Simple Diet, Beautiful You

Simple Diet, Beautiful You

by Emily Josephine

©Copyright 2015. All rights reserved. You have permission to quote small portions of this book in other publications, digital or print, as long as you give credit to the author and include a link to her website, http://liveyourdreamswithemily.com.

Disclaimer: Any attempt to drastically change one’s lifestyle should be approached with prayer and care. Readers assumes all risk for applying any information in this book to his or her life.

In addition, the information in this book is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to treat, diagnose, cure or prevent anything (*gags as she is forced by law to type that disclaimer*). Always counsel with your health care practitioner before making any dramatic changes to your diet, or going off of any prescription medication.

Distributed by Smashwords.

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Contents

Part One: The Simple Diet

Introduction To Part One

Chapter One: The Simple Diet Defined

Chapter Two: Stay Hydrated

Chapter Three: Don't Diet

Chapter Four: Avoid Man-Made Foods

Chapter Five: Eat Food In Its Most Natural State Possible

Chapter Six: Eat Lots Of Fruits And Vegetables

Chapter Seven: Healthy Fats

Chapter Eight: Limit Grains

Chapter Nine: Get Enough Antioxidants

Chapter Ten: Don't Do Drugs

Chapter Eleven: Supplement Your Diet

Chapter Twelve: The Simple Diet For Your Soul

Chapter Thirteen: Special Considerations

Chapter Fourteen: Putting It All Together

Part Two: Healthy Fast Food

Chapter Fifteen: Healthy Fast Food…Really?

Chapter Sixteen: The Two-Minute Snack

Chapter Seventeen: Breakfast Bonanza

Chapter Eighteen: Lip-Smacking Lunches

Chapter Nineteen: Scrumptious Suppers

Chapter Twenty: Healthy Fast Foods In Real Life

Part Three: Delectably Dark: The History, Mystery, And Health Benefits Of Dark Chocolate

Chapter Twenty-One: Where It All Began

Chapter Twenty-Two: The History Of Chocolate

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Health Benefits Of Chocolate

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Organic Question

Chapter Twenty-Five: Recipes, Raw And Roasted

Chapter Twenty-Six: Conclusion To Part Three

Bibliography

Other Books By Emily Josephine

About Emily Josephine

PART ONE: THE SIMPLE DIET

Introduction To Part One

Eating has been turned into a complicated endeavor. Aside from the fact that Hollywood has single-handedly caused thousands upon thousands of girls to develop eating disorders, food and nutrition are two of the most highly debated subjects of our era. Is meat good for you or not? Should everybody give up gluten, or just those with Celiac disease? What is the final word about the cholesterol and fat in egg yolks?

In this book, I am going to do my best to make the issue of eating as simple as possible. My ultimate goal is to show you how what you eat affects both outward and inward beauty.

What not to expect from this book

This book will not tell you how to lose weight or get your youthful energy back – although if you follow the principles herein, there is a good chance, if you need to lose weight or increase your energy levels, such will happen. But it does not prescribe a specific weight loss plan.

Neither will this book tell you whether or not to quit eating meat, nor reveal the top ten anti-aging foods to eat. It will not tell you anything you couldn’t learn from any number of other books about food and nutrition. So if you’re looking for a secret formula, some special mix of foods that only a handful of elite people know about…well, let me know when you find it.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but I once had a reviewer on Amazon criticize a weight-loss book I had written and published in the Kindle store. No new information here, was the jist of the review.

Well, I’m sorry. There is no new information about how to lose weight. Neither is there new information about how to use food to be healthy. If you have, like me, already read several dozen books with differing angles on the topic, this book is not for you. I have nothing new to share.

If you want to stick with me, thank you, and let me give you one more thing this book will not do: it will not tie your brain into knots with complicated chemical nutritional formulas (you’re welcome :) ).

What you can expect from this book

This book is going to explain why the human body was designed to thrive on a natural diet, and why the modern unnatural diet leads to many and varied health problems. It will get into some details about certain nutrients that are particularly lacking in the modern diet, but you won’t need a Master’s degree in nutrition to understand them.

But this book won’t stop there. It will take a twist on the word diet and discuss why the diet that goes into our eyes and ears are equally as important as the diet that goes into our mouths. Everything you read, watch, and listen to has an impact – subtle or not – on how beautiful you are, both inside and out. That is what the first part of the book consists of. Be aware right now that although I myself consume a 100% plant-based diet for ethical reasons, I understand that not everyone desires to do that. Therefore, I do make mention of the consumption of animal products in order to appeal to a broader audience. If you are a vegan, I ask for understanding in this matter.

The second part of the book shows you how you can eat healthy, no matter how busy you are. It provides four formulas, one each for snacks, breakfast, lunch, and supper. Following the formulas, you should find that you can provide three homemade meals a day – even for a family – in about thirty minutes of hand-on prep time total.

The third part of the book is for the sheer fun of it. Most people enjoy chocolate, and like to be told that at least one of their favorite foods can be classified as healthy. So Part Three of this book tells you everything you ever wanted to know about dark chocolate – ending with over twenty delicious chocolate recipes!

If you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, or if you are eating a mostly processed food diet and know that you need to make a change, I believe this book will help you. It will help you look better, feel better, and even act better.

Let’s begin the journey, shall we?

Chapter One: The Simple Diet Defined

Many people, when they hear the phrase simple diet, think of one of two things. An image of a plateful of rice and beans is the first. The second is a picture of pioneers in the 1800’s eating food cooked from scratch over a fire.

I’m not sure how we came to romanticize this time, particularly their diet, as we do. Yes, they did not consume fast food, frozen dinners, or potato chips. But they did consume plenty of white flour in the form of bread, cookies, cakes and pie crusts. Those who spent weeks and months on the prairie subsisted on cornmeal cakes and prairie chickens. No greens, no fruit, no omega-3 fatty acids.

And a startling percentage of women died in childbirth – many times, along with the baby they were trying to deliver. Part of that was due to the ignorance of sanitation back then, but I believe a large part was also due to wrong diet. A deficiency in vitamin E, for example, makes the labor and birth process much more difficult than if a mother has plenty of the nutrient in her system.

Read the history of author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family. Almost everyone in her immediate family died in their sixties.

That is young. And if you read through all her books, and notice what was lacking in their diet and what was prevalent, you get a good idea as to why they died so young.

The truth is, a simple diet does not have to be boring, like rice and beans. And it has nothing to do with what farm families in the 1800’s consumed. Even by that time – nay, many years before, because white sugar has been around for hundreds of years – people were eating unnatural foods.

A simple diet is a diet consisting of food that is as close to its natural form as possible. If it is impossible to eat in its natural form, it should be avoided altogether, or considered as a condiment or occasional special treat.

The simplest food of all

There is one kind of food, and one only, that is so easy for the human digestive system to handle that I have heard it referred to as pre-digested. I am talking about fruit.

Most fruit can be picked off the tree, vine, or bush and eaten as-is. Most of the tropical fruits require some peeling, but this is easily accomplished with a moderately sharp tool, if not with hands.

The next simplest foods

The next easiest foods for humans are raw fish and raw egg yolks, and after that, cooked fish and cooked egg yolks.

I would put the raw tender greens, such as lettuce and spinach, equal to cooked fish and egg yolks. Next in line would be cooked dark, leafy greens such as broccoli and kale, tied with raw milk since the protein in raw milk (yes, even goat milk) is a little tough to digest, while the fiber in dark, leafy greens – unless chewed thoroughly – makes it hard for your body to extract the nutrients from it. Cooked dark leafies, however, are generally more easily digested than their raw counterparts, unless they are fermented as with raw sauerkraut.

I could go on, but I think you’re beginning to see what I mean by a simple diet. The more a food has been removed from its natural state, the less nutritious it is – and usually, the more toxic it is.

Some people, if they were to hear the term simple diet, would immediately think of raw food. After all, uncooked, natural foods have not been processed. That makes them the simplest of all, right?

I used to buy into that. But as I just explained, the vegetables that belong to the cabbage family are very difficult to digest in their raw state because of their tough fibers. These tough fibers also make it difficult for your body to extract the nutrients from the juice of the plant. Blending facilitates that process as cooking does, but you can’t pick a green smoothie out of the ground, can you? Or, for that matter, a glass of juice, however fresh and organic it may be.

I am not excluding raw kale or egg whites from a simple diet, only making the point that the human body deals with some natural foods much more easily than with others, and those foods might be eaten more frequently and in greater quantities than the others.

Forget the ideal.

If you’re like me, you’re going to be tempted, as you read, to look for the ideal diet for humankind. Or, at least, for you. You’re going to want me to tell you the exact number of servings of the best foods you should eat every day for optimum health.

I’m not going to give you what you want. We do not live in an ideal world. We live in an imperfect world where different people deal with different constraints that keep them from eating the healthiest diet possible. Some families cannot afford to buy all organic food. Others have developed autoimmune digestive issues that prohibit them from consuming fiber in any form. It might be healthier for me to eat salmon three times a day rather than eat nuts and seeds, but at $12 a pound for the fish, this habit would send our food budget through the roof.

You must get the idea of ideal out of your head, because if you don’t, it will continually prod you into seeking for it. And since it doesn’t exist, you will only increase your stress levels.

Jason’s story

Jason is a fictional name of a real person. I read a book of his that he had published to Kindle. He got into raw food, eventually dropping greens, nuts and seeds out of his diet until he was living on only six pieces of fruit per day. He talked about it in a holier than thou way, as if he were the only person on earth eating the ideal diet: only the food that is easiest to digest, and just enough to keep him from looking like a complete skeleton (he had a photo of himself in his book, and he was very thin. And I say that as someone who is just below her ideal clinical weight).

Later on in the book, he confessed to binging on fast food and packaged foods various times. He could not explain these cravings.

Could you? My readers are always smart, so I’m going to assume you can figure it out as easily as I could.

Six pieces of fruit per day. Nothing else.

Moreover, I visited his blog and found that he was in a state of despair because the world refused to live up to his ideal of how it should work.

Ideals can make you crazy. Depressed. Get them out of your life. You don’t want to be like Jason.

It’s about principles

Instead of ideals, shoot for principles. Simplify your diet by following the ten food-related principles outlined, one per chapter, in most of the rest of the book. You don’t even need to follow them 100%. Aim to start with following them 75% of the time, with a goal to end up following them 90-95% of the time.

Because the more you follow them, the simpler your diet will be. And the simpler your diet is, the healthier you will be.

Following the ten principles, I wrap up the book with two more chapters. The first discusses various issues related to health and eating that don’t directly fit into any of the principles. The final chapter talks about the other diets in your life not related to eating, but which strongly affect your inner beauty. I’m talking about what you expose your eyes and ears to.

Let’s start at the beginning, with the first principle of the Simple Diet.

Chapter Two: Stay Hydrated