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Author Topic:   "Natural" (plant-based) Health Solutions
Faith 
Suspended Member (Idle past 1444 days)
Posts: 35298
From: Nevada, USA
Joined: 10-06-2001


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Message 606 of 606 (831325)
04-15-2018 2:48 PM


Some boring musings about eating for health
Straight vegan is probably not going to be possible for me, but I'm downsizing my ambitions these days. I'm impressed with those who have clearly, even dramatically, improved their health on a whole foods vegan diet, and especially with Annette Larkins who looks half her age after doing raw vegan for most of that same length of time, eating from her own garden. I'm impressed but we're all different and I'm now convinced I can't do vegan let alone raw vegan. I do know though that such a diet change takes time, they say a couple years to go completely vegan, and I can't be sure where I'll be diet-wise in two years. (Probably dead for that matter. But whatever God wills in that regard.)
I can do vegetarian pretty well though. I need my dairy and eggs. And I've improved things in general because my dinner plate now has at least two nonstarchy vegetables and often more, plus a starchy one, often with something dairy like cream cheese in the mashed potatoes. I'm doing mostly cooked vegetables. Many of them are actually nutritionally better cooked than raw, and you can eat more of them because they get condensed in cooking, and if you puree them, for instance the carrots, you get even more nutrition.
A lot of carrot juice and combo juices were originally very high on my list of priorities but I've been finding that it's just too labor intensive to keep it up. If I got cancer and wanted to go the route so many do who are interviewed by Chris Wark, with the prodigious amounts of carrot juice and salads, I simply couldn't do it. You can't get the nutritional punch of carrot juice with pureed carrots because they are so dense you can't eat enough of them, but the best I can do is the best I can dp. I can do the juices every few days, up to about 40 ounces to last the day, which is about all my juicer can handle, and that's the best I can do.
Plain carrot juice is fine but carrot-celery-granny apple-beet-lemon juice is haute cuisine in my opinion. And foods that taste good matter a lot to me. The people who are really into food as medicine say you have to learn to eat for health even if you don't like the food. I guess I'm self-indulgent but I don't think I could do that even if my life literally depended on it. I'm doing my best to incorporate a lot more fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables, a LOT more, and have made big improvements in that direction, always making how it tastes high priority by looking up recipes to find out the best way to flavor them. I don't notice any particular health benefits yet except that I'm slowly losing weight, but eating this way has to be better for me whether I feel it or not.
I still have some meat from time to time and I don't think I'll stop doing that. And even on my all-veggie days I often use chicken broth for various purposes. Bulgur wheat pilaf for instance is a great main starch and it gets its flavor from chicken broth with onion and celery. And it needs yogurt to finish it off, so there's one way I can't do without dairy.
I found one store in my area that has Ezekiel 4:9 bread, after running across recommendations for it on all the health sites. It's a very heavy tasty bread that's found in the freezer at the store, that's based on the recipe in that Bible verse:
Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof...
(Other translations give "spelt" for "fitches.")
Since it's probably all that Ezekiel would have to eat for over a year it must have been formulated for maximum nutritional value.
I'm addicted to not-so-health-promoting sourdough bread unfortunately. But I like the Exekiel bread well enough for it to replace some of that bad habit.
Have been having steel cut oatmeal for breakfast for quite a while now, with some ground flax seed thrown in, and I like it, but I got a mad craving for eggs in the last few days, so that's what breakfast was this morning. With Ezekiel toast spread with cream cheese. I'm learning not to see these deviations from the ideal health plan as setbacks. I no longer think they are. I'm doing fine. Most of my food these days is in the "ideal" category, and many of my old habits are good stuff in their own right anyway. It would be different if my cravings were for a whole bag of potato chips or a pan of brownies. I haven't had that kind of craving in a long time.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

  
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