Alkalinity Enriched Life

Continuing on from last week's post, I want to write more on this topic of Healthier, and how eating alkaline or following even a couple of alkaline practices can keep you in far better health than average normal people.

Consider this, average normal people, eat whatever they've been eating traditionally, occasionally they try out some new foods, and reject most of them, have almost no healthy food practices because they don't know what health means and what will add to health or take away from health.

Compare this to a person who's done a little bit of research on the alkaline diet, follows a couple of healthy food practices, like having a glass of wheatgrass drink every day, having a 500ml of water immediately after waking up, avoiding fluid intake 30mins before and after food intake.

The effect of all these practices are never seen in the short term, looking back at my own life, after I started following these health principles(I'm no expert by any standard), I've almost never fallen sick, I have energy to carry out most of my activities, I feel better and less lethargic. So, 10 years into such healthy practices, a healthy eater will be on a path far different from that of a non healthy eater.

Non healthy eaters never look up health, they goto a doctor when they're sick, the doctor gives them some pills, they take the pills, the problem goes away. But never actually ponder on the fact of why they had the problem in the first place and why is such medication necessary. Diabetes is the best example, most people think diabetes is hereditary, diabetes isn't hereditary, what you eat isn't healthy so you got diabetes, nobody ever told you how to eat healthy so you never got to know.

Now that you've read this post, you have a better grasp of what will happen if you follow alkaline eating and how alkalinity enriches your life.

Make sure you watch the video below, it's an investment of time in health. You'll gain some interesting insights.

This video is interesting and reveals some secrets regarding placements of items in super markets. The supermarkets place items based on profitability. This is good info if you want to know how to shop better.

Cheers,

Prithvi

Health Fanatic Vs Healthy Person

The title may confuse you a bit, probably because you may think they are the same thing.Well, to clearly demarcate the territories of the people mentioned above, I've written this post.

Let me first describe each of the above people and later get into what are the pros and cons.

Firstly, a health fanatic is a person who puts paramount importance on health, he strikes every t, dots every i. He knows health inside and out, follows it and preaches it. He's so much into health and taking good care of the body, he thinks it to be the way it is and feels that it is the only way to live a quality life.

Please bear in mind that there is NO right or wrong way.There are just things you do and consequences to that.

Now, let's get into a general healthy person. A healthy person (from the perspective of the alkaline diet), is a person who has a couple of glasses of wheatgrass everyday, does a little bit of breathing exercises to aid digestion, follows many rules of the diet. But he gives himself a break on a one day of the week, or on a meal per week. (People who follow all rules are health fanatics, you qualify as a healthy person if you follow some of the rules and overall feel better)

In essence, this person is healthy, he falls sick far less than any of his other non healthy eaters, lives a lighter and higher quality life, feels enriched.

Now that you get the picture of who is who. Let's get down to more details. Without the shadow of a doubt, both of these people have far higher quality lives than regular people who don't follow any sort of healthy eating whatsoever, but for our benefit, we need to know what category we'd like to fall into and what benefits it has.

A health fanatic will live a good quality life, these people are few in number, the circumstances that health fanatics require are not available for most normal people, people who're extremely busy, and sometimes even wealthy, people who can afford to have healthy food prepared all the time, are usually the ones who will fall into this category. This is the ideal of healthy eating.

Coming to healthy people, following some of the rules has brought a higher quality life to them, while they don't have all the opportunities to have a perfectly healthy life, or they don't make use of all of them, they feel alive and have a lot more energy than most ordinary people.

Since the alkaline diet or diets in particular are relatively new (less than 50 years old), there has been no long term study of generations together where there has been a higher life expectancy. But it makes more logical sense to think that people who take better care of themselves will live a longer life, how much longer? Well, that's a question that has no answer as of today, but we should have more data in the future.

All I want you to take away from this post is, which category do you fall into? Which do you want to fall into?

After you choose a category, live life free of the guilt of choosing the category and live life happily.

Cheers,

Prithvi

Support System

The challenge that most people have(myself included) is that nobody will support your diet, or your exercise, or anything new. Let me give you an example , you want to eat clean, but your roommates(family/friends) probably don't want to change their eating habits and want you to follow the same habits as before so it doesn't create differences. They may not do it consciously, but overall, their attitude will be similar to this.

Now, we come to the important point, what can you do about it? Just like in everything in life, you need to get yourself through the initial stages of hurdles, the first thing to keep in mind when you are faced with hurdles is that they are going to come up. Expecting that they are going to be in your path will get you prepared to overcome them.Knowing you're going to face hurdles will keep you strong. 

Why you will or will not follow through all comes down to the one thing. The state in  which you are at the the time of the action. Let's say you're pumped up, you won't even feel the need to eat some junk. You're probably doing something productive anyways and you're so engrossed in it, you forget about eating and by the time you should eat, your mind is in the right state. But let's say you're dull, maybe you had a bad day at work and you don't feel like going and making the salad. What will usually end up happening on the initial stages is you'll probably eat some cheat meal. Why I say initial stages is because after it becomes a habit, you'll find yourself doing it unconsciously. But it's the first 30 days that make all the difference.

This post is small, it's meant to keep you on track. Knowing about the alkaline diet will not make you healthy, implementing it will. You must focus your will power on making the alkaline diet a part of your life. Watch the video posted below, it may give you the necessary focus to take the action needed.

What I want you to take away from this post is
1) Nobody will help you unless you help yourself.
2) Habits are like railway tracks, they take time to form, but once formed, they will take you where you want to go.

Be sure to watch the video of this man who had an encounter with death and survived. It's a very motivating video.

Habits, Food Habits

Reflecting on my habit of eating a salad every single day without fail, I thought "What is it that makes me eat this salad every day?", the first answer was, "Because my mom made it.", but after a little more thought, it dawned on me that I put things in perspective a long time before I actually ate that meal.

If you eat clean, your blood sugar remains stable, what this means is that there are no sudden drops or spikes in blood sugar. You know those sudden cravings you have to eat something, mostly junk? That's because of a drop in blood sugar. If you're diabetic, a drop in blood sugar is a very serious thing, you could faint on the street if you're low on blood sugar. Coming back to our main point, clean eating maintains our blood sugar, and you won't get those cravings. If you've eaten some McDonald's or KFC kind of junk, there are high chances that you feel these kind of cravings often, watch the documentary 'Supersize Me' for more info on this.

So, in the cycle, you eat clean, you don't feel the craving to eat junk, that leads you to eat clean and so on and so forth. Similarly, you eat junk, the candida yeast in your body crave sugar, you feel like eating junk again and again and so on and so forth. To break this cycle, you need some kind of external force, this usually comes in some sort of realization or someone that you meet, or something that you watch or read(like this blog post!!!!). When such an event occurs, you must take a decision, a decision to focus on health. If this is the first time you've done so, it will be difficult, but it's the first step. Take it with the faith that you can achieve whatever it is that you want.

This is the seed of a habit, a habit that forge a better life for you. "Habits are like railway tracks, they take time to make, but once made, they take you where you want" - Patricia Fripp. To make it simple, just start with one meal per day as a salad. Small bowl or big bowl, you decide, but start a salad, the advantage here is that you don't put on any weight whatsoever regardless of the quantity. Salads feel better on the stomach, they are light, they aid digestion, even if you eat junk for another meal, a salad will facilitate smooth digestion and assimilation. Try it, it's an amazing feeling.

This post was to make you start a habit, If you start any one habit that creates better health for you, then I'm satisfied. Small habits are things like, taking 2 deep breaths after each meal to send more oxygen into the body to speed up digestion and keep the brain fresh after a heavy meal. Another small habit could be having 500ml of water first thing every morning when you wake up because the body is most dehydrated at the time.

Possibilities are countless, but start small, and keep at it.

Regards,

Prithvi

Alkaline Bananas: A Superb Snack

Woah!, I was just looking at the calendar to see how many days are left in May and I saw another whole week. 5 Fridays in this May, that means 5 posts. As you know, I keep alkaline eating easy, I don't go into complex exotic recipes involving half a dozen fruits half of which you won't find in India and the remaining half for which you don't know the Indian term. My ideas are fairly simple, primarily because, if they weren't, I wouldn't be using them myself.(lazy me ;)).

Having said that, let me take my favorite fruit of all time for this week's alkaline food, banana.The fruit that is available throughout the year, is cheap to buy. The benefits go on and on, but let's take a closer look into how we can use it as part of our alkaline diets. As an important note, bananas have a high glycemic index, what this means is that the sugar(glucose) content is high in them, this causes the sugar to be absorbed into the blood stream faster and causes a spike in the blood sugar levels. This isn't very good, because it is best to have a sustained blood sugar level without fluctuations. If a fruit/vegetable has a low glycemic index, it will get absorbed into the blood gradually and keeps the body stable. If you've ever felt a sudden spike in energy after eating some junk like McDonald's or KFC or something like that, this is what it is. Fluctuating blood sugar causes sudden feeling for a craving, sometimes in the middle of the night, or at odd times, this won't happen if you eat healthy foods and maintain the alkaline balance.

To be clear, a banana and a McDonald's meal can in no way be compared, in other words, don't worry about a high glycemic index as it is a natural sugar and as a part of an alkaline diet, it will blend in perfectly. (If you plan to go on a banana diet for an entire week, that maybe a different story ;)).

3 Ways we can use Bananas in our alkaline diets are
1) Fruit: As simplistic as it sounds, bananas and a couple of almonds make for a terrific snack during the evening, I usually feel hungry at about 7pm, I grab a banana, grab a couple of almonds and I needn't worry about dinner till about 9:30.

2) Banana Sundae:  Typically, sundae is a word used to describe an ice-cream sundae, but in our case, we are referring to an entirely alkaline dish. Sliced bananas, served with honey on top make excellent dessert. Slice the bananas, place them horizontally on a plate and pour honey over them and it is ready to eat.

 3) Salad: You may know from my previous posts that I mix and match fruits and veggies in my salads. Well, a banana is no exception, multiple times per week I add bananas to my salads and it makes for an awesome salad. Bananas, being sweet, neutralize the taste of any non sweet alkaline foods and make the salad palatable.

This concludes my post on bananas and their alkalinity. Although bananas are not highly alkaline, focus on natural foods is my priority as I believe that nature has made food available to us if we just look.

Give me your thoughts, I want to know. What do you want to hear about? Post in the comments.

Cheers,

Prithvi

Apple: The Alkaline Fruit

Continuing strong with our articles about specific alkaline foods, the fruit for today is Apple. After having discussed 2 veggies over the past 2 weeks, I find that a fruit is the necessary sweet required to maintain the balance.

Apples are amazing fruits, I like many things about them. Firstly  that they are sweet, secondly that they have almost no seeds (seeds are in the center and can be thrown away), thirdly, they make excellent additions to salads and are my favourite.

Here are 3 fantastic ways to use apples in your alkaline diet, again, keep in mind that these ideas are for daily usage, not to give you an exotic usage idea that you will never use, the objective is to eat alkaline.
1) Cut Slices
2) Snack
3) Salad Additive

Although some of the items may seem redundant, bear with me, they are awesome.

1) Cut Slices: At a pH of 8, apples are amazing for a dish when cut and served with some chat masala(ground spices powder). While an apple alone may not serve to be a meal, it certainly plays a role in making a good portion of the meal.

2) Snack: If you're familiar with my eating schedule, you'd know that I eat a small portion of salad for breakfast, a large portion for lunch and brown rice with curry for dinner. Having lunch at 1-2pm and having dinner at 9pm creates quite a large gap. I find myself getting very hungry during the 6-7pm time. To get over the feeling, I simply eat some almonds(5 max), or bite on an apple. Unlike watermelons, apples can be eaten any time without the need for a big cutting procedure. An apple serves as a snack very well.

3) Salad Additive: A salad without apples is incomplete for me, I rarely have salads without apples. Apples form a significant portion of my salads every single day. I like all alkaline foods, but the problem with cucumbers and neutral tasting foods is that they don't satisfy the taste buds at all, in that case, I add something like an apple or dates to make the salad taste better.

This post is a quick read, ask questions if you've got any.

Apples are alkaline, and are great to eat.

Your questions are welcome.

Stay Alkaline, Stay Healthy.

Cheers,

Prithvi

Cucumbers: The Alkaline Food

Continuing with the theme of the month of alkaline recipes, the veggie* for this week is the cucumber. Alkaline inside and out, cucumbers make for awesome alkaline foods. They are light, fill your tummy and they are alkaline, what more could you ask for? Well, before you say 'taste', let me accept the fact that cucumbers don't taste all that great, but they don't taste all that bad either, they are simply neutral.

Let's dive into ways we can use cucumbers in our alkaline diets.
1) Cut Slices
2) Cut Slices in Salads
3) Cut Slices as a side dish

Yes, you read it right. The famous cucumber is best used as cut slices. Let's go into some details about how we can use them to the best possible way.

1) Cut Slices: The most common and easy way to eat a cucumber is to peel it, slice it and serve on a neat plate. It will be ready in 2 mins, best for a snack, in the initial days, cucumbers were my breakfast and lunch. Over time, newer dishes have come up in my menu. If the plain cucumber is too bland for your taste, add some chat masala (spicy & tangy powder), although chat masala has non alkaline ingredients, since we are adding them in minuscule quantities, it's alright.

2) Cut Slices in Salads: As you may remember from some of the pictures of my salads, cucumbers are a daily feature in my salads, sliced up a little differently than usual, cucumbers make a great filling, they are cheap to buy and one cucumber is often enough to fill up nearly half of the salad.  The important thing to remember if you're one of the people that can't eat cucumbers directly, make sure you add some fruit that can add some sweetness to the salad to neutralize taste factor of the cucumber. This is a big one for me.

3) Cut Slices as a Side Dish: Cucumbers are present in every restaurant, and many times they are just placed as starters before the meal and the best part is that many times they don't even charge for them. A note to over eaters, cucumbers are the way to go if you want to eat less of junk. You have only 1 stomach, you can either fill it up with salads, with soup, with starters, with biryani*, or with ice cream. But the end result is that your stomach will be full after a while, and if it's full with cucumbers, you've put on no weight whatsoever, if you're full with biryani, you've put on 1500 calories.

Note: The satiety reflex, the reflex of the stomach that tells you you're full is triggered faster when you eat healthy, That means that if you're eating healthy foods, you will eat less and still have all the energy you need.

True, the list above is small, but  it's not list that makes the difference, it is the application of the list in your daily life. I eat cucumbers in the way I mentioned above, it makes a huge difference to the quality of my life. I feel phenomenal, very necessary element to balance out acidic foods.

Keep this in mind while using cucumbers from now on.

Please post your experiences with cucumbers, and let me know about anything you'd like to hear more about.

Regards,

Prithvi

* in India, we refer to cucumbers and tomatoes as vegetables.
* Biryani is steamed flavoured rice that often includes Non Veg.

Tomatoes Alkaline Possibilities

With the beginning of a new month, let's go deeper into specific fruits and veggies that we can use every single day in some form or another.It's never possible to continuously create new recipes and try new veggies, we need to find something that works and repeat it over time. For the first week of May, let's pick tomatoes, tomatoes are everywhere, they are ubiquitous, they've been here for as long as we can remember, and will stay for as long as we live. Best part, they are alkaline.

Today, I'll delve into 3 different ways I use tomatoes in my alkaline lifestyle, how tomatoes are playing their part in my alkaline eating.

The 3 basic ways we can use tomatoes in our Indian alkaline diets are
1) Curry
2) Juice
3) Chutney

1) Tomato Curry: Simplest and probably the most common way of using tomatoes alone to create a curry, tomato curry is easy to make(no discussions about recipes here today sorry ;) ), tomato curry in itself can be a dish, it can be eaten with rice and with rotis (disc shaped item made of wheat). It tastes good if the ingredients have been added correctly, best of all it is light. After eating tomato curry, it fills you up, but keeps you feeling neutral, it doesn't make you feel drowsy. This is an excellent dish to add to your diet.

2) Tomato Juice: A much rarer use of tomatoes is tomato juice.Juices play an important role in the alkaline diet, essentially since we believe in a 70% water rich diet. Please note that water rich foods ≠ water, overall foods that have more water content in them qualify. Tomatoes fit the bill, tomato juice, with any additives of any sort, has excellent benefits, the best of the benefits is serving as a replacement to other beverages. Tea/Coffee/Soft Drinks/Alcohol/Milk Shakes, none of them are alkaline, there are alkaline alternatives which we will discuss in another post, but for now, remember that tomato juice is one of them.

3) Tomato Chutney: The 2nd most common chutney after coconut chutney is tomato chutney. It is similar to a curry but it is used with breakfast items like idly, dosas, wadas. While a chutney is just a side dish and doesn't classify as a main dish, our objective is to ensure that most of our diet is alkaline, small changes like chutney, beverage etc go a long way in improving the quality of our diets.

There are several ways of using tomatoes in our alkaline diets, start using these 3 and we'll add more later.
I'd love to hear about your recipes and experiments with the alkaline diet. Post your thoughts below in the comments.

Regards,

Prithvi

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.

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