Choosing Your Food & Timing Meals

Diet is undoubtedly an important part of your health. But, diet is MUCH more than just eating vegetables or meat.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

If you are like most readers of this publication, you care deeply about your health and are interested in trying new ways to improve it. One of the most commonly discussed causes of poor health, and paths to good health is diet.

Diet means many things to many people.

Growing up, whenever I heard a friend or family say “I’m on a diet” it usually meant that they were trying to limit their food consumption or fast for some period of time.

This was all I associated the word “diet” with before adulthood. Even to this day, if someone in my family says they are “on a diet” another will respond with “don’t starve yourself.”

In reality, diet is much more than eating or not eating. At the most basic level, diet is deciding which foods you will consume.

After figuring out where your food comes from, you are left with deciding when to eat.

Once you’ve chosen the ‘when,’ you need to decide within which time interval (or time of day).

Once you’ve understood the importance of time, you will then need to consider the environment within which you eat.

Finally, we learn that the manner in which we eat and prepare our bodies for food is just as important as what we are eating.

These are some of the most important things to consider when choosing a diet.

What To Eat

If I were trying to dumb things down, I would say something like “just eat meat” or “vegetarian is the way.” To be sure, both of these diets are far superior to what is commonly referred to as the Standard American Diet (SAD). It is no wonder that advocates tout health benefits of both carnivore and vegetarian diets.

Although I do not support either diet as a long-term solution, if I had to pick…it’s carnivore, no question.

I’m not a fan of standing on a soapbox and telling people which specific foods they should eat. In fact, the more I learn from the medical arts, the less I am certain about dietary recommendations.

Especially after learning about temperaments and the disposition of an individual’s physiology, I am increasingly certain that there are no one-size-fits-all diets.

The Law of Natural Healing | Part 2

Although I hesitate to recommend specific foods, I am more confident in telling you how to choose your foods.

1. Eat food which is close to you in space and time. The closer the better.

   1. This includes eating foods which are in season, and harvested as close to your home as possible.

   2. If you cannot find foods close to you, make sure they are in the same latitude. An area that mimics the season, and the phase of the solar cycle.

   3. Local is the name of the game. Good for your health, and your farmers.

2. Eat food which are as close to wild as possible.

   1. Everything from regenerative crop, to pasture-raised chicken, to wild caught game.

   2. The more natural (wild) the environment of the food, the more nutritionally and energetically balanced the food will be.

   3. Even if you like your carnivore diet, I don’t believe eating imprisoned animals force fed corn-slop would make healthy meat.

   4. For instance, I am learning to hunt because I believe it will provide the best meat for my family.

3. Allow the older cultures to inform your diet.

   1. For instance, I have learned from my own and other cultures the importance of preparing your food, preparing your digestive tract for the meal to come, and how to close out the eating process after your meal is done.

      1. In India people eat what’s called Mukhwas after their meals. This is a sweet, seedy, and herbal mixture used as a digestive aid and breath freshener.

   2. More recent works from the likes of Dr. Gundry only echo these practices. Gundry, for example, claims that consumption of poorly prepared legumes are one of the culprits in chronic and cardiovascular disease.

      1. I have not confirmed this myself, but I have no reason to doubt it.

      2. Many cultures insist on extensive prep for foods like cabbage, lentils, beans, etc. This isn’t a coincidence.

4. Select food for nutritional density, especially when it concerns trace minerals.

   1. Most people are deficient in basic minerals like Magnesium and Potassium. This is why I am cognizant of the salt we use in our food. Mineral salts, because of their density and diversity of ions, are exceptionally good at maintaining low blood pressure. As good as most prescription drugs.

Foundational Health Strategy

These are just some of the important considerations, but I think you get the gist.

Timing Your Meals

I’m going to tell you something that deep down you probably already knew, but the “diet gurus” have led you to forget over all the hype between vegetables vs meat.

When you eat is probably more important than what you eat.

There are many ways to skin this cat.

First of all, one of the interesting elements of paleo life and diets is the timing of their major meals. You eat with the sunrise, and the sunset. I’m sure there is some variation from culture to culture, but I think the point is well worth considering.

Why are these times of day important?

For starters, these are the times in which we receive the most abundance of red light from the Sun. Red light (specifically around 670nm wavelength light) is one of the most potent stimulators of our mitochondria.

A simple experiment from Powner & Jeffrey demonstrates that people who were exposed to 15 minutes of 670nm light before their meal, had a 27% lower blood sugar elevation across the 2 hours which followed.

That is a massive reduction, simply from 15 minutes of flashlight on your back.

An easy way to apply this knowledge is to make sure you spend at least 15 minutes outdoors during the rising/setting sun. Then, enjoy your meal.

The other aspect of this worth considering is minimizing digestion before sleep. Most people should be sleeping a couple of hours after sunset. It’s best to enter this phase of your day with minimal residual food that’s left to digest.

Why?

Having food off-cycle from the sun-lit day disrupts your body’s internal clocks. This disruption confuses your body’s clock, and leads to dysregulation of metabolism. The end-result will be poor sleep, weight gain, and a stress response. Once in a while won’t kill you. But, add these up across years…and your asking for insulin resistance amongst other chronic problems.

It isn’t just negative consequences which we are trying to avoid. According to the authors, several other benefits have been shown in clinical trials:

• Diabetics who restricted eating between 8AM-6PM naturally reduced their daily caloric intake by 28%

• Patients who only ate between 8AM-4PM lost as much weight as someone who is on a calorie-restricted diet

Intermittent Fasting

When talking about timing of meals, we naturally stumble upon the concept of time-restricted feeding, or intermittent fasting (IF).

Like some of the trials referenced above, this is a feeding pattern in which you designated anywhere from 6-10 hours within which you will eat. The remaining hours of the day are fasted. For instance, you may eat only between 8AM-4PM.

In my opinion, IF has some benefits which are probably a combination of calorie reduction, hormonal re-balancing, and circadian re-alignment. These are very important upsides of IF.

Importantly, an IF schedule can be designed to align with a more “paleo” feeding pattern. Major meals around sunrise and sunset. However, problems can arise when your IF schedule deviates from the seasons and changing solar cycle. Especially as it pertains to hormonal balance and circadian alignment.

Increasingly, I am of the opinion that IF is beneficial insofar as it mirrors the habits necessary to maintain optimal hormonal and circadian balance.

Preparing the Body

Photo by Tim-Oliver Metz on Unsplash

The final layer I mentioned above, which admittedly I have a far less ‘scientific’ grasp on is how we prepare ourselves for meals. In part, this is because it is quite new to me as well.

There may be more value in exploring traditional culinary books on this topic, rather than any scientific article.

Preparing the body can mean a couple of things. For instance, one way we can prepare is by choosing digestive aids to consume before, during or after meals. As mentioned above, Mukhwas is one such option.

Others include fermented foods like pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, or natto. Fermented foods provide a plethora of mineral, enzymatic, and digestive benefits. Whether they aid in the release of our digestive juices, or provide digestive juices (acids) themselves. They can help make meals more palatable and enjoyable. List goes on.

Finally, we need to prepare more than just our gut. For instance, we also need to prepare our minds. Your state of mind matters when eating food, even if its just by hormonal impact.

The most basic way this can manifest is under stress/anxiety. You don’t want to be eating your meals under the influence of abnormally high circulating cortisol and other stress hormones. Not only is this poor-habit forming, but also bad for digestion and storage of the food you would consume.

Another thing to consider is the food itself. How does it look? How does it smell? How does it make you feel?

Is your body & mind telling you to reconsider eating this food? In this place and time?

I hope by the end of this article you can start to see how “diet” is much more than just restricting calories and sticking to one food group.

This is not to say that those who are unhealthy will not notice a benefit from those 2 simple solutions. They most certainly will.

But, once you’ve accomplished your initial health goals - what’s next?

How will you further improve your health? Do you even want to?

Ultimately, these are personal choices. I am not here to tell anyone that they must do one thing or the other. I’ve seen enough people happily destroy their health, as long as they get the hit they are looking for.

I am more interested in the ideas and strategies which lead to long-term health optimization.

---