I was a bit disenchanted when I read an article on the Dr. Oz website today about losing weight. The article talked about eating low fat foods, as well as low fat dairy, and avoiding refined carbohydrates depending on which area of the body carries the weight. This article did not mention reducing sugars, including sugar from fruit. Mercola recommends eating under 25 grams of fructose a day. It also did not mention that many people have a food sensitivity to pasteurized milk or mention the alternatives of raw dairy.
A different kind of "diet," Metabolic Typing, makes a lot more sense to me, in fact I currently eat according to my metabolic type. The title of this post, The "No-Diet" Diet, is the title from chapter 3 of Paul Chek's book How to Eat, Move and be Healthy. As I am the Facility Coordinator of a holistic gym in Chicago that employs Paul Chek trainers, I am going to do a series of posts summarizing information from his book, and talking about my experience with it.
By the way, I am not personally affiliated in any way with Paul Chek, and I do not get any type of monetary "kickback" for mentioning his name. I am not a Chek Trainer or Practitioner, and I am in no way financially linked with Paul Chek's organization. I'm merely sharing my experience, as I am currently being helped by a Chek Practitioner. Also, as you may notice, many of my other posts are based on varying sources.
As you might remember from earlier blogs, Kristie Yaakoby, Chek Trainer and Functional Nutritionist is helping me with "clean," organic eating to alleviate the exhaustion and imbalance from Adrenal Fatigue and Estrogen Dominance. I am on this eating plan for my health, but it also helps many people lose weight.
Metabolic typing is a way of eating that is based on the studies of Dr. Weston Price, who investigated indigenous groups of people. Some groups ate high protein, high fat diets. Others ate a mostly plant based diet. All of these groups ate primarily organic, whole foods. When Eskimos began to eat a modern western diet of processed and pasteurized milk, their sickness and death rates began to rise markedly. All of these indigenous diets were at least four times as nutrient rich as the modern diet.
The idea is that, depending on what food was available in that climate zone, each group physically adapted over many generations to that type of that diet--plant or protein based. If I recall correctly, I remember reading an article by Paul Chek online that talked about our varying lengths of intestines, depending on ethnicity. This influences digestion and what foods a person metabolizes well and therefore what foods people need to eat.
For example, people from polar regions need more protein and fat, because of many generations adapting to eating a lot of fish. People with ancestry form the Equator benefit more from plant-based diets, because many generations adapted to an environment with more plant sources of food and less meat sources. All cultures studies did have some meat in their diet.
You don't have to know your ancestry to understand what metabolic type you have. Just ask yourself how you feel when you eat certain types of foods: Do you feel better after a meal of mostly protein and fat or a meal of mostly carbs, or a mixed meal? You can take a free test at www.ppssuccess.com. This is the site for Paul Chek's Mastery Center, and you can click on Food for Thought, and then click on What is the Primal Pattern (this is the metabolic typing test). If you google metabolic typing test, there are several on the internet, although taking this test from a holistic health practitioner is best.
Until I started eating for my type (protein type), I was hungry all the time, I could not get full, and meals weren't satisfying. In fact, in the past when I was a vegetarian, I lost so much weight and could not gain it back, I eventually had to reintroduce meat. By the way, when I was younger and wanted to loose weight, I tried the low-fat diet, which didn't work. I function at my best when I eat a protein type diet:
Protein Type: 45% protein, 20% Fats/Oils, 35% Carbohydrates (from vegetables not refined carbs--also, Chek practitioners recommend that all types avoid gluten--many people who are overweight, loose weight immediately when they do this.
Carbohydrate Type: 70% Carbohydrates, 20% Protein, 10% Oils/Fats (Avoid fatty meats and fatty dairy--this type may do well eating only 2 meals a day. Focus on eating light meals.)
Mixed Type: 40% Protein, 50% Carbs, 10% Oils/Fats
These ratios must be balanced accurately--if I don't eat all three food groups in the correct ratio, I still end up being hungry all the time--eg, skipping the carbs (even though I'm a protein type.) By the way, I often eat butter and fatty meats, and I am slender, because I am a protein type. I really need to avoid sugar--this kind of carb overload totally gets my body out of whack, and I become light headed and tired.
It is my personal view that "white sugar" is poison, and I will rarely eat things like junky-birthday- cake-icing when I am at a birthday party, and as soon as I reduced my sugar intake to below 25 grams a day, I immediately stopped craving it.
This is a very simplified, brief summary of Metabolic Typing from How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. Hopefully, if you have read this far, you might consider buying the book, which is much more detailed and really well researched. Chek'swww.eatmoveandbehealthy.com, www.chekinstitute.com and www.paulcheksblog.com.
Knowing what I know now, having read the book, and being helped by Kristie Yaakoby (www.balancemethods.com), I will never go back to eating an "Average American Diet"--now I cringe when I think of that phrase. Before I was diagnosed with Adrenal Fatigue, I thought I was impervious to any negative influence that an "above average diet" might have (by this is mean eating some organic foods, some processed foods, and sugar whenever I wanted becasue I was not overweight.) But unfortunately, the more I educate myself about whole, organic foods, the more I realize, "above average" is absolutely not going to cut it.
By the way, Dr. Oz had another article on his website about the "Prehistoric Diet." It said people only need 10% of their calories from meat. Apparently he is either not familiar with or doesn't adhere to metabolic typing, which has helped me immensely. Dr. Oz's "Prehistoric Diet" also included a smoothie recipe with a lot of fruit, and hence a whole lot of sugar from fruit. I look forward to the time when mainstream practitioners are educating people about the issue of too much sugar, regardless of the source. He also recommends soy milk, which acts as a xenoestrogen--some studies link it to breast cancer, "man boobs," and hermaphrodite babies. I'll do a post on soy milk later, but it is fermented soy that is recommended, while advertisers push people to guzzle soy milk.
After learning from Paul Chek's book and from holistic health practitioners, I'm really "underwhelmed" by Dr. Oz's show, and I rarely see anything helpful on it.
A Votre Sante (Here's to Your Health), Alix
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