Diet is a confusing and frustrating issue for many people. We’re either forcing ourselves to stick to a program that we think is healthy, and kicking ourselves for “failing,” or we’re just trying not to think about the whole thing.
Someone you know feels energized eating a certain way, while you might feel irritable and starving on that same type of diet. Clearly the key is biochemical individuality, and no “off the shelf” diet program is able to look at your individual needs.
Diet really is complex, but it’s simple at the same time. There is a complex of factors we need to look at, to determine which foods are best for you — the foods that will strengthen your system rather than weaken it.
But because we now have diet typing research, including Dr. Abravanel’s body typing and William Wolcott’s metabolic typing, we can systematically determine what fuel your particular body runs well on, which is different from what your friends or family members do well on.
There’s a multitude of diet programs being promoted, and opinions about what works best. Most are based on one particular aspect of diet, such as low-carb, or raw foods. People make some seeming progress with these one-size-fits-all schemes at first — mostly due to the fact that they’re eliminating the junk foods they were eating before.
Sometimes one small intervention, like cutting down on sugar or processed foods, can make a big difference. So even a one-size-fits-all diet that doesn’t really fit you can give you some benefits at first, simply because of what you’re NOT eating. But we want to take it a step further.
The factors that determine your ideal diet are:
* body type–which of your endocrine glands is dominant
* blood type
* food allergies and intolerances
* existing nutrient imbalances
* ideal weight
* current health conditions
Most of these are familiar, but body typing may not be. Body typing is the result of extensive research by Dr. Elliot Abravanel and others including Dr. Laura Power in the past few years. Dr. Abravanel found that each person has a particular body type, which reflects which endocrine gland is more active in their metabolism than others.
Body Typing
Dr. Abravanel found that there are four basic endocrine glands that determine body type: Pituitary, Thyroid, Adrenals and Gonads.
For example, an Adrenal type will be generally strong and sturdy, with their adrenal glands being dominant. Their body shape and pattern of putting on weight will reflect that — they tend to have a strong, stocky build with relatively broad shoulders. When they put on weight, it’s higher up on the body, not so much on the thighs and hips.
Adrenal types tend to crave greasy and salty foods, which make them feel better in the short run but actually weaken their adrenals in the longer run, by overstimulating them.
A healthy diet for each body type (and the one which would help each person achieve their ideal weight and maintain it) would de-emphasize the foods that stimulate their dominant gland, while emphasizing the foods that strengthen and support their recessive glands.
Many people believe that their food cravings are signalling a nutritional need for that particular food. But what we’re actually craving is the feeling that the food gives us, as a result of overstimulating our dominant gland. The overstimulation weakens and exhausts the gland, and sets up a vicious cycle in which we crave more of the food to get the stimulation.
But by eating foods that strenthen the recessive glands and give the exhausted dominant gland a break, we can break that vicious cycle. Then the food cravings disappear, and the foods that are healthiest for us become the same ones we actually like!
Diet is no longer a battle of will and a matter of depriving yourself of the foods that you love. Your preferences shift as you begin to eat the foods that your particular body really needs.
You can begin to experience the deep feeling of satisfaction that comes from eating food that your body really wants and needs, which is a different experience from the kind of satisfaction that comes from addictive cravings.
When you eat the foods that your exhausted dominant gland is telling you to eat, you’re relieving some tension, and that feels good in a way. But you’ll notice that you don’t really feel relaxed or satisfied in a deeper way. Something is missing.
The Four-Beat Cycle
There’s a cycle we naturally go through, which Wilhelm Reich called the four-beat life cycle. We start with a tension, which in this case is hunger. It grows, and we feel charged. Then we need to satisfy the hunger, so we eat, and that discharges the tension. But the fourth part of the cycle is relaxation.
Foods that are overstimulating and weakening for us don’t allow us to get to the relaxation, so we never feel finished. We feel relieved of hunger in a way, but still on the prowl for something else. Probably everyone has this kind of experience fairly often.
But with the proper diet, we can be getting to the relaxation phase at every meal, feeling satisfied and complete. Hunger naturally arises again for the next meal, and we can experience the full 4-beat cycle as it naturally occurs, without cutting it short and leaving ourselves stuffed yet still unsatisfied.
Diet Therapy software is a new tool that allows the practitioner to input all the factors that determine which diet is right for you, including body/glandular type. A complex of factors turn into a simple, elegant food chart that’s easy to follow.
Breaking long-standing eating habits isn’t an easy task. Often there are deeper emotional issues involved. It’s a process of making small improvements over time, and the proper dietary guidelines will support you along the way and help make it easier so it’s not the kind of struggle we’ve all gone through with diets.
So by “easy” I don’t mean it’s a piece of cake. It takes effort to make changes, but it helps to be on a track that’s supporting your progress.
The next article will be about blood typing and how that’s used as an indicator for diet.