (my skin is always coloured yellow because I'm getting too much carotene)
- Two serves of broccoli (anti-cancer)
- Two sticks of celery (I've forgotten the health benefits)
- Some pumpkin or beetroot when available. Juice of one lemon when available.
- 420 mls of water to make it possible to run the blender.
While that is liquidising I crack three raw eggs (50 gm each) and add them to the blended mixture then blend for another 5 seconds.
Fine. It sounds revolting because you are unused to it. Try it and you'll be surprised.
That breakfast prevents me being hungry till late afternoon, so I have to remind myself to eat a couple of serves of cabbage for lunch, and finish off with a tablespoonful of apricot kernels.
I start to feel thirsty at about 3:30pm so drink 400 mls of water then boil some water and make a drink with about a tablespoon of cocoa powder and a teaspoon of coconut oil sweetened with a quarter teaspoon of stevia powder (the herb, not an extract). I follow this up with a heaped soupspoon of peanut butter that I watched being ground at the local health store, so I know there are no additives.
I'm a lazy cook, so I prepare enough stew to last me for several weeks, and freeze it.
Most of my quantities are guesswork because I don't measure them, but I can tell you that I use 5 kilos (11lbs) of kangaroo mince and one and a half litres of coconut oil. In Scotland you could look for rabbit or venison. It the USA you could look for buffalo. My theory is that these wild animals are not repeatedly dosed with worm killers and insecticides and hormones so they will only pick up whatever is sprayed on the plants.
I add a good helping of seaweed, a kilo of garlic, about a kilo of onions about a cupful of curry powder, some chilli powder, and about 4 teaspoons of salt. Oh, I nearly forgot, I soak a litre of lima beans overnight to make about 2.5 litres of soaked beans, and cook them in with the stew. Don't take my word for it...this is healthy. Look up the cancer fighting ability of curry and garlic and onions and the health benefits of seaweed and beans. Oh, yes, don't be taken in by the low salt scam. Athletes have died because of too little salt in their blood, and too little salt can cause high blood pressure, which it is supposed to prevent. Then the doctor can prescribe a low salt diet and his favourite blood pressure drug.
After I've had my stew I eat the half orange left from breakfast.
In the late evening I have a handful of almonds and two sticks of celery and three brazil nuts.
At no time during the day have I felt hungry except for a few minutes at 3:30pm before I eat my peanut butter. But I've eaten many foods that are known to fight cancer and heart attacks and pimples and overweight and underweight. During the season I eat whatever free fruit I can get. For the last couple of months I've been eating a healthy diet with about a dozen figs straight off of my tree. My weight didn't budge from the exact centre of the ideal weight range for my height, in spite of all the sugar in the figs. What Atkins didn't allow for was that natural foods contain hundreds of different chemicals, so as well as sugar the figs have lots of other chemicals that prevent the sugar from making me fat.
One last tip for your healthy eating plan. If you're slimming, drink everything cold. Your body has to burn calories to heat up the drink to body temperature. Also, the more hot food you eat, the less calories you need to burn to keep warm.
