I’ll be honest with you, I’m totally against the going on a diet mentality. Why? For me, it seems to place far too much emphasis on denying ourselves foods that we want to eat, or think we want to eat. My philosophy is that it is vital that we educate ourselves as to the best sorts of foods to put into our bodies.
Alkaline Diet Weight Loss Tip #1
Combine food education with alkaline diet theory. This can become a powerful tool that makes it easy to give up foods that we no longer want to eat.
For example, if you just think of dairy products as just acid foods and that you shouldn’t eat cheese or drink milk because you want to alkalize your body, do you really think you can you’ll stop having them?
Instead, if you take the time to find out more about where milk comes from and who it is meant for as well as finding out what it contains and how it affects your body, you may never want to drink it again.
In this video, Harley lays it all out – dairy contains all sorts of hormones, puss, fats and cholesterol. So before we even think about our alkaline diet, it’s pretty clear that dairy contains all sorts of things that we don’t want. About now you may be thinking that milk contains calcium. Isn’t that good for us? Now if we add our alkaline diet knowledge to the equation, we know that even though milk does indeed contain calcium, the amounts of animal proteins that it contains produces a condition known as metabolic acidosis in our bodies. This leads to a net loss of calcium from our bones.
So we know that dairy is pretty disgusting and that it puts an acid load on our body. But what about weight loss? You might be thinking that low fat milk is okay. But it’s not. A neat trick used by the dairy industry on milk packaging is to advertise the percentage of fat by volume. Considering milk contains so much water, the volume of fat turns out to be very low. This is why we see 2% milk in the store.
If we look at it by calories though, 35% of the total calories of “2% milk” come from fats! Quite confusing, isn’t it? And this is just how the dairy industry wants to keep us.
One cup of milk (244 grams) contains 122 calories, 43 of these calories are from fats. The majoirty of this weight is of course water (but water doesn’t have any calories). For every cup of milk you drink, you’re taking on board 5 grams of fats (inc. 3 grams of saturated fat) as well as 20 mg of cholesterol.
Just one cup of milk, every day of the year would equal: 5 grams fat * 365 days = 1825 grams of pure fat. Considering you may be pouring milk on your cereal, having milk in your tea or coffee, drinking milk on its own, as well as eating all kinds of foods that contain milk (e.g. cheese as well as all kinds of cooked foods that we might not think of as “dairy”), there’s a fair chance you’re consuming a lot more than just one cup a day.
If you want to lose weight and alkalize, dairy has got to go.
To discover more reasons to avoid milk, check out http://www.notmilk.com/
Alkaline Diet Weight Loss Tip #2
Comsume a whole foods, plant based diet. It’s that simple. By avoiding completely, animal based products we give our bodies a chance to start to heal themselves. Understand though that just avoiding animal products doesn’t mean your diet is necessarily going to be healthy. Eating heavily processed foods, e.g. white bread and sugar laden drinks and snacks could technically be a vegan diet, but it’s definitely not healthy. That’s why it’s the combination of a whole foods and plant based diet that’s important.
There’s a whole bunch of doctors and researchers who have published all kinds of amazing information about the power of this kind of diet. But it still isn’t common knowledge. That’s because the facts are having to do battle with the power and might of business and industry that stand to lose a great deal of money should these facts become more widely known.
Some great resources include:
Dr John McDougall- http://www.drmcdougall.com/
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine – http://www.pcrm.org/
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D. – http://www.heartattackproof.com/
T. Colin Campbell – http://www.tcolincampbell.org/
All these doctors and researchers appear in the movie Forks Over Knives which is a must see documentary movie.
Alkaline Diet Weight Loss Tip #3
Awaken your taste buds and discover all kinds of “new” foods. If you’re worrying about what sort of foods you’ll be able to eat on an alkaline diet, there are so many delicious things that you may never have tried before. The beauty of it all is that a whole foods, plant based diet is naturally alkaline in nature. On top of this, it will naturally help you to lose weight.
Whole foods, foods which we eat as close to their natural state as possible (e.g. wholewheat bread rather than processed white bread, freshly squeezed orange juice rather than juice from a carton, and so on) give our bodies all kinds of nutrients that the processed versions have been stripped of. So the feelings of hunger and having to eat will fade away since our body is getting the fuel it needs from a smaller amount of food.
This has nothing to do with restricting calories or watching what you eat. When you eat the right foods, you can have as much as you want. Your body will tell you when it’s full. This is something you’re bound to notice.
Read more about alkaline foods here. I’m going to talk more about specific alkaline diet recipes that I eat, another time. I hope these three tips will inspire you to alkalize. It feels goood!