About two weeks ago, I started a diet that involved eating mostly vegetables, seeds, and lean protein, along with some vitamin supplements. I’ve been feeling exhausted and overwhelmed all the time, even after sleeping well.
Well, two weeks are up now. Time to review and see if my diet is having any effect.
My regimen:
Carbohydrates:
Vegetable (mostly boiled or steamed, but sometimes stir-fried, or raw) – onions, green peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, carrots, potatoes, peas, corn, turnips
Rice, cornflour meal, and oats – boiled and limited to one serving or two.
Spices – garlic, ginger, black pepper, turmeric, chili powder, cloves
Protein – Salmon, tuna, mackerel, curd
Fats: Olive oil
Miscellaneous vitamin, minerals and trace elements: Sunflower seeds, vitamin B complex, biotin, vitamin C and D, omega 3 oils, lecithin, kelp (iodine and manganese), an herbal supplement with calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium. Plus a dash of apple cider vinegar with water in the mornings and a spoonful of blackstrap molasses at night. I should add that I also cut out coffee and black tea, which tend to counteract the effect of supplements, and bread, which is fattening. I drank green tea once in a while, but mostly I drank water, either plain or with ginger in it.
I followed this diet fairly strictly until the day before yesterday when I felt a little bored of the whole thing and and succumbed to peanut butter and crackers (!).
So do I feel better? Frankly, no. I feel heavier and more lethargic than usual. I didn’t get the boost I usually get from lightening up and eating mostly vegetables. I can think of two reasons for the failure.
One is the heat. It’s around 30-35 degrees celsius but it feels a lot hotter. A lot. More like 45 degrees. It’s not just that it’s humid here near the bay. Baltimore gets humid too. But there’s a certain kind of heaviness. Sometimes it feels almost as hot and muggy here as Madras, though temperatures there are about ten degrees higher.
The other reason I can think of is exercise. During my student years when we were expected to pay for rent, food, books, travel and everything else from about $500 a month, I developed a 25 buck-a-month diet (it would sometimes be 30 bucks) that was a modified version of the one I’m trying out now and it got me into the best shape of my life. But there was a difference. Back then, I worked out 4 times a week, strenuously. These days, a long walk is the best I can do. And even then, all I can think of is the news, the market, the gold price, the oil spill, the horrible legislation in the works everywhere to control people, the nastiness of the government, and the nastiness of the “market” so-called. Everywhere you look the people in power seem to be sociopaths. Completely lacking in decent human feeling or any sense of responsibility. Not a shred of conscience and yet moralizing and sermonizing as though on equal terms with god. And the major media is several times worse in its way, although I’m sure they’d throw a righteous fit if they heard that.
So that might have something to do with it.
This weekend I have guests, so keeping up with the diet is out of the question anyway. I don’t drink, but my friends all do and I have to nibble at something to keep them company since they tend to feel guilty if I just drink water and look on. That means crackers and chips. Sigh. They all like eating out a lot too. And there are only so many times you can order soup or a salad.
I mean, the restaurants have to stay in business too. So, no diet for a week. I have to do my part for the consumer economy.
Well done. Graceful and entertaining. Useful too.
I just did a cleanse using Dr. Alexander Junger’s program and was happy with the results. He has a book called “Clean” that details the method. It seems similar to what you’ve done but certain of your items (corn, potato, rice) are excluded for three weeks. Best of luck with your regimen.
Thanks. Will try it.
I don’t like corn much. But I need rice or potatoes to feel full. That’s my problem..
Besides, the all meat diet gets expensive.
Lila,
You struck a chord. I have tapered back on my media consumption. I was flat out depressed! Waking up everyday and filling my head with the psycho’s who rule the world is not good for me.
There’s only so much you can take. Pretty much, it seems as if since 2001, my entire life has revolved around a bunch of charts and numbers. I kid you not. The day gold is down, I’m happy, cos I think it’s going down further and I can buy in cheaper.
It get worse when I have a stock. Because then one part of me is cheering the market going up and another part of me is sorry it’s not down.
How can you keep living like this? It’s a perfect waste of human energy.
Investment is a different thing. But this is high stakes gambling of the most pathological variety
I don’t have that problem. I am poor. A wholly different problem. Not to evangelize or sound pious. But reading 10 chapters a day of a contemporary version of the Bible and praying for others has helped me a lot.
Yes. Thinking of something besides your own problems always helps.
But I have a tendency to not tackle my own problems by “taking care” of other problems.
There’s an element of escapism in that.
Beyond a certain minimum, poor is a very relative term.
Money is not the only item one can be rich in.
One can be rich in time and freedom to act is wealth too.
Rich in relationships is another kind of wealth.
Rich in knowledge..experience.
..skills…
Rich in achievement..
Rich in spiritual development
Rich in imagination..
Ancient post that I just now saw. …. but knowing you will see the comment…. Any further experiements to report?
Your diet sounds somewhat similar to what I normally try to do. Except I do have a cup of organic coffee nowadays. (There’s just no substitute for it.) And I don’t do corn or potatoes. I’m even reactive to the organic corn nowadays; I don’t even think about touching the toxic kind. And potatoes, well, the doc told me to lay off the nightshades several years ago, but eventually, I started up with organic potatoes again — *until* last summer, when I started having alarming reactions to potatoes too (and several other things). One reason I’m actually hoping I am diagnosed with Lyme disease is, it’s known to cause these novel food sensitivities, but as you treat it, they typically go away.
Besides something like Lyme, it seems food allergy and sensitivity is just a fact of modern life. Our typical diet hammers away at the GI tract, causes gut inflammation, and pharmaceutically aids invasive species such as Candida. Oh, wait … let’s not forget, vaccines with excipients including peanut or soy oil… It’s basically a recipe for creating multiple food sensitivities.
I’m reading “Brain Allergies,” a 1980 book that points out that people often become allergic to what they eat most often. They claim a lot of Asians are actually allergic to rice. That could be a reason for your poor outcome after two weeks, particularly if you increased your intake of any of t hose grains.
Histamine intolerance is separate from allergy/sensitivity, but can exacerbate it. If you already have a lot of craziness going on — say from existing allergies, and you’re fighting off some kind of bad guys, your body is basiclaly already a war zone. Your WBCs are hurling the cytokines and histamine around in attempts to stop the enemy or perceived enemy. So, you intake some food that seems perfectly safe — say, canned tuna — that contains natural histamine. Well, *that* can set you off since you’re already brimming with the stuff to begin with (and perhaps your body is a little slow to break down the excess; one of the B vitamins is essential to that process.). That is probably part of what’s going on with me. Too much excitement for the immune system.
OTOH (or *in addition to* the above) your diet may have been working and causing a cleansing crisis. Especially with the ACV, which is a yeast killer.
I’ve been a nutrition (i.e., putting good stuff in) fan for a long time, but only recently have I become equally careful about making sure the bad stuff gets out. Just like you have to supplement food, a lot of us challenged modern lifestyle victims have to supplement our bodies’ detox pathways as well. People who have stuff like candida, Lyme, or cancer come to realize very quickly that killing too many of the bad guys too quickly, without giving the body time to take out the trash, can leave you feeling sicker — or in very extreme cases, can even kill you.