Excellent advice for us all @reddust. I was aware of fasting being very good for the body and have heard that eating one big meal a day is best for giving your body time to digest and recover but also what you say makes sense with the 14 or 16 hours of fasting. I am not a big eater but I do eat a lot of snacks. I am a vegetarian and have been for over a year now so eat a lot of soups with lentils etc but I could definitely eat a lot healthier. Of course when giving it thought, food is indeed for sustenance, pleasure and health and I have long said that water is the fuel for a healthy body, if it can be found in a pure state, which is very difficult these days. I wasn't aware of just how beneficial walking was for anti-aging and repairing DNA. We have definitely been led a long way away from our natural environment. Food, water, pharmaceuticals, deoderants, aftershaves, vaccinations, lotions, creams, powders. Not to mention the radiowave communications zipping through our bodies every day and set to increase in a potentially dangerous way with the introduction of 5G.
It's a full time job just trying to stay healthy in the modern world! :(
Great post my friend! Hope you're doing well! :)
(btw, this is the second time today I have made a very similar comment. The other was on @benjojo's post about vaccinations which relates a bit to this one. Thought you might be interested in checking it out) :)
@tonyr, I used to eat to relieve stress but with the change of diet I don't do that anymore. It's strange because I thought my constant cravings were do to stress but now I think I was suffering from nutritional deficiencies.
When I was very sick back in the 1990s I was on all sorts of medications from anti-depressants to deal with pain and panic attacks, antibiotic rounds dealing with bladder infections, and asthma medication. I found out that both antidepressants and antibiotics kill the little bugs that do the bulk of our bodies work regarding digesting our food. I stopped taking antibiotics and antidepressants back then because they made me feel even worse. I started eating healthier, even stopped eating sugary food and wheat products for a while and I felt better plus my asthma cleared up. (A warning to those on antidepressants, don't go cold turkey, do some research and slowly stop taking them or you may feel a little or a lot crazier for a while.)
Over the years I slowly started eating sugary foods and wheat and because I felt so good I thought I had recovered from what ailed me. All my symptoms slowly came back but so slowly I didn't notice, I even went vegan in the early 2000 and I was working out at the gym 5 days a week lifting weights and running.
Years later I found out my iron count was low and I was suffering from nutritionally deficiencies. Women lose iron every month because of their monthly cycles and children need iron because of their growing bodies. Plant iron (non-heme) is chemically different than animal base iron (heme).
It's been proven even through you will read arguments asserting this is not true, humans can't digest plant heme easily couple that with my destroyed gut microbiome it's not surprising I was lacking in iron. The lack of iron is hard on a woman's body because we lose blood every month. I didn't know this at the time either, I found out from a Ph.D nutritionist that I need to eat red meat and animal organs or I will continue to suffer the symptoms of anemia.
I suffered from all these problems for years until I introduced beef liver and steak back into my diet. When I look back I see from my research most of my physical and mental problems where related to nutritional deficiencies and stress made everything worse. What makes nutrition complicated no one digest their food the same, take me as an example because of the medications I was on. I also suffered from migraines but mine are related to my gallbladder and pancreas so I eat foods that help both these organs which could become a book or at least a large article. The 3rd most common surgery for women is removing the gallbladder. Both these organs are harmed by high sugar intake and processed refined foods. My people ate large amounts of animal products and fat through the winter months and if we survived childhood illness and death we lived to over 70 years old. One side of my family were American and European farmers the other side of my family were hunter gatherers (Piegan Indians-The Blackfoot Tribes). We were healthy until modern medicine and grocery stores full crap food were easier to access compared to our traditional foods and medicines.
Because of the drugs I took my gut was a wreck and I am sure I couldn't and still can't digest plant heme very well. I do a lot of homemade pre and probiotics making fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut which help my gut microbiome reestablish itself.
@reddust please accept my apologies for taking so long to reply to you. I have been extremely busy these last few days and have had minimal time for steemit other than to post my daily contest. I have a lot of comments to catch up on but yours is rightly the first. :)
Personally I don't really know what to make of the meat/ no meat argument. I know that I have been without meat now for over a year and feel no positive or negative effects either way so as such I can choose to eat meat or not, which I choose not to. You may well be right about the plant heme but I still can't believe that humans were designed to eat meat despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary. I ate meat for 36 years, loved it and miss the taste of it every day but something clicked inside me that told me it was wrong and that it was doing me more than physical harm. I don't preech to anyone because I'm in no position to and leave everyone to live their own lives and make their own decisions but I think the reason we eat meat is for the same reason we do most things in life these days and that's because we don't know any better and exist in a world created by others in their image to suit their agenda. I think as humans we are far from our natural intended state and our diet is just one area of our lives where we are allowing harm to be done to ourselves.
I also think that data and scientific research in the main is flexible to whatever outcome or result is desired and although there are undoubtedly many excellent scientists doing excellent research, the fact that there are so many scientists for hire makes it really difficult to know which information to trust.
I am really confused on the matter so for now I'm 'going with my gut!'' :0
I hope you are well my friend! :)
Most of my friends are vegan 😁