Forced Cheating

The title maybe surprising, perhaps even curious, but I was forced to eat some foods that I shouldn't be eating during the last 2 weeks. I had my wisdom teeth extracted, I thought it was a simple procedure, but it involved a general surgeon, and him pulling out my teeth and the consequences, well, eat cold ice cream or curd rice for the remainder of the day. It was painful, painful with a capital P. No gym for 2 days. These were the instructions, but life isn't all that good in practice as it is in theory is it?

I had pain, pain and pain for the whole last week. I ate ice cream and oats for the whole week. Basically, I couldn't chew, I had to gulp down anything I ate. The second week(i.e. this week), was much better with respect to the pain, but I still couldn't eat salads, my sutures were not removed till yesterday and my chewing muscles weren't ready for salads.

Now that we have the background out of the way, how does this relate to alkaline eating? Well, it made me focus on my productivity, my health and the way my body is reacting to external circumstances, in other words it was worth it. Allow me to clarify how all these things played out.

Firstly, let me discuss eating junk, I eat junk, this in turn effects the way I feel inside, either makes me energetic, drowsy or neutral. Junk always causes drowsiness, it is a rule, because of the ingredients. Simple rule to keep in mind. That in turn effects my workouts, when you eat junk, your workout somehow feels harder to do (I can attest to this). This in turn causes us to throw in the towel on our workouts and avoid working out altogether. This vicious circle will never end, unless we make a change to the food by using our will power. Food is the easiest to change, working harder in the gym after a heavy meal is hard, well, this is my opinion.

Secondly, eating junk changes the way the body reacts to the environment, I travel to the same places, same way, but I feel the heat much more. I sit at home with the temperature just as before but I'm somehow not feeling cool, it feels like the temperature has changed, but it hasn't. My body is creating different things to counter the foods I eat, this is making me feel different, and not so good. I had to bath multiple times a day to keep cool. This is a clear indication that the healthy foods I ate, used to keep the body feeling good, the unhealthy junk I ate, does more bad than good to my body.

All of this has been very useful. I need some small stints of feeling 'not so good', to remind me to eat healthy. These 2 weeks have tormented my body, There was pain in addition to bad food that is a very bad mix, since it effected my teeth, I couldn't eat what I should have. But this has brought in renewed spirits to go to forward and a strong reason to go forward.

This post is just to let you know that there will be times like this in your life, but each time you face something like this, learn from it, look out for changes you feel, it will make you grow stronger from the experience.

Impact of An Alkaline Diet on Daily Life

A thought dawned on me the other day, I asked myself 'Why eat Alkaline?', I found that this is a very important question that most of us have. A question that you must have answered in some way which led to starting or continuing the diet. Let's look at why we eat alkaline and why we should continue to eat alkaline.

I'll describe 3 areas of my life where the AD has personally helped me.

Firstly, I find a huge, and I must emphasize on huge, impact on exercise. During my previous years when I used to eat any and everything, I tried to exercise, but the exercise used to be such a painful thing to do, you get tired easily, which in turn makes you give up on the exercise program entirely. After I changed my diet, exercising is a breeze, it's so simple to do, it's like a ship with an anchor, when you eat junk, you feel like you're dragging the anchor, when you eat healthy, it feels like you've let go of the anchor. It feels heavenly.

Secondly, there is a amazing difference in the quality of sleep I get. When I used to eat junk, I used to wake up tired, tired and tired. I learnt later that the body is trying to digest all the junk we put into it while we sleep and the body's resources aren't enough to cope with junk and as a result we feel dull and drowsy after waking up from a complete night's sleep. Eating alkaline makes waking up much easier, you feel fresh when you wake up in the morning, you have less resistance to getting up. It feels amazing, words can't describe how good it feels.

Last but not the least, energy level throughout the day, I must say that there is zero energy drain. When you eat junk, and you're continuously eating junk, you forget how good it feels or rather how light it feels when you eat healthy, probably because you forget what eating healthy is.  After a couple of days of eating alkaline, you'll immediately feel the difference. I felt lighter, light like a feather. Light is a relative term and you must know how pathetic it feels after eating junk to know how 'light' feels like. Eating junk brings with it drowsiness, you eat Chicken Biryani (flavoured & steamed chicken with rice), you immediately feel like sleeping, especially with today's lifestyles' of AC restaurants, AC offices, AC homes, comfy chairs, AC cars. It makes it all the more likely to feel drowsy after such a meal.

The biggest impact that an alkaline diet has on your life is the long lasting energy, I eat salads for breakfast and lunch. I eat my breakfast at about 8am and lunch at around 1pm. Often, it so happens, I can completely forget about lunch till about 3pm. I have a very small portion serving of salad for breakfast and this should make me very very hungry, but this doesn't happen, this doesn't mean I don't eat till dinner, I must eat at the right times so I feel normal and feel satiated most of the time so as to avoid any cheat meals. When I refer to energy, it isn't the shot of sugar that instantly fuels the body when you eat some junk, I'm referring to a higher quality of energy, energy that stems from health not from food.

This is a very important post, for me as well as for anyone who's practicing the AD, it keeps us on track as to why we're on this diet in the first place, this can be easy to forget in today's culture of fast food.
Let me know what you think, any questions you may have, any experiences you've got regarding the AD.

Cheers,

Prithvi

Cheat Meals & Solutions

Hey guys,

I know that the main interest for anyone is to figure out how to eat clean and most of all, how to resist the urge to eat junk. This post is all about, why, how and what to do now.

Why?

Before we get into the details of how, let's first figure out the why, why would anyone not want to live healthy, feel light? Logically, it makes no sense whatsoever, however when we dig deeper into this, we'll realize that the urge is a combination of emotional, psychological and scientific.

Emotionally: Eating food provides blood to the stomach and makes you feel good, this is one of the major reasons for over eating, whenever you feel bad, you'd grab something to eat (I'm no exception, this was a chronic problem that I had). This doesn't add to the quality of your life in any way, it only lowers it and makes you fat.

Psychologically or mentally: We feel disconnected from the rest of the society, everyone is partying, having drinks, eating kebabs (kind of grilled meat) and what not, people will eat anything under the sun, but this can't go on forever, all and I must emphasize ALL diseases come from creating a poisonous environment for our blood to proliferate in. Infectious bugs can do nothing to our body if our immune system is strong, because we pollute our bodies by consuming all sorts of 'socially acceptable' food, we are tearing down our immune systems and allowing bugs to infect us. (By the way, these are not my thoughts, they are thoughts of the best professors at Harvard who also happen to be Nobel Laureates).

Alkaline Salad, my lunch today.

Scientifically: There is a specific reason why we continue to crave sugary foods, please keep in mind that when I say sugar, it includes carbohydrates. E.g Rice is sugar, after it is consumed it gets converted to sugar. This isn't the regular sweet sugar we have at home, just so you know. Consuming of sugar creates Candida yeast in our bodies, this yeast's craving for sugar makes you go and eat sugar. You know that feeling after eating junk, after a couple of hours you want to eat junk again. This is because of Candida, it creates the craving.

This is typically low in Indians because of the home environment wherein we are 'forced' to eat at home most of the time, but has changed drastically over the past couple of years due to the cropping up of fast food restaurants in every nook and corner and the changing lifestyles.

Now you know why you feel like eating junk. Let's move on to the How.

How?

Restricting the categories of foods you allow yourself to eat, makes a phenomenal difference in the quality of life we have. Before we discuss more on this, let's look into what are the Hows of unhealthy eating.

1) Eating Packaged foods: There are a couple of things to note about packaged foods, firstly, that almost no packaged food is alkaline, let me know if you find any. Secondly, they have so many ingredients that it crosses the line into acidic and maybe even into very acidic. As we know that alkaline foods are those that usually have a good amount of water content(the more the better) in them, do packaged foods have any water content at all?

2) Eating Junk: All food that we eat at restaurants is usually acidic, since almost everything has some percentage of oil in it.  But compared to packaged foods, this is slightly better (this doesn't make it alkaline), as it is freshly prepared, the alive component of the food is more than in the case of packaged foods which have been packed months ago. In case of fast food chains like KFC or McDonald's, they have everything prepared in some part of the country and shipped everywhere else where only the last phase i.e. frying in oil or heating is done. This means, it is NOT good for the body.

3) Eating Excess: Eating in excess any food, let me re-emphasize, any food, be it acidic or alkaline (except salads), is not good. Just because they are alkaline, doesn't mean you can eat hundreds of almonds, they have their limits. The advantage of eating alkaline is, firstly that it keeps you feeling light all the time, in addition to the fact that it is good for you. Secondly, that the food you eat doesn't create Candida and create the craving for food.

Now that we have the How part covered, let's look at What Now.

What Now?

If you're feeling drowsy and feel drained of energy, and you need a cup of coffee to stimulate you, the diet intake you have is probably acidic. The impact its got on your body today is toxic enough, if you continue to eat the way you do, the future doesn't look too good.

What's probably happening is that the body's alkaline reserves are being depleted, but there is no replenishment, so if that is the case, the body needs to get the alkalinity from somewhere to balance out the acidity, so it takes it from the bones. This is why people shrink when they grow old.

I don't want to do an entire health workshop here, but the way your body feels and responds to the foods you eat are the best guide to you eating journey.

Solution

Obviously every one of us is human and I just mentioned above that there are alkaline reserves in the body. There is a cheat day allowed if you eat alkaline throughout the week. This basically boils down to the 80:20 eating habits, eat alkaline 80% of the time and you can eat acid 20% of the time.

Just keep these tips in mind, make sure that you eat the cheat meals at good restaurants where the meals are freshly prepared. Don't eat packaged foods, they are absolute junk.

Zig Zag principle, if it's not your cheat day and you still feel like having something, you may just go and have like 2 spoonfuls of ice cream.

WARNING: If you are weak with foods like me, don't try this, you will most likely fail and binge eat.

I have a solution to the warning, if you want to accompany a couple of friends out, eat a big bowl of salad or something at home and then go out, you'll already be full, so the tendency to eat anything greatly reduces.

I'll sign off here. Please post any comments you may have. I'm always open to questions.

Regards,

Prithvi

Where Does It Go?

Often times, I get this thought "I don't have proper info on this." when I think about the alkaline diet. So I decided to make a post out of this so all the people having the same question will find some solutions and a place to talk about it.

Looking at history, anything that is new to this world has it's way of making it into the world. The order is somewhat like this.
1) Little or no info
2) More and more info
3) It's hip and everyone's doing it.

If you think about it, everything started like this, Copernicus said the Earth revolved around the Sun and people came to burn his house down, but he was right. Edison was dyslexic, but his inventions revolutionized the world.

Similarly, the alkaline diet is picking up and I find much more info on it than just 6 months ago. I created this website so I could bring all the people in India (& the world), could find resources on the alkaline diet. Since there virtually zero info out there, and my blog lists in the top 10 in a google search for alkaline diet, it's gained some popularity.

In essence, the point I'm making is that an alkaline diet makes you feel phenomenal, leaves you with lasting energy, keeps you light, dare I say more? If we get all these benefits, why don't most people follow it? The answer I think is below.

There are challenges with it, firstly, there is no authority on the alkaline diet, there are a few people here and there but no one who's dedicated his entire life to it and supports it.
Secondly, major health organisations don't mention anything about it. Just think about it, on one hand there are drug companies that have more than $1 trillion in business, on the other hand we have guys who want to eat healthy and stay healthy with no unity whatsoever. Therefore, clearly, the institutes of health make no mention of diets like AD.

Another challenge I face on a consistent basis is the lack of proper information, contradicting food charts, controversial doctors, are all that I find about it whenever I search it. But I follow it, because it works in my opinion.

Some photos of my consistently eating alkaline.

My Breakfast & Lunch

Notice that all the things in it are not alkaline, but overall, it makes great alkaline food and I feel phenomenally light for hours after eating. 

My dinner Brown rice with Oats soup.

This is my dinner, not everyday, but one of the dinners I eat. The rice is brown, but the Ulava charu (I don't know its literal translation,Oats Soup/ Oats Syrup, whatever you want to call it, tastes great.) Does the job of keeping the meal alkaline. 

Alkaline options are around us all the time, we just overlook them. If you put your mind to work, it will come up with things that you never knew existed. Simply put, whatever you focus on you will manifest in your life.

I went to a restaurant yesterday, I looked for alkaline options, I found cucumber salad, tomato curry and Tandoori Roti(flour item prepared in a hot charcoal oven) tomatoes are alkaline, cucumbers are alkaline, roti is made from unprocessesd flour and has no oil hence making it a great item to eat with something alkaline.

We can make alkaline choices, we needn't always eat alkaline, an 80/20 principle would serve us well. Eat alkaline 80% of the time, anything else 20% of the time. Just make sure this is interspersed, i.e. don't go on acid eating sprees and/or alkaline eating sprees.Remember, alkalinity can only save you if it is practiced regularly.

As always, I'm open to any questions you may have, whatever they may be. 

Cheers,

Prithvi