We have only just barely entered the new year....an amazing opportunity to restart, refresh and make improvements in our lifestyles. How many New Year’s resolutions have you made for 2016? What were they?
How many have you already broken?
We like to set unrealistically high goals for ourselves, by which we ultimately set ourselves up for failure even before we really take the chance to make any significant changes. Let's face it, we are creatures of habit, and it is hard to make changes…let alone when we live and work on tight schedules and our health seems to mostly being addressed only when we start lacking it.
Today, I would like to share with you wisdom presented by a well-known Holistic Health Practitioner, Neuromuscular Therapist and corrective exercise specialist, Paul Chek. Many of our Members are familiar with his teachings, but those of you who are not, this could just be THE push for you to get on the right track with kick-starting your journey to a healthier you, and to taking the most advantage of the wonderful foods available to us from Miller’s farm.
Paul Chek is a strong proponent of the Weston Price Foundation (www.westonaprice.org), whose founder Sally Fallon (the author of the ultimate cooking Bible “Nourishing Traditions”), also consults our Farmer, Amos Miller. I invite you to continue your “getting-healthy” new year’s resolutions with the simple approach outlined in the text and videos below.
Rotation Dieting
A rotation diet is an easy, and inexpensive, approach to identifying food intolerances, avoiding symptoms of food intolerance and detoxifying your body, especially your digestive system. It is also a healthy and effective way to lose weight.
Eating the same foods over and over is one of the most sure-fire methods to developing a food intolerance. Not to be confused with a food allergy, food intolerances are negative reactions to foods that produce symptoms such as nasal congestion, skin conditions, headaches, itchiness, lethargy and a variety of other maladies. In other words, symptoms which you may not at all associate with food at first! They quietly sneak up up on us as all-kinds of unpleasant symptoms and they disarm the body of its immune defenses.
These conditions are thought to be brought on by a 'leaky gut' which is characterized by the passing of undigested food particles through the gut wall and into the liver. When our liver becomes backed up from the many food additives, chemicals and pesticides so many of us consume, the undigested food particles end up making it to our general circulation which causes an immune response from our body. Over time, if we continue eating those foods our body considers harmful, the immune system continues mounting a stronger and stronger response, shown by the many symptoms described above.
One particularly successful method of reducing the chances of developing intolerances to certain foods is to eat foods on a rotating basis. It's generally accepted that food stays within your system for approximately 48-72 hours, with an average of 55 hours. Therefore, eating your food on a four-day rotation works well for many people and has eliminated many of the symptoms associated with food intolerance because they avoid exposing themselves to foods from the same families, or genus, minimizing the immune response.
To make this way of eating work for you, Paul Chek recommends a "training rotation plan", which is much easier than a true rotation diet that requires monitoring foods by families (taxonomic relationships). With a training rotation plan, you keep a notepad in your pocket and write down everything you eat and drink on a daily basis. At the end of the day you look at all the foods and don't allow yourself to eat those foods for another 72 hours. For example, if you ate eggs, chicken, cauliflower, mushrooms and drank orange juice on Monday, you would not eat any of these foods nor drink orange juice again until Friday.
Please watch these great video blogs from Paul Chek. They are a great introduction to understanding the importance of eliminating the "irritant" foods out of your diets as you are committing to a healthier lifestyle. Otherwise, our bodies are forced to spend too much energy on dealing with and detoxing from the foods that do not agree with YOUR system and the body has no more energy to spend on healing.
