The Beauty Detox Solution (7 page)
Read The Beauty Detox Solution Online
Authors: Kimberly Snyder
EATING FOR BEAUTY
A man returned from college with a Ph.D. in making sugar from different fruits. He was asked if sugar could be made from the guava fruit. After some deep thought he said, “I did not study that. It was not in my curriculum.” Using common sense was beyond him.
It is not a pumping in from the outside that gives wisdom; it is the power and extent of your inner receptivity that determine how much you can attain of true knowledge, and how rapidly.
âParamahansa Yogananda
Now that you know that energy creates beautyâclear, youthful skin; lustrous hair; strong nails and a lean bodyâand the key role digestion plays in Beauty Energy, it's time to start putting it all together. The Beauty Detox Solution goes beyond simply what foods we choose to eat. Beyond incorporating more alkaline foods in your diet, there are ways to actually
eat for beauty
. That's what this chapter is all about! The easy principles in this chapter are the key to maximizing your Beauty Energy, to cleanse the body and make you more beautiful from the inside out.
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MORE ENERGY = MORE BEAUTY
EAT ALKALINE FIRST
At each meal, no matter what the whole meal will entail, we always begin by putting an alkaline food
first
in the bodyâeither ripe fruit, raw vegetables or salad. This includes breakfast. Besides ensuring that we consistently load up on raw plant enzymes, practicing this rule will ensure that we get alkaline, water-containing foods in the body at every meal and increase the overall percentage of these foods in our diet.
Do you notice something that these alkaline foods have in common? They contain a great deal of fiber. Fiber acts as a cushion to help slow down glucose absorption in the bloodstream and prevents our blood sugar levels from becoming elevated and erratic. Fiber
also fills us up and helps diminish our physiological cravings. It is absolutely critical to use this natural way to control portion size. When we fill up first with fresh, natural foods, we can eat in abundance and never feel deprived, since these foods have so much filling fiber and contain so many nutrients.
What is Fiber?
The Food and Nutrition Board defines dietary fiber as “nondigestible carbohydrates and lignin that are intrinsic and intact in plants.”
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Dietary fiber is found
only
in plant foods and is present in large amounts in fruits, grains, legumes and vegetables. Fiber passes all the way through the small intestine undigested and forms the bulk of our stool. It helps stabilize the body's blood sugar levels, which may help control diabetes. Dietary fiber removes excess cholesterol and hormones, and binds to and deactivates cancer-causing substances.
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By working to push toxicity and sludge out of the body on a continual basis, it helps keep the excessive breeding of bad bacteria in check, so our levels of good bacteria stay in the right balance. Fiber also helps us feel full, providing a natural way to fill up on our beautifying plant foods without worrying about restricting or counting calories.
Fiber also helps keep our digestive tract functioning optimally and keeps us regular, which is critical for our ongoing cleansing efforts. It helps to consistently remove toxins from the body. A report published in the
Journal of the National Cancer Institute
suggested that if one's daily fiber intake was increased by thirteen grams, the risk of colon cancer would decrease by 31 percent.
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The solution is not to add an isolated fiber supplement, like Metamucil, here and there to a diet filled with foods sorely lacking in crucial dietary fiber. Americans spend $725 million a year on laxatives alone.
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Something is clearly wrong! Instead, we need to focus on increasing our percentage of high-fiber
foods!
The average American gets only about eight to fourteen grams of fiber a day in his or her diet. On plant-based diets like the Beauty Detox Solution you will get much moreâupwards of forty grams of fiber or more!
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It is easy to have a salad at the start of lunch and dinner at a restaurant or when preparing meals at home. Here are some practical examples of how our Eat Alkaline First principle works in action:
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First eat: | Followed by: |
Celery sticks | Rolled oat cereal for breakfast |
Green salad | Steamed veggies and brown rice at lunch |
Green salad | Avocado and veggie sandwich at lunch |
Red pepper and carrot sticks | Avocado sushi rolls at lunch |
Green salad | Fish and broccoli at dinner |
NO MORE CALORIE COUNTING
I have good news. We are not going to be counting calories! Yes, you heard that right:
no more calorie counting!
For generations, people have stayed slim and healthy without ever counting calories. When we look at pictures from the turn of the century to, say, the 1950s, isn't it amazing how relatively slim everyone is? Obesity was not a widespread issue, yet no one counted calories (or anything else, for that matter, like grams of protein or carbs). They also didn't eat all the processed foods and low-fat, low-calorie “diet” foods!
Calorie counting is a truly modern invention, and it is
not
the only way. Thank goodness, because it is so restrictive and makes for a miserable way to manage our weight! Furthermore, just counting calories won't ensure that you eat foods to promote beauty or help you cleanse your body of aging, acidic sludge. We do want to eat fewer calories in general to maintain our health and weight, but the great news is that we don't have to obsess over it. When you fuel your body with quality, nutritious foods, it happens naturally.
Now, you may be wondering,
Okay, but how much do I eat, then?
Most of us are so out of touch with our true hunger needs, and how much fuel our bodies actually require, that we have no sense of when we're truly hungry or full. As we begin to cleanse the body, our systems will start to optimally absorb nutrients, and we will start feeling full faster. Simultaneously, we will shift into consuming mostly nutrient-dense and fiber-filled foods, which will allow us to get the nutrition with far fewer calories, anyway whether we are consciously counting or not.
BEAUTY TIP
Be Prepared!
Eat Alkaline First is an important principle to follow. I know we all have busy lives, and it may not always be possible to toss a green salad together before your main meal. So how do you stick to the Beauty Detox while eating out and while traveling? Just plan ahead. For instance, if you are going to a Chinese restaurant for lunch with your coworkers and you know you may have a hard time finding raw vegetables there, prepare ahead of time. Keep some carrots or celery on hand, and eat that within the hour before lunch. When I travel and I know I will be eating less than optimally, I always carry some clementines or carrot sticks that I can eat to make sure I coat my belly first. I also like buying containers of baby spinach, which are easy to grab out of the fridge and knosh on in a pinch when I am preparing something else, or I can also make a very simple salad with it in about thirty seconds.
In Part 2, Your Beauty Solution, I provide portion guidelines to get you started. But it is not the purpose of this book to provide you with the minutiae of specific grams of foods and calories you should be eating. These numbers are forever changing depending on which “diet” you are followingâ¦not to mention that they're ridiculously confusing! And we all know that calorie counting doesn't work in a consistent way for the long term: there is always that disheartening yo-yo with the scale.
Instead, let's use broader terms for choosing our foods and their quantitiesânot just numbers. As long as we follow our 80 percent alkaline-20 percent acidic food rule, we will
be consuming fewer calories in general, since our concentrated, calorically dense foods will be reduced overall. Have you noticed that there is no nutritional label to read on the side of an apple or a bunch of cilantro? The closer we stick to eating natural, whole and unprocessed foods, which are much easier to digest and free up Beauty Energy, the less we have to worry about counting calories. As we become more alkaline, our bodies will absorb vitamins and minerals, which we'll be getting in abundance, better. We'll also be continually cleaning the sludge out of our wheels, which we now know is the real cause of aging!
BEAUTY TIP
Say No to Splenda
Though they have all been approved and declared “safe” for human consumption, there is a lot of controversy and potential health risks associated with artificial sweeteners, which include aspartame (Equal and NutraSweet), saccharin (Sweet âN Low) and sucralose (Splenda).
Let's start with aspartame, also known as NutraSweet and Equal. As of 1994, 6,888 cases of adverse reactions from aspartame had been reported to the FDA, enough to make up a staggering 75 percent of all nondrug complaintsâmore than any other food ingredient in the agency's history.
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Aspartame is an excitotoxin, which is a toxic substance that in high concentrations may stimulate nerve cells so much that they are damaged or killed. It is composed of aspartic acid, methyl ester (which breaks down to formaldehyde and formic acid) and phenylalanine. Those are scary words, right? They point to one thing: that they are acid-forming in the body!
Think aspartame can help you lose weight? Guess again. Despite the fact that it has zero calories, studies have shown that aspartame can in fact
induce
weight gain. Some researchers believe that the two main ingredients in aspartame, phenylalanine and aspartic acid, stimulate the release of insulin and leptin, hormones that instruct our bodies to store fat.
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One study showed that when we ingest a large amount of phenylalanine, it can drive down our levels of serotonin,
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which is the neurotransmitter that tells us when we're full. A low level of serotonin can also bring on food cravings.
Saccharin, aka Sweet âN Low, is no better in this regard. A study at Purdue University's Ingestive Behavior Research Center concluded that consuming foods sweetened with saccharin leads to greater weight gain and body fat than eating the same foods sweetened with sugar.
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What about the new popular sweetener sucralose, aka Splenda? Researchers from the Duke University Medical Center published a study in
the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health
that showed that sucralose lowered good bacteria in the intestines by 50 percent and contributed to an increase in body weight in lab studies.
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The best bet is to avoid all these artificial sweeteners and all products that contain them: there are too many potential health risks. The better choice for a calorie-free sweetener is stevia, which is a natural herb that has been used for hundreds of years in South America and grows naturally in parts of Paraguay and Brazil. It is widely available in the marketplace today. Another good choice is xylitol, a lower calorie, low-glycemic substitute that is a sugar alcohol that occurs naturally in the fibers of many fruits and vegetables. Xylitol is contained in some chewing gums, and it may help reduce cavity-causing bacteria in teeth. If you find that stevia tastes bitter, xylitol may be a better option.
Most people try to eat small, restricted portions of low-nutrient foods that have little or no fiber when they try to lose weight. That is why they feel hungry and deprived much of the time. To make things even worse, these diets contribute to aging and create toxins in their bodies. Meat, dairy and refined carbs are so dense in calories and low in fiber and nutrients that it is almost impossible for us to eat them and not consume a huge amount of calories. Or we watch our calories closely and feel miserable all the time, always thinking and obsessing over food! The great news is that on the Beauty Detox Solution, you can eat large amounts of food, but you'll learn to eat truly healthy foods that support cleansing and fill you up with nutrients and fiber. And, no, you'll never have to count another calorie!
BEAUTY FOOD PAIRING
The principle of Beauty Food Pairing is so powerful that it alone can change your entire life. When practiced properly, it will forever improve your beauty and health.