Staying Healthy
From Peter Bigfoot's Book of Ancient Natural Remedies
Our bodies are the most precious thing we will ever have in this life experience.
Most of our ailments are self-inflicted through a short list of everyday behavior that we can have control over, such as:
Self-destructive habits … The most popular are candy, soda pop, poor food combinations, deep-fried foods, poor-quality fast food, eating between meals, eating too late in the evening, alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs, and so on. Most of these may seem harmless, but done consistently over time they may have disastrous results.
Exhaustion … The human body must rest. The best hours for sleep are between sundown and sunup in most places. For long days, a nap midday is a great way to prevent heart attacks, recharge your energy, and mellow out. Exhaustion destroys our immune system, and proper rest helps to restore it.
Lack of exercise … If we don’t use it, we lose it! Bodies were made to do physical work all day. If you are sitting all day, to be really healthy that has to be balanced out with some good exercise every day.
Negative thoughts and emotions … Hatred, fear, anger, boredom, sadness, jealousy, and spending our time thinking about all the things that we do not want in our lives - if dwelled on long enough these will create a wide variety of illnesses, frequently cancer and heart disease.
Lack of love and joy … Love and joy are the two most important aspects of human life. If not for love and joy, there would be no purpose in living. A lack of love and joy can lead to heart disease and cancer.
Chemical poisons in your environment, food, or water … Read the labels before you eat packaged food! For example, did you know that aspartame, the sweetener, is a neurotoxin that can and does cause brain damage, seizures, headaches, depression, panic attacks, rage, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, tinnitus, vertigo, numbness in the legs, memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and lupus, to name a few? Aspartame is also sold as AminoSweet, NutraSweet, Equal, and Spoonful. Read the labels!!! Become aware so you can avoid the chemicals that might harm you.
Diet … The goal of eating to maintain excellent health is hampered greatly by the ongoing battle between the tongue and the tummy. The tongue only seems to care about the pleasure of taste, while the stomach is more sympathetic to the requirements of the body and good digestion.
Those people who suffer the most are those who treat their body as though it were a machine or a recreation park with a trashcan in the middle. Look in the mirror now and then and say “I love you” to your body. Treat your body with love and respect and the results will be well worth the effort.
What to eat
After 50+ years of studying and practicing healthy diets, this is what I have found works best for me. It’s simple. A typical meal would go as follows:
1) Greens: a large portion of (very important) salad in the summertime and steamed greens in cold weather—green lettuce, kale, Cabbage, broccoli, collards, bok choy, Parsley, spinach, Swiss chard, etc. Including at breakfast!
2) Protein: most often only one type per meal, such as red meat, eggs, cheese, nuts, poultry, fish, or beans plus grain.
3) Grain: a moderate portion of properly prepared whole grain, usually rice, corn, or oats. I avoid wheat. Many people are allergic to it and I am one of them.
4) Roots: a portion of root vegetables of some kind, such as carrots, beets, rutabaga, turnips, radishes, or yams.
As for fruit, I mostly eat it in the summer and have it midday by itself or with some yogurt. The worst time to eat fruit is for dessert. Sweet foods after a meal will often cause fermentation in the gut, take away calcium, and give back alcohol, carbon dioxide, and tooth decay.
Combine your foods mindfully
Proteins and starches will combine okay if eaten with plenty of greens.
Animal and vegetable proteins should not be eaten in the same meal together.
Beans and grain combine well. One part beans to three parts grain makes a complete protein, and this is especially good with greens.
White dairy, such as milk, cottage cheese, or yogurt, makes for a disastrous combination when eaten with grain—as in the classic milk and cereal combo. This is especially harmful in cold weather, as it forms copious amounts of mucus and sets the stage for infectious diseases and allergies to settle in.
Fruit is best eaten alone on an empty stomach. Melons must be eaten alone. The seeds in the melon, if masticated, are the only source of protein that can be eaten with the melon. They do their digestion below the stomach, in the small intestine. Fruit likes to digest quickly, while starches, proteins, and greens stay in the stomach two hours or more. This is why fruit on top of other food causes indigestion. Fruit with a little yogurt is good. The acidophilus in the yogurt helps to replace our intestinal flora and alleviate gas problems.
Spices
Most spices perform important assistance to digestion. The family cook has the extremely important responsibility of keeping the group healthy with their food. It would be wise to study the values of culinary spices. Here is a sample to whet your appetite:
- Sage is used on meat to protect us from ptomaine poisoning (caused by spoiled meat), and as a tea it will cure that disease.
- Black pepper warms our stomach and stimulates digestion. It has good antibiotic qualities and keeps us healthy in cold weather.
- Hot red peppers cool the stomach and stimulate digestion while sending blood flow to the surface of the skin to be cooled. They also have powerful antibiotic action. They allow us to eat red meat in hot weather without getting sick from excess heat.
- Ginger aids digestion and has a warming, stimulating action. It is good for relieving gas and helps to relieve allergies.
- Oregano stimulates digestion, making it possible to digest roasted cheese on a pizza. It also helps to kill fungus and harmful yeasts, and works great to relieve a toothache (just pack the herb around the tooth).
You will have a healthier family if you learn about spices and use them.
Drinking with meals
Don’t do it! If you are too thirsty to chew your food, then drink your fill of water, wait fifteen minutes, and then eat. If we get in the habit of washing our food down with water, there will be too much water in the stomach and no saliva. Then a swamplike condition develops in the spleen and stomach, which can lead to diabetes. If you have a dry mouth no matter how much water you drink, you need more Vitamin C. Drink some lemon juice with the water.
Fit your diet to your life
Your diet should fit your life. As the conditions of our life change, so must our diet change, too.
One condition that is important is the environment we live in - whether it is cool or warm. Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees F. Everything that we swallow will have to be heated up or cooled down to be at 98.6 F. This activity takes a lot of energy from our body. Imagine drinking a glass of ice water … how much fire would it take over a stove to heat that water up to 98.6 degrees? Somehow our body manages to do that inside. On a cold day it would be exhausting to heat up a cold meal or ice water. So with that in mind, the more we can assist the body temperature, the more energy we’ll have left to accomplish something.
Some foods have a cool energy, like salad greens, raw vegetables, and fresh fruits. Other foods have a warming energy, like baked potatoes, red meat, most cooked food, and dried fruit. If I am working outdoors in the cold on food that is too cooling, I will have difficulty keeping warm, have excessive clear runny mucus, and be likely to catch a cold. When exposed to hot weather, I will do best eating cooling foods like watermelon, salad, fish, and raw vegetables. If I eat warm-energy foods in hot weather, the heat will be oppressive, and I may become ill from excess heat–type ailments.
When we are in a cold environment, the water in our bodies has to be constantly heated. So to conserve energy, our body will urinate more frequently to get rid of excess water. The solid food that we have in our gut will help to keep us warm. You can see how this dovetails with the raw food being cooler, as it has more water content.
The heavy person tends to be warmer, and may do better with a cooler diet, while a thin person tends to be cooler and will benefit from a warmer diet. Young people tend to be warmer than older people, so a young person can enjoy more fresh fruit than the elder person.
The way I adjust the heat value of my diet and still eat pretty much the same foods is by choosing to cook the food or eat it raw, and by adjusting the portions. That is, more protein and fats to keep warm, and more raw foods to keep cool. Adding appropriate spices helps, too.
Another consideration is our level of physical activity. The person who sits at a desk all day needs lighter fare than ones who do strenuous work all day. If I did strenuous labor on the sitter’s diet, I would become depleted. If the sitter ate the heavy foods of the worker, he or she would become fat and toxic.
Vegetarian diets
I was a vegetarian (what people call vegan, now) for twenty years. That would be, looking back now, about eighteen years too long. The diet is too low in protein and heat value for my lifestyle. I became seriously depleted and nearly died from it. In a warmer climate and with less physical work and stress, it may have worked.
But then, where is the benefit of imposing such self-limiting behavior on oneself? Well, when the body becomes too “yin,” cool, and depleted, we tend to struggle to achieve unattainable ideals. Our diet then becomes our religion, and we become a prisoner of our own self-imposed limitation. It may be a very similar scenario to becoming an addict of any kind.
In the natural world, all the creatures that have their eyes in front, as we do, are predators.
How to get chubby
It is pretty simple: starch and sugar, when not used up before the next meal, turn to fat. Eating fat does not make a person fat. We are much healthier when we get our strength and energy from fats and proteins rather than sugar and starch.
It’s so simple: sugar and starch build fat; proteins, fats, and greens build muscles and bones.
What to drink
Nearly all the bottled and canned beverages sold in stores are to some degree poisonous. Most contain way too much corn syrup, sugar, alcohol, or chemicals. The only one that I could feel good about, besides some bottled waters, would be non-alcohol beer. There is no sugar in it, no chemicals, and no alcohol. Not even fattening!
At my place we drink a wide variety of herb teas. We boil the water in the evening, take it off the fire, stir the herbs into the water, and cover it. Next morning we pour it through a strainer into a large ceramic pitcher, and that is our beverage for the day, which we always have available. The tea can be chosen for its therapeutic value or just simply for the flavor. Either way, it is beneficial, and nothing harmful about it.
We use the herb stevia to sweeten the tea. Stevia does not feed yeast, ferment, cause gas, rot your teeth, or make you fat.
Eat with intent
Be aware of why you are choosing to eat a particular food. Know what each food does for you.
If you are experiencing a health problem of some sort, start becoming aware of what causes it. For example, up till I was about twenty-six, my feet would break out with a rash now and then. I finally traced it to eating tomatoes. Bummer! I love tomatoes, but now I do not eat them. The rash is gone. Another time, for a while I had dandruff all the time. I traced that back to pasta. If I eat pasta today, I’ll have dandruff tomorrow. If I continue to eat pasta my hair starts falling out. I love pasta but do not eat it.
Many people will get an outbreak of herpes virus if they eat peanut butter or beans, especially if combined with a stressful situation.
Remember to love your body. Eating should be an act of love.
