Our Longevity Diet

With intermittent fasting, we often emphasize that when you eat is more important than how much you eat, when it comes to losing weight and maintaining good health. This is no excuse to pig-out of course, but eating to satiety is fine within an alternate day fasting regime. But is that enough for a healthy diet?

Of course not. What you eat is very important to your overall health, regardless of the schedule or quantity of food you consume. Eat nothing but junk food, and no amount of fasting or calorie restriction will counteract the ill effects of unhealthy eating.

A Nutty Example

A recent study examined the effect of daily consumption of pistachios on gamma-tocopherol serum levels. Gamma-tocopherol is a form of vitamin E which has been shown to reduce the risk of lung and prostate cancers, and perhaps other forms of cancer. Other studies have shown pistachios to have a beneficial effect on heart health by lowering LDL cholesterol, as well.

In this study, half the participants added about two ounces of pistachios to their daily diet, for a period of four weeks, while the other half continued their normal diets. Cholesterol-adjusted serum gamma-tocopherol was significantly higher at the end of the period for those eating pistachios, compared to their own pre-diet baseline, while the control group showed no significant change.

Good Food

That is just one of the hundreds of studies we see each year that show how good foods have beneficial affects on our bodies. It’s not just pistachios — most nuts are healthful eating. Fresh vegetables are great for you too.

Meat has a bad reputation among many health-conscious folk today, but really, there is no other food that has as great a variety of beneficial nutrients. All meat has fat in it, and too much fat — especially the saturated fats common in meat — can cause problems. But those problems can be avoided.

If called upon to do so, your body will turn those fats into energy. The amount of meat in your diet should be in direct correlation with the amount of vigorous exercise you get. A healthy diet for one person is not always a healthy diet for someone with a different lifestyle.

Likewise, fruit can be packed with good minerals and vitamins, but eating too much fruit will be unhealthy for someone whose lifestyle if very sedentary, because most fruits also contain high sugar levels.

Balance

Intermittent fasting can help you lose weight, and also produces beneficial health effects that promote longevity. But a healthy diet must be part of your lifestyle, or all those beneficial effects will be countered by more powerful ill effects.

You need a diet balanced with good healthful fat, fiber, sugar/carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals in the right approximate proportions for your lifestyle. A ‘fat free’ diet would kill you if you could achieve it. Each of these things are a necessary part of a healthy diet — the quantities and proportions varying depending on how much energy you expend in your daily life.

Variety is not just the spice of life — it is the easiest path to a healthy diet. Eat as many different fresh and healthful foods as you can, with plenty of clean water. Your body will then be able to sort out what is best for you, and dispose of the rest. You can usually trust your appetite to lead you to the foods your body needs most — being aware that sugar and fats tend to be craved far in excess of their actual merit.

Strike the balance that is right for you — you will know by how it makes you feel when you are doing the right thing. There is no need for exact measurements of portions and strict rationing of certain foods. Just reduce the fat and sugars if you are sedentary, and eat a great variety of healthful foods. Drink plenty of clean water. Voila — you have a healthy diet.

Follow the link in the right hand column, just under our picture, labeled ‘April Meals’ and you will find listed our daily meals and snacks for the month. We are not fanatical about diet, but try to get varied and healthy foods. Isabel does all our cooking, and she doesn’t seem to know what a can-opener is for. Almost all the food is fresh, made from ’scratch’, and prepared with loving attention to detail.

Unfortunately for many people, such a time-consuming preparation is not always possible for them, and the talent to produce healthy and delicious foods may be lacking as well. I wish I could offer a simple solution for them, but there is really no substitution for quality. Restaurants are not the answer, even good restaurants. If your food was prepared the way Isabel prepares ours, it would take at least an hour from the time you placed your order before you could eat. Restaurants can rarely operate that way and stay in business; today’s lifestyles are too hectic to allow people the luxury.

Here in Mexico, people are accustomed to readily available fresh foods. Most people shop daily, buying the food a few hours before they consume it. That food was probably brought to the market early the same morning, and may only have been harvested the day before if it is local produce. Of course a wide variety of imported foods are also available, and we must assume those are not as fresh, but still they are kept in good condition.

It is easy to gain weight, even when fasting 24 out of every 48 hours, if you eat junk foods. A few years ago a man made himself sick (he developed a fatty liver) just by eating nothing but McDonalds food for 30 days. Fast food is like television, it caters to the mass appetite with trash. To say that ’sugar is bad’ or ‘fat is bad’ is to miss the point — a little sugar, and a healthy proportion of fat will do no harm — it is the overindulgence in these things that leads to obesity. Even a McMucker burger won’t kill you if you eat only one per month.

Food proportions are also an important factor. It is easy to over-eat, especially when the food tastes great. There are two techniques I’ve found helpful to overcome this natural tendency — first, drink plenty of water before your meal (and pretty much all other times too!) — second, eat slowly. Gobbling down food allows you to eat well past the ‘full’ feeling and into the unhealthy ’stuffed’ range. If you eat slowly you can enjoy the food better, and your body has time to develop the chemical signals that tell your brain you are full. Most weight-loss diets fail because they ordain fixed amounts of food, and leave you feeling unsatisfied. Intermittent fasting allows you eat until you are full (but not beyond!) and places no restrictions on what you eat, so long as it is healthful food.