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Any specific diet path?

Posted September 15th, 2009 by David Yoakum

Does anyone have any experience-based information with specific diet paths-- Ayurvedic, Dr Abravenel's Body Type Diet, etc.

 

It's kind of a maze getting through what is factual, what is influenced by culture, etc.

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This is what works for me. . .

Posted September 15th, 2009 by Charles Bowling

 

Hi David,
 
Describing the dietetic miasma as a maze, is probably an understatement. When i met some vegetarians over 40 years ago, i asked them why they did it. They said,"We love animals." Hmmm, i thought, "I love animals too. I wonder if i can do that also?" So i gave it a week's trial, and never went back to carnivore status.
 
But, and  this is a big but, it's not wise to drop meat from the average American diet of french fries and milkshakes. So right away i scanned the available dietetic options, each of which was made up of a bunch of claims and suppositions. Happily i already understood, that unless someone's worldview (and the diet that results from it) is based on the play of the opposites, that it was not for me. (Even AQAL is based on the play of the opposites.)
 
So i put on my research hat and studied. Basically the theory is that foodstuffs do one of two things when they enter the body: cause expansion or contraction. The theory further holds that the body seeks a sort of homeostasis, where expansion and contraction are more or less equal.
 
But rather than expand on this rather complicated theory, my 40+ years of experience with it can be summed up rather easily. The secret of this diet is found in whole grains. Whole grains are to a healthy diet what compost is to gardening. It's the 50% rule. If 50% of your soil is compost, a gardener can get by with most anything else and produce wonderful results. Similarly if 50% of the diet is comprised of whole grains, one can get by with almost anything else.
 
Why a whole grain? It's because the whole grain contains both the inner and outer, the brown part has not been ground off and discarded, in favor of a white inner core. This is the rough equivalent of trying to produce a viable human embryo with only an egg and no sperm. Both are required.
 
100 years ago, such a diet was common. But its origins are much older than that. It can be traced back to the gunas of India, rajasic, tasmasic, and sattvic. In fact it's fair to say that this is the diet on which human beings evolved. It's only in recent times (100 years or so) when it has been discounted or perverted .
 
Now it happens i'm a vegetarian; but as much as i love the animals, it would be a great leap for a whole culture to shift to a non-carnivorous diet. So in cultural terms, a diet that has at least 50% whole grains, and views carnivorous products as a sort of condiment, seems to me to be a wise and fair compromise. The alternative is to have a diet where meats are at the center place; obviously this is not only very hard on the animals, (and the environment) but is likely to have a deleterious effect on human health, especially as it concerns cardiovascular disease, the putative cause of many deaths.
 
Warmly,
Charles
41N54'51' 88W18'31"
 

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individuality

Posted September 15th, 2009 by Ambo Suno

Hi, David. I too have gotten moved about the diet and fitness board a lot - maybe a little like the shiny orbs that are sent about in a simple pinball machine (Have you ever seen one? Smiling.) I've tried a lot of stuff, and at the moment I don't have "a diet" to present. What I'm doing now seems to be working better for me and my discipline has reached a higher level.

I think there are some basic principles, some of which have been mentioned by Charles and recently Robb. I'll just add two thoughts that come to mind for me.

One has to do with the metaphor/reality that "You are what you eat." Similarly, it has been suggested, that you are what you do and you are what you think. So apparently how your, our, intentions, images, and visions of life form, from outside guidance or in some other creative process, will affect what you eat and do and decide to eat and do. Obviously, a traditional yogic attitude will manifest differently than a distinctly powered weightlifting attitude. There are obviously so many different factors in this that momentarily or for periods of exploration your outlook/inlook might lead you to different regimens.

Another thought has to do with commonality and individuality. Some of the good principles that have been mentioned already and that you have heard of already probably represent and fit quite well huge areas of commonality. One of my inadvertent perspectives and interests suggests that we many are highly individual. More so than we might think. Metabolically, energetically, characterologically, allergenically,  and so on. How people metabolize different compounds in different ways always surprises me. Significant variations in people's reports of how they feel and what they experience from ingesting the same material is usually an amazement for me.

In a highly complex AQAL world, that of course includes different configurations of type and perhaps destiny and fate there is so much variation. So I suppose this reality of individuality that interacts with commonality suggests that one has to experiment, explore, dare to not know for awhile. It appears that you are young so, lucky you, you have a lot of time to discover from others and discover for yourself. Sometimes that may mean rediscovering the wheel - and you'll really understand about rolling. (This thought may be partly a self-justification for my own history of resistance to trends, temporary knowledge and wisdom - plenty of whoopses and inefficiencies this way, and maybe not necessary [tentative smile].)

These comments don't exactly part the clouds, do they. Sorry - sort of - smiling.

ambo