80% of the people are deficient in magnesium; 90% in vitamin D. How’s your GABA?
Category: Diet
Small Changes Make a Millionaire
Make a small change for better health outcomes in your diet each day. Can be even a very tiny change, but is nevertheless a clear improvement health-wise. But do it every single day without fail. Use some kind of reminder in the morning in order to decide from the get-go what the small change will be for that day. If you miss a day, make 2 small changes the next day to catch up.
In 12 months, your overall diet will be transformed almost completely for vastly better health.
Like the age-old saying goes, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. So it is with diet, also.
What Is Healthy Cooking?
No-oil and no-salt cooking. Minimize saturated fat and cholesterol. Zero refined sugar. No rationalizations and no excuses.
Old Age and Digestion
If you are into your 60s and 70s, it would be a good idea to take a digestive enzyme pill with your primary meal, as these enzymes decrease with old age, so that without a supplement, you are getting much less value from the food that you eat because it doesn’t get thoroughly digested for lack of digestive enzymes.
Yet another problem with old age and digestion is that the hydrochloric acid produced by the stomach to breakdown food decreases with old age, so that food — and proteins in particular, which are more complex compounds — don’t get broken down as efficiently by digestion in the stomach for lack of this acid, which is another reason why the old should increase the amount of protein in their diet somewhat to compensate for this inefficient digestion. A sprinkle of lemon juice on your salad would help here with digestion in the stomach.
How To Binge Eat
Do you find that you eat way too much on the weekends or, now and then, just go overboard with too much food? You are not alone.
But there is an effective way to deal with this kind of occasional binge eating, which I’m afraid most of us humans are guilty of. That way is to have planned calorie deficit days each week (planned as in specific days of the week). Right now, I have 3 calorie deficit days each week, so when I overeat on the weekends, it doesn’t matter.
One calorie deficit day is just a few hundred calories below what I typically eat (2100 calories). The second is double that but not that severe really. But the third calorie deficit is a serious drop — half of what I normally eat.
With 3 planned calorie deficit days each week, I don’t have to be that concerned with the occasional binge. Actually, without the occasional binge, I would lose too much weight.
So I can enjoy my binge and eat cake, too — sort of speak (I don’t eat processed foods like cake).
Calorie Deficit Days
I have been doing OMAD for 3 years, but I also do 3 calorie deficit days a week. One moderate deficit, one medium, and one large. My usual day calorie-wise is 2100 calories. The way I do the one large calorie deficit day is that I wait until very late in my eating window to have that one meal, and that one meal is unusually high in protein and fat and therefore very satiating. That one meal can be 1000 calories, but because it is late in the day and very satiating, that’s it for food for that day, which translates into a 1100 calorie deficit. I was wondering if anyone else does calorie deficit days, and, if so, how they go about it — what their strategy is?
Fiber and Your Health
The cause for poor health produced by the American diet is pretty clear. Most Americans do not eat enough fiber to satisfy even the minimum requirement, even though the American standard is set very low at 38 grams per day for men and 25 grams for women (aboriginal communities can eat up to 100 grams of fiber — personally, I think the standard for men should be 75 to 100 grams per day).
What happens when you don’t get an adequate amount of fiber from a diverse group of plant foods is that you undermine the good bacteria in the gut. These bacteria produce the metabolites or short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that help to maintain the lining or barrier of the intestines as well as the blood/brain barrier of the brain.
If those SCFA are not produced in adequate amounts, this leads to the leaky gut syndrome in the intestines and permeability in the brain’s blood/brain barrier. Once this happens, you get toxins, pathogens, etc. escaping into the blood vessels from the intestines and into the brain through the blood/brain barrier, leading to widespread inflammation and ultimately, if chronic, various autoimmune diseases.
It all starts with inadequate fiber in the diet. That’s the underlying cause. There is no mystery to it. (Note: Using fiber powder is by no means an equivalent substitute for getting your fiber from actual plant foods.)
Salt
Reading Fuhrman’s Eat For Life. Has a very interesting section on salt. Views salt from the evolutionary perspective of what humans in the bulk of their existence have taken in, that is, just the salt in the food and nothing more. That’s the amount our bodies through all those perhaps millions of years the human body is accustomed to need.
But then he compares that to the modern diet where everyone adds salt to virtually everything, so our current salt intake is spectacularly above where it should be. So we eat way too much salt compared to what we should be consuming, but worse, that amount of salt changes one’s taste buds to having to expect virtually everything one eats to be salty. So the current modern salted diet has radically changed the modern taste buds.
Only by drastically reducing salt can someone eventually get back to taste buds as they were meant to be, where one can pick out the more subtle flavors of various foods.
So the current heavily salted diet leads to high blood pressure and poor health, but also undermines one’s sense of taste. Goes on to say that his Nutritarian diet will lead to this reawakening of one’s true taste buds, and so you will get much more enjoyment out of actually tasting a variety of unsalted foods.
5-Day Mimicking Diet
I’m on day 3 of the 5-day mimicking diet. 800 calories per day, except the first day I went without food entirely.
Focus on the mimicking diet is minimizing protein so to maximize the amount of autophagy. Less than 20 grams of protein per day, except that first day was 0. From Longo’s book The Longevity Diet.
Really want the body to have to scavenge for protein wherever it can find it — all those wayward (and cancerous?) cells.
Longo says a healthy person should do this 3 times per year. Someone with diabetes much more often.
I knew I could do this because I did one similar 800 calorie day before and it wasn’t difficult. I thought I could boost the benefit by not eating that first day, which I knew I could do because I’ve done 48-hour fasts before.
Those more strenuous fasts one has to work one’s way up to them imo. Not sure I want to do a 5-day water fast because I do notice with a 48-hour fast that my energy level goes down significantly. One must feel very depleted after 5 days with no nutrition — really don’t want to experience that level of fatigue.
Insulin Spikes
It has only been just recently that I’ve come to realize the importance of keeping blood glucose levels steady compared to having large insulin spikes and the inevitable crashes, as when blood glucose levels drop severely, that’s when one feels very fatigued. Having steadier glucose levels that don’t vary that much means you avoid that fatigued state. That’s the benefit. No doubt, this has a very big impact on one’s mood. I would venture to guess that depression and low glucose levels go hand in hand.
Henry's Views 