Want to get healthy?
If your answer is yes, good for you! It’s not really as difficult as it may seem. At Emerald Forest, we want you to be healthy too. We have put together a basic, easy-to-follow plan for you to not only feel better and have more energy to do the things you love, but improve your overall health as well.
All or any part of the following program will get you on the road to better health. Following our entire step-by-step program is ideal for optimum health as each step builds upon the previous one. But, we understand that, for some, it is easier to maintain a new lifestyle if the change is gradual and you like what you are doing. In the beginning, we suggest you to do that which appeals to you most. After all, any change for the better is preferable to no change at all. As you begin to feel better and experience more energy you will be motivated to adopt more or the entire program for maximum benefit.
Deep breathing helps the body’s lymph system eliminate waste. |
Now, before you read on, take a deep breath. Did you do it? Because if you did, you just took one of the most important first steps to improving your health. Go ahead, take another deep breath. Deep breathing helps the body’s lymph system eliminate waste from your body’s cells allowing them to take in more oxygen and at the same time, improve your health. If you combine deep breathing with exercise, you will do the most to aid that lymph system of yours to do its job properly. There will be more about the importance of proper breathing in the program on exercise, but for now, we’ll talk a little bit about how your body works.
Before we discuss the types of foods you should put into your body, a definition of pH balance might be helpful. pH balance is the measure of the acidity and alkalinity in your body. A proper pH balance is not only necessary for health, but life itself. The ways to balance your body’s pH are through:
Diet |
Exercise |
Stress
Management |
Our bodies function much better and are healthier in a slightly more alkaline environment. An imbalance of pH, or too much acidity, opens the door to disease, including cancer, viruses, parasites, bacteria, and fungus, all of which require an acidic environment in which to grow. Balancing your body’s pH and getting rid of too much acidity, robs these bad elements of the food they need to survive and grow.
Step One – Common Sense Eating
Many fad diets ignore your body’s fundamental physiological makeup and can put you at a higher risk for health problems later on. Weight loss is not really the issue, eating healthy is. If you eat properly, losing excess body weight will occur as a natural result. At Emerald Forest, we have reviewed and tested over one hundred different diet and health programs and have included in our program only those elements that contribute to both short and long-term health.
It is important to understand that there are only two food groups that create the good alkaline environment within your body. They are fresh fruit and vegetables. Notice the word fresh. If you cook (steaming is okay) or dry fresh fruit or vegetables, they become acidic, and no longer provide the alkaline benefits to the body. Processed sugar is almost completely acidic, which explains why it is so detrimental to your health. Eliminating as much processed sugar from your diet as possible should be a high priority. Replace it with an alkaline-based sweetener like Xylitol or Erythritol which are major tools for not only restoring a healthy pH balance, but are effective disease inhibitors as well.
Eating fresh fruits and vegetables makes good sense for another reason too. Our bodies are made up of approximately 80% water. Isn’t it reasonable to eat more foods that have a high water content like fruits and vegetables? Meat, which is acidic, is considered a “compressed food” or a food that is not rich in water. To eat more sensibly, consume only one compressed food at each meal.
Eating water-rich foods has still another benefit as well. They help hydrate the body. In fact, they do a better job of giving your body the water it needs better than drinking multiple glasses of water each day. Remember the lymph system we mentioned earlier? Water rich foods also aid the lymph system in flushing out body waste.
Step Two – Food Combining
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Food Combining Chart |
Have ever seen the food charts the government puts out? Well, if you have, try and get them out of your mind. We’re going to show you how to be a pickier eater. We’re going to show you how to pick the right foods to put together.
For optimum health and energy, it is important to know how your body digests the food you eat. Not all food requires the same kind of chemicals for digestion. Your stomach produces an alkaline-based chemical for digesting starchy* foods like rice, bread, and potatoes. It produces another, acid-based chemical, for digesting protein foods like meat, dairy products, and nuts. When combined, these two types of digestive chemicals actually neutralize each other. So, when you eat a starchy food with a protein food, you send a mixed message to your stomach. It produces each type of digestive chemical, which in turn, cancels each other out, and the majority of the food you just ate lies in your stomach for a much longer time than is healthy. Some of it is passed on to the small intestine prematurely requiring it to do a job it wasn’t designed to do. Digestion time is unnaturally lengthened and much more energy is expended in the process. And you wonder why you’re so sleepy after a big meal of meat and potatoes.
Not all food requires the same kind of chemicals for digestion. |
The smart solution is to combine foods that are digested using the same type of digestive chemical. Vegetables can be digested using either an alkaline-based, or an acid-based chemical and, as such, can be combined with either starchy foods or protein foods. Instead of eating a steak and baked potato, have a small steak with a big salad, or a modest baked potato with lots of steamed vegetables. Eat one combination for lunch, and the other for dinner. That way, you combine foods that are digested the same way and you are combining water-rich foods with compressed foods.
Then there is fruit. Fruit is in a league all by itself. It isn’t even digested in the stomach. Within a few minutes of eating, fruit is passed on to the small intestine where it is digested and its nutrients are absorbed. Because fruit isn’t digested in the stomach, it should be eaten when the stomach is empty. Combining fruit with starches or proteins causes it to sit in the stomach and ferment causing gas and bloating. Always eat fruit by itself and on an empty stomach!
Step Three – Timing is Everything!
Let’s discuss more about how the body works.
Your body handles the food you eat in essentially three different ways:
• It digests it.
• It assimilates the nutrients.
• It eliminates the unused waste.
The body has an internal, biological clock that is set to perform each of the above functions at different times. The best time for digesting is from 12:00noon to 8:00 pm. The best time for assimilation is from 8:00 pm to 4:00 am. Elimination is ideally performed between the hours of 4:00 am and 12:00 noon. This doesn’t mean that you can’t do these things out of order or at different times, only that your body works and expends energy most efficiently during the above hours.
Your body also works best when it has only one major task to perform at a time. Digestion always takes priority over assimilation or elimination. If you eat while your body is supposed to be eliminating waste, you interrupt the natural process and force it to digest. If you eat in the middle of the night when your body is assimilating nutrients, you cause it to stop and digest instead.
Fruit to the Rescue
The key to making this all work properly and provide for individual preferences is fruit. Because fruit isn’t digested like other foods, it can be eaten without interrupting the other processes. The only thing to always remember is to eat it on an empty stomach. If you want a snack at 10 at night, have an apple or a grapefruit. If you’re hungry at 6 in the morning, have a breakfast of different kinds of fruit. Actually, eating only fruit until as close to noon as possible helps your body during the elimination cycle, and still provides all the energy you need to get you to lunchtime.
To Summarize
Because your stomach is empty in the morning, breakfast is the ideal time to have fresh fruit such as: apples, oranges, melons, berries, etc. or unprocessed fruit juices. In fact, you can eat fruit off and on all morning if you like. The longer you eat only fruit, the more time your digestive tract has to clean itself out.
Lunch is the best time to eat proteins like meat. Because steak requires about 4 to 6 hours to digest, it is best to eat it at lunch along with a salad, or steamed vegetables, or both.
You can eat dinner as late as 6 pm. Dinner is the time to eat starches like baked potatoes, rice, and bread. If you only add fresh or steamed vegetables, you make it easy on your stomach when you go to bed. Instead of expending a lot of energy to digest food, your body will conserve its energy for the next day and provide you a good night’s sleep in the process.
Step Four – Eating for Your Blood Type
The last step in our diet program focuses on blood type.
Eating for your blood type may be a new concept to you, but it is based upon solid scientific research. To learn more, we encourage you to get a copy of the book, "Eat Right for Your Blood Type"
by Dr. Peter J. D’Adamo. Dr. D’Adamo’s revolutionary findings rank with recent break-through discoveries on DNA and genetics. It is cutting edge science and medicine.
The primary principle behind blood type analysis is that people with different blood types require different kinds of diets for optimum health.
The four different blood types are:
Eating for your blood type can provide some of the same benefits as mentioned in earlier steps: more energy, weight loss, lessening of chronic conditions such as: asthma, headaches, and heartburn. Some people respond better to a higher protein diet than others and vice versa. If you are someone who feels less than your best when eating too much protein or too many starchy foods, the answer may lie in your blood type.
The following is over-simplified to give you a basic idea of the differences in diet required by the four blood types:
Type O – The oldest and most common blood type needs the most protein.
Type A – Requires a high vegetarian diet.
Type B – Needs a wide variety of wholesome foods.
Type AB – The most rare-only 2% to 5% of the population and requires a combination of both A and B diets, but can do well on some foods that are not good for either.
If you want to know more about the specific diets required by the different blood types, we urge you to read Eat Right for Your Blood Type.
