Introduction
Patients with chronic pain need a high-protein-intake diet, avoiding carbohydrate-induced episodes of hypoglycemia and weight gain. Many serious conditions and diseases, for example obesity, congestive heart failure, and renal failure, have their own recommended diet. This post is to offer a diet specifically targeting pain.
Please consider this crazy diet!
Keep reading, even though the Optimum Diet is vegan.
You can easily research this online, for example this, selected randomly. Search for “diet” vs. “chronic pain”. You will find there are no diseases associated with eating healthy plant foods. Meat eating is associated with degenerative diseases and aging. Diet and food choices are what have the greatest effect on your health. To optimize your health, you must optimize your diet. Take control of your diet and control your health and your life.
In order to benefit from good nutrition, you will have to adopt a new way of thinking about food. If you are suffering, please accept that you need a diet that will best support recovery from illness and maintenance of health. This leads to the best possible energy, athletic performance, mental power and endurance, prevention of degenerative disease. And it keeps us young.
Overview of a good diet
A good diet will include a wide variety of vegetables and fruits with enough complex carbohydrate to maintain your weight. These include beans of all varieties, grains with the exception of modern high-gluten wheat, nuts, seeds, winter squash, and tubers such as potatoes and yams. It should be about 80% raw and 20% cooked by volume. It will include plenty of seeds and nuts used in various ways to provide essential fatty acids and calories. It could include a moderate amount of extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil.
You will only combine foods with similar digestive characteristics, not combine fruits with vegetables. Some recipe books include food combination charts.
There are restrictions: you should never use transfats such as margarine, Crisco, heat extracted oils, or partially hydrogenated oils. Never use refined sugar, white flour and white flour products. Use very little honey or maple syrup.
When to eat
Surprise! Because the hormones stimulating metabolism and energy production are highest in the morning, most of our food intake should be in the morning. The body normally goes through a cleansing/restoration phase at night during sleep if the digestive system is relatively empty then. So all you insomniacs – take note!
Make gradual changes
Stopping sugar, caffeine, meat & dairy “cold turkey” will result in withdrawal symptoms lasting about two weeks. Symptoms will include such things as feeling faint, headaches, food cravings, poor concentration, and mood problems. Some people assume these symptoms mean they must eat meat; their bodies need it. Not true! The symptoms are simply associated with metabolic improvements and will shortly go away.
Why not eat meat?
Meat is very high in phosphorus which must be expelled from the body as calcium phosphate, causing calcium loss. The amino acid mix in meats leaves a metabolic acid burden reducing cellular efficiency. Meat is rich in long chain fatty acids which stiffen cell membranes and reduce cellular efficiency. Long chain fatty acids in meat require energy to split them into smaller fatty acids to use as fuel. The fatty acids in meat also leave an acid residue, which also decreases cellular efficiency.
Meat contains too much protein and the body cannot use amino acids for fuel except by changing them into sugar. This is an inefficient way of producing energy. It releases ammonia which is very toxic and must be detoxified; this also depletes your energy. It causes urea formation which uses up energy when expelling it from the body. Meats have a concentration of environmental toxins up to 200,000 times that found in plants. The metabolic acid load from eating meats uses calcium from our bones, which depletes the calcium.
All of the above factors decrease cellular efficiency. The result? Less energy, less endurance, a prolonged recovery time from injury or exertion. And, environmentally, meat is seriously damaging to the planet.
Why not eat dairy?
Humans are the only mammals that continue to drink milk after being weaned. We are also the only mammals who drink the milk of another species.
All the calcium in milk products is combined with phosphorus and is expelled from your body as calcium phosphate. The proteins in milk and milk products result in a metabolic acid load which is excreted from the body with calcium – depleting calcium from the bones. The metabolic acid load decreases cellular efficiency. Milk protein is associated with causing allergies. The long chain fatty acids in milk cause the same problem as those in meat. Environmental toxins concentrated in the animal will come out in the milk.
Resources
Many, many vegan recipe books are available in book stores; look through them to find ones of interest. Most of the recipes will probably have to be modified to comply with the Optimum Diet principles.
The book Juicing Therapy by Bernard Jensen. Juicing is very good for making your cells work.
The China Study Cookbook by LeAnne Campbell
Various DVDs and books in the series Fat, sick and nearly dead – this, for example.
Various DVDs and books in the series Forks over knives – this, for example.
Read this, try the questionnaire, see if you might benefit. The article is from practicalpainmanagement.com
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