Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! (10 page)

Have you ever been swept away by a toxic lover who sucked you dry?
I have. Bad men used to light me up like a Christmas tree. If I had a choice between the rebel without a cause and a nice guy in a sweater and outdoorsy shoes, you can imagine who got my phone number.

Rebels and rogues are smooth (and somewhat untamed); they know the headwaiters at the best steak houses, ride fast European motorcycles, and start bar fights in your honor. In short, the rebel makes you feel really alive! It’s all fun and games until he screws your best friend or embezzles your life’s savings.

You may be asking yourself how my pathetic dating track record relates to your diet. Simple. The acid—alkaline balance, which relates to the chemistry of your body’s fluids and tissues as measured by pH. The rebel/rogue = acid. The nice solid guy = alkaline.

The solid guy gives you energy; he’s reliable and trustworthy. The solid guy calls you back when he says he will. He helps you clean your garage and does yoga with you. He’s even polite to your family no matter how whacked they are, and has the sexual stamina to rock your world.

While the rebel can help you let your hair down, too much rebel will sap your energy. In time, a steady rebellious diet burns you out. But when we’re addicted to bad boys (junk food, fat,
sugar, and booze), nice men (veggies and whole grains) seem boring. Give them a chance!

The cells of your body love the Alkaline Solid Guy, too. When your cells are at peace with their surrounding environment, they receive nourishment and release waste with ease. As a result, you experience a beautiful relationship with health. But when you eat, drink, think (and date) crap, your cells and inner environment become polluted.

The secret to super-sexy health is a slightly alkaline pH. It’s that simple and that complex. Simple because the food you eat for optimum health is relatively accessible, inexpensive, and requires little preparation. Complex because we’re all carrying around a lot of psychological food baggage that makes changing ingrained habits challenging.

Know this, sweetheart: Your diet and lifestyle choices will either help or harm your delicate pH balance and your overall health. In this chapter you learn how to groove in the optimum health zone. Grab the reins of alkalinity. Yee haw!

pH Scale

If you’re like me,
you ditched high school chemistry in favor of flirting and bumming cigs (acidic). Luckily, I went back to the books to learn what I missed. The pH of a substance tells you how acid or alkaline (basic) it is. pH is measured on a scale from 0 to 14. If something’s neutral, it has a pH of 7.0. Above 7.0, it’s alkaline; below 7.0, it’s acidic. The higher above 7.0, the more alkaline it is and therefore the more oxygen it has; the farther below 7.0, the more acidic it is and the less oxygen it has.

Technically,
pH
stands for “potential of hydrogen.” It is the measurement of hydrogen ions in a particular solution. The more ions, the more acidic the solution, and vice versa.

Okay, so why is this so important? Your brilliant body is designed to operate within a very narrow pH range. Optimally, you want to be a little on the alkaline side, with a blood pH of around 7.365. Blood is the most important, and therefore most protected, pH measurement. Even a minor fluctuation in your blood’s pH (either too alkaline or too acidic) creates distress signals. Symptoms generally start out small and then ramp up as the imbalance continues.

Everything from a runny nose to skin eruptions, heartburn, eczema, inflammation, arthritis, poor circulation, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, a weakened immune system—even cancer—can be traced back in some way to an acidic inner terrain. In fact, a blood pH lower than 7.0 is extremely dangerous. Oxygen levels decrease, and cellular metabolism comes to a screeching halt. Guess what that means? Casket time!

It’s much easier to become too acidic than too alkaline. Your body regularly deals with naturally occurring acids that are the by-products of respiration, metabolism, cellular breakdown, and exercise. But when our acidic diets and lifestyles add to the load, our bodies get overwhelmed. You can meet your amazing God pod halfway by shifting your pH balance toward the alkaline side. By simply eating a more alkaline diet—veggies, greens, fresh organic green juices and smoothies, sprouts, wheatgrass juice, certain grains, and other fabulous plant foods—you will explode with vibrant energy and well-being.

An acidic condition is also a breeding ground for bad bacteria, yeast, and fungi, while an alkaline environment helps keep these critters in check. We assume that colds and viruses happen when we “catch” a bug. In fact, many common infections are actually caused by bacteria that are part of the normal flora already present in our systems. When our diet and lifestyle choices suck, we create a fertile ground for them to multiply and revolt on the inside.

But it’s not just diet that affects your pH. Lack of exercise, anger, drugs, cigs, and stress can all make you acidic. Stress is not a laughing matter or a badge of courage. The work-hard, play-hard, dealwith-it-later approach is a big pH no-no. Emotional stress releases acid-forming hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline that flood your system and muck up your soil. Plus, stress gives you wrinkles! When you’re sixty you’ll wish you had fixed that shit. Do the DIY now instead. Dump the doughnuts and chaos and watch the clock reverse.

pH ranges, vary slightly
throughout your body. Your blood needs to be slightly alkaline for optimum health; so do your tissues. Your bowels, skin, and (for women) vagina should be slightly acidic—this helps keep unfriendly bacteria away. Your stomach is the most acidic environment in your body (with a pH that ranges from 1.6 to 2.4) due to the hydrochloric acid used to fight foreign invaders and break down foods, especially protein. Your saliva fluctuates the most but still should be slightly alkaline.

The simplest and most accurate way to read your pH is to test your urine—the most reliable bodily substance—with litmus paper strips, available online for about $10. They’re similar to strips used to test chlorinated swimming pool water, so that you can do the backstroke without getting algae in your bikini. The litmus paper changes color when it’s exposed to an acid or alkaline substance. The greater the color change, the more acid or alkaline the substance.

To test your urine, most manufacturers will tell you to simply hold the strip in the flow for a second or two and wait about ten seconds. Easy! Then just compare the color on the strip to the pH chart on or with the package. For optimum sparkle, your urine should fall in the 6.8 to 7.5 pH range. Keep in mind that the pH of urine varies, depending on what you eat and when. To get the best reading, blow off testing your first morning pee. Due to metabolic processes from the night before, it will generally be on the acidic side. If your first pee isn’t acidic, it doesn’t always mean you’re in the zone. Quite the contrary, it could mean that you’re not releasing acids the way you should. To get a more accurate reading, the best time to test your pH is on your second pee of the day and before meals or at least one to two hours after eating.

One reading of a test strip won’t really tell you much, because levels fluctuate. It’s best to track your readings a few times a day for a week or so to get a general idea of where you fall. Record your findings in a journal so that you can track your success. A few weeks of this will give you a pretty good snapshot of your body chemistry. As you transition to a more alkaline diet, you’ll definitely see improvements. After a while you won’t even need to test. You’ll know exactly what will happen when you scarf hot wings and guzzle coffee.

It’s important to keep in mind that pH operates on a logarithmic scale, meaning each increase of a single number in either direction away from 7 (neutral) is actually a multiple of ten. So when you move from 7 to 6 on the pH scale, that’s ten times more acid; 7 to 5 is a hundred times more acidic; and so on. Coffee, for example, has a pH of around 4. Soda is a 2. Can you see why the SAD diet takes its toll? It’s much easier on your bod to stay in an alkaline range than to try to restore it. In the blood it takes twenty times the amount of alkalinity to neutralize an acid. Sheesh, is it really worth that cup of Joe?

A few years ago I was teaching my husband about testing his pH and trying to encourage (force) him to eat more alkaline, raw foods and dump animal products completely. At the time, I was in my bash-people-over-the-head mode—and there is absolutely no worse way to approach the man I married. Several hours after he’d finished a burger, fries, and brews at our local joint, I asked him to test his urine. It was an 8, which is über-alkaline!

Naturally, I was shocked and began questioning all that I had learned. Then I hit the books to find out what was really going on. Animal products, fried foods, and alcohol are all highly acidic. In response, his cute bod was pillaging his mineral reserves. He was too alkaline because he had previously been too acidic—his body was overcompensating. Get it? A reading like this is a false positive. Once you understand the basics, you’ll know when your body is truly in the zone.