Health food maniacs (looking for a conversation about "eating right")

[Ell]

Feeling a little frustrated/lost right now after some recent readings I've done....Just as a back story to this, and something I've alluded to in a few other threads, I'm in the process of trying something new with my fitness routine. My goal is to transition from:

 

a) Lifting heavy weights 3x+/week, occasional but not regular hockey or yoga for cardio, and eating pretty much whatever I want (but not necessarily in excess....I'm currently of normal weight)

 

to:

Swimming training (with end goal of doing mile+ long summer lake swims), yoga, and much cleaned up diet. 

 

So here's my vent session/what I'm looking for your approaches on: I've been reading about different eating plans and diet approaches from a few different sources lately. My idea was to not follow just one plan or "system" but to take the best approaches from several that interest me. But this is what I feel like I'm running into time and time again:

 

Start of the reading: 'this isn't like some other readings out there where diet suggestions are hard to follow or cost a lot of money...."

 

End of the reading: You should pretty much only eat twigs and rare berries.

 

It kind of makes me want to pull my hair out. I don't mean to sound as if I'm looking for an excuse; I'm really ready and committed to try something new that will lead to an all around healthier lifestyle, more energy, etc. I guess my point is....do you know how the workers at my local grocery store would look at me if I started inquiring about the types of antibiotics that were used in the raising of their chickens?

 

Does anybody else find this hard? How do you all navigate this "eating better" jungle?

Edited November 29, 2015 by Ell

[idquest]

People tend to forget that virtually all modern 'eating healthy' advice are just theories not substantiated by practice results. In diet science, it might take decades to prove or disprove a theory because this is how long it takes for a body to react to a new eating pattern. But modern economics doesn't work on decades schedule, best it can do - a year or two. So judge yourself on a validity of a particular diet.

 

The best advice I've come around has been eat in moderation, alternate food, introduce more veges, cut down on sugars.

[wilfred]

the above is very reasonable. likewise, my eating philosophy is to try and cut down on sugars, get more protein (mainly eggs, fish & chicken), good fats and continually supplement with 'super' foods/herbs. jing is the name of the game as far as diet is concerned, trying to get as much bang for buck to raise ones base vitality level without things getting too pedantic. many fruits are good for jing while having fibre and providing ample sugars.

 

supplementation - smoothies (fresh hemp/nut milk, probiotics, protein, green powder, etc), juicing, tonic herbs

 

i do juicing once per week and make smoothies once per week (make enough milk to last two rounds) and take tonic herbs/tinctures every day. i try to be mindful of what i eat to the extent that anything going in my body needs to serve a purpose (is it boosting jing? providing yang? hydration? fuel to burn? citric acid to cut through fats? etc). example would be my regular juice is a dash of ginger cordial, pomegranate juice, 50% water with goji/schisandra drops and some ginseng extract. much better than a glass of squash or an orange juice. upon waking every day 1 pint of water w/ crystal salt followed by a green tea. start the day with hydration. just some examples.

 

i believe you can afford to eat quite a bit of crap as long as you're supplementing high energy foods/herbs and your jing levels will still increase over time. obviously not optimal, but it works. herbs like he shou wu, rehmannia, schisandra and ginseng being some of the staples.

[Andrei]

The idea of healthy diet is to have a "caloric deficit", which means you should eat less calories than you consume.

By doing that you enter in ketogenesis which means you basically burn fat instead of glucide from carbs.

Of course you have to keep working out so that you maintain the strength and muscle mass.

By eating less calories does not mean to eat less or to fast, on the contrary you have to increase the amount of vegetables and greens. Also there is carbs cycling:

 

[futuredaze]

Eat what feels right. Since I started meditating and practicing qigong, I can tell which foods serve my body and which foods dont. Labels and diet plans are not helpful in my experience.

[Jetsun]

Most diet stuff is a load of garbage. What is healthy is always going to be individual depending on your constitution, genetics, what your ancestors ate, individual sensitivies etc. Then there are all sorts of variables and ways of looking at it, in ayurveda it would depend on your body type, which could contradict what TCM says about it.

 

In the end the only thing which made sense to me is eat more local, seasonal, organic food and pay attention to what your body needs, which may be very different from what it craves out of habit or wants due to emotional reasons. Local honey is also good.

[vonkrankenhaus]

What we call "food" is actually the environment.

 

Vegetal life has created animal life.

 

Microbial life has created both.

 

Human "diet" or "range of foods" extends from the densest minerals to cosmic vibrational phenomena.

 

Cut off from natural environment by training and herding, modern human being is at a loss about "what to eat", which is to say "how to relate to the environment".

 

So they have been confused, reduced to relating to clowns used as advertising, to authority figures, beliefs about "science", and all kind of things nobody can actually eat.

 

 

 

-VonKrankenhaus

[Bud Jetsun]

Whatever one decides to consume, appreciate that what was once energy of another living being will now become part of ones own fleeting energy body.  

 

If the food-stuffs one consumes are cultured in suffering and fear and torturous death, one's own fleeting body then also composed of suffering and fear and torturous death energy. 

 

Thank the tree that cultures it's fruits from the suns energy and earths water and minerals and air.   Thank the plant that grew in the sun and was ripped from the earth and hacked up to become ones vegetables.  Thank the grains that were kind enough to transmute the earth and water and sun and air into bio-available energy from sharing it's miraculous living seeds.

 

Do not feed the products of the earth and sun and air and water to other living beings to be tortured and murdered.  This is converting good food energy into purposeless torture and murder, and thermodynamically a wasteful burden to both the earth and one's own energy and peace-in-mind.

 

Do not pay other beings to do what one would personally wish to do or have done to them. 

 

Unlimited Love,

-Bud