LUNCH, FOOD COMBINING, NEW WAYS OF THINKING, PERHAPS

Okay. So you’ve started the day with some super food, or a piece of fruit, or a little bit of yogurt and you’ve snacked on some more super smoothie or a piece fruit or vegetable and you’re ready for lunch.

Here’s another shift in habit that drives some people crazy, and then again, some people like to try new ways, and many of the health advocates indicate this way of eating, and that’s food combining.

The main rules of food combining are simple:

1) Eat fruit alone, and on an empty stomach. ( I expand this and say fruit with any all raw meal is fine, including a nice thick high protein / fat raw smoothie).

2) Combine proteins with vegetables. The strict people just like protein and leafy vegetables, but I expand, protein and any vegetable that is raw. Not protein with cooked starchy veggies like potatoes and carrots and turnips and whatnot.

3) Combine grains with vegetables, here since the grains are already starch you can add starchy veggies, and it’s good, in my mind to have some raw veggies with your meals if you can.

What this leaves out is the combinations to which we are so accustomed: meat and potatoes, bread and peanut butter, pizza with the starch/grain crust and the cheese / protein filling. Some other day, I’ll give a little write about how milk products that are organic and aren’t raw aren’t so great, (with yogurt, kefir and butter being possible transitional exceptions), but for now: the old macaroni ( or pasta) and cheese: bad for you since the macaroni (or pasta) is in the refined flour category that Weston Price (see earlier essay) found common to all people with lots of ailments, and bad for you in combining the grain and the protein.


So does that leave anything for lunch?


Yes.

And lunch, the middle of the meal day, many recommend being the main meal, the big meal of your day. See perhaps, The Three Season Diet. ((And, of course, buy from a local bookstore, such as Readers’ Books.)) This book, the three season diet, has many instances of people radically losing weight by shifting their eating to the middle of the day, and eating seasonally.

And what big meal would be nice with food combining?

Some meat and a salad.

Some (raw) cheese and a salad.

Some protein smoothie/ dressing/ dip and a batch of any sorts of veggies, be they salad or not.

Make your salad dressing a feast: olive oil, flax oil, miso, tahini, spices, raw apple cider vinegar, even a little fish oil. Some digestive herbs like ginger and turmeric and coriander. Make it yummy. Make sure the olive oil is organic and cold pressed. This is great for you.

Some whole grains, whole wheat, rice, millet, quinoa, barley, rye and some veggies or salad.

The key to getting things to taste good is your use of spices and your combinations. Again, lots of the raw foods and the various healthy eating books can give you recipes that follow these combinations.

Fit for Life by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, is kind of the classic in this way of getting healthy by food combining. They encourage people to start the day with fruit alone, to make sandwiches (I’d say skip all bread, but if you do bread, do Ezekiel bread or one of those that are closest to being whole grain) with just tomato and onion and avocado filling say, to have a protein meal of steak and salad. I’d say, better, salmon and salad, and cook the salmon as rare as you can, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

The ideas are this: for lunch, eat a lot. Give yourself time to rest a bit after. Give yourself time to eat and enjoy. Give yourself time to eat and follow your breathing and have a sweet conversation, if only with yourself that’s fine too.

In this lunch have either protein and veggies

Or veggies and grains, preferably whole oats, or whole wheat kernels, or whole rye, barley, millet and so on.

As per always and always: food is fun. They are gobs of delicious ways to eat with these combinations.

See, perhaps: Raw Family Recipes. Or: Living-Foods.com/recipes.

Think of your favorite ways to do the above food combining. Invent, create, discover.

(And one advantage to an all raw meal is that everything combines with everything else, since they all come with their enzymes intact.). Experiment. Enjoy. Thrive.


(Note. The essays are rotating through the three blogs, more or less one per day.
So you might want to check:
WakeUp Feldenkrais®
and
Life on Earth ::: Slow Sonoma
for the last two essays.)