A Diet Option to Increase Your Physical Energy

Welcome back. This week I'm going to share some things I’ve learned about eating for increased MENTAL CLARITY and ENERGY. How many dieters are out there, and why do you diet? Do you diet to lose weight?  Do you diet to have more mental clarity and vitality? Do you diet to have more energy? What's the point?

I've been on a dieting journey my entire life. I sense that I have finally reached a point where I'm elated with what I've discovered, and I want to share it with you. So, let's dive in, and I'll tell you about my dieting story, and then what I've learned.

My Dieting Story – The Early Days

When I was born I was sick from the formula that I was being fed for, my parents told me, about six months. So, I had problems from day 1, and I was a pretty sickly kid along with food allergies when I was young too. I was one of those no peanuts or peanut butter kids. I was eating like every American in the mid-60s, 70s, diets. Pretty standard fare - lots of soda, chips, and all that kind of stuff. I never was overweight though. I was blessed in that sense.

Animal Protein Reduction

That Standard American Diet (SAD) was all I knew for the first two decades of my life, and then I went off to graduate school, and I took a course called “Studies of the Future” where we read John Robbins’ Diet for a New America. From that book and class, I learned a lot about the meat industry and what it was doing to the depletion of resources along with the inhumane treatment of animals. I was never a big fan of meat to begin with. I was one of those kids that my parents always had to tell me to eat my meat. I didn't really like it. Once I really understood what was going on in the United States in the animal husbandry industry, and I was clear that I didn't really want to support the industry, it was very easy for me to say, “OK, I'm just going to be vegan.”

I ate a vegan diet for a while and lost a ton of weight. I got down to below 130 pounds and was looking like I had been in a prisoner of war camp or something. It was clear I needed to eat something more. I said, “OK, I like fish.” So, I added fish to my diet and was now a “pescatarian”, which became an official word in the dictionary (pes·ca·tar·i·anˌ peskəˈterēən / noun: pescatarian; plural noun: pescatarians; noun: pescetarian; plural noun: pescetarian 1. a person who does not eat meat but does eat fish) not too long ago. As you’ll see below, my body’s intuition to limit animal protein was in alignment with what contemporary science is telling us.

Now, I've been a pescatarian for almost 3 decades; i.e. not eating meat since 1990. This diet has worked pretty good for me. However, as I've gotten older, I've noticed I have a lot more pain in my body, I have a lot more energy issues, and I was looking for something to upgrade in my diet.

Other Diet Tweaks

About 10 years ago I read Eat Right 4 Your Type, which, when you read it, logically makes sense. I tried that out, and it kind of worked in some areas, and not so much in others. I still sense there's some truth in that diet, but it has some things that are lacking.

I’ve always been a big cyclist and have been following pro cycling and enjoy watching the Tour de France. When I read about how the cycling teams were eliminating gluten from their diets because they found that gluten actually causes inflammation in the joints, I said “I'm going to go gluten free.” So, I cut out gluten, and immediately lost some weight and felt a bit better. I was pretty good about it most of the time. Occasionally, I would stick stuff back into my diet that had gluten in it, but I've been pretty gluten free for about 10 years, on and off. Gluten free still wasn't doing it for me though. I’ll come back to gluten here in a bit because this is one of the keys. The biking teams were right. It does cause inflammation, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff that cause inflammation and other issues too.

In the next stage of my diet, last year I read The China Study, which is a great book! It's all about the relationship between animal proteins and cancers. It's fascinating if you haven't read it. The bottom line of the China Study says you shouldn't eat more than 10% animal protein, you shouldn't eat any processed foods, and you should try to eat whole foods, which makes sense, right? We’ve evolved from Paleolithic people, and they mostly ate whole foods that they gathered with occasional meat when they had a good hunt. So, I was doing The China Study Solution diet and kind of sticking to that diet for a while. While I did have limited results on this diet, it still wasn't what I was looking for.

The Plant Paradox

My dad has had issues with rheumatoid arthritis, and my sister has had some health issues too. So, they were trying this diet that comes from Dr. Gundry called The Plant Paradox diet, and they were having amazing results. Given the family genomic connection, I thought, “Wow, I'll give it a try.”

So, what is The Plant Paradox? What The Plant Paradox says is that certain plants evolved to try to protect themselves from being eaten or at least from being eaten until they were mature / ripe and ready for their seeds to be eaten and spread by animals. The way plants protect themselves from being eaten is by creating proteins called lectins which for certain people (and animals), not all people because we're all a little bit different, can cause issues in our bodies including diseases.

A somewhat well-known story of lectin poisoning is in the book Into the Wild. This book is the story of a young man who went off to live in the Alaskan wilderness. In the spring, he picked and ate some wild berries. The problem was that the berries were not ripe, and they had extremely high lectin content. The result was that the lectins in the berries coated his GI tract and blocked the absorption of nutrients for days. The result – he starved to death! So, lectins can be very detrimental to our health and ultimately our longevity.

Given the results that my dad and sister were seeing, I said “I'll give this lectin free thing a try.” Gluten is a lectin, but there are many lectins in different types of plants. Now, The Plant Paradox diet is fairly intense because it does cut out a lot of the foods that a lot of us are used to eating including all grains. Here is a summary of the restrictions:

1. GRAIN FREE – Most of us are familiar with gluten free, but this diet eliminates all grains, including rice, all wheats, oats, barleys, etc. The only exception is millet which does not have lectins.
2. NO AMERICAN FRUITS AND VEGETABLES – The diet cuts out any foods that came from the Americas because the human gut has not yet evolved to manage the lectins that are in the foods of the Americas because we have not been in the Americas long enough from an evolutionary perspective. So, this includes all squashes, peppers, corn, and nightshades.
3. NO PROCESSED FOODS – this is also a restriction of the China Study diet, and it makes sense because our Paleo ancestors did not manufacture food.
4. ONLY GRAIN FED MEATS and FISH – this make sense too because the grain just goes into the meat of the animal. So, it is recommended to eat only grass fed AND finished meats as well as wild caught fish. Note, the “finished” part of the meats is important because many meats are grass fed but then finished with grain to fatten them up before slaughter.
5. LIMITED ANIMAL PROTEIN – this recommendation is consistent with the findings of The China Study. The maximum recommendation is 10% and 5% is better. Note – this is much lower than many of the paleo diets out there. If you want to learn more about the issues associated with high levels of animal protein in your diet, read The China Study. Note – this also makes sense to me as well given that Paleo people did not have meat every day because they didn’t have good ways to store it for long periods of time. Hence, it was only available after a good hunting or fishing trip.
6. ONLY DAIRY with A2 CASEIN MILK – what the heck is A2 casein milk? A2 casein milk refers to milk from cows and goats that have been milked by humans for millennia. A1 casein milk is associated with cows in Northern Europe and then brought to the Americas. A1 casein milk has a genetic mutation from several hundred years ago. This mutation produces a lectin in the milk that mimics insulin. This lectin interferes with the proper production of insulin in the human body and is thought to be responsible for the dramatic increase of diabetes in young children in the later part of the 20^th century up to the present as families moved away from breast feeding to bottle feeding cows’ milk to babies. Do you know any diabetic youths? I do. Were they bottle fed cow’s milk? Yes, for the youths I know, and A1 casein is what caused me to be sick as a baby and led to my Mom being a big advocate of breast feeding. So, what do you do if you like cheese? Look for A2 casein cows’ milk cheese or goat cheese.
7. NO FRUITS except when IN SEASON AND SOURCED LOCALLY – remember the Into the Wild Story above? Berries have high lectin content while they are growing, but the lectins diminish as they ripen and “want” to be eaten so that their seeds will be spread. Why sourced locally? Because fruits that are shipped long distances are picked before they are ripe and the lectins do not get flushed out.
8. SIMPLE STARCH FOODS – this recommendation is to avoid simple starch foods such as potatoes that digest too easily and turn into sugars rapidly.

There are a few more details in the book, but what Dr. Gundry points out multiple times, it is not so important what you eat, but more important what you don’t eat. So, the Don’t Eat list is much more important than the Do Eat list.

The Plant Paradox Diet Results

Back to the diet results. I cut out the stuff on the DON’T EAT list, and I'm only about four weeks into this diet, but I cannot believe how big of a difference it's made on a number of levels already.

1. Did I lose weight? Yes, I lost like 12 pounds without even trying. I believe this is mostly due to bloating and water retention due to lectin inflammation.
2. I don't have any joint pain anymore.
3. I don’t have any muscle ache anymore.
4. I don't have any gut pain.
5. No more acid reflux. I was taking proton pump inhibitors for years because of a hiatal hernia and related acid reflux.
6. No post lunch energy crash.
7. No head aches.

I'm so happy about all those physical results, but the last two are the ones that really have me sold on this diet.

1. Number one is return of mental clarity, loss of brain fog. That's just awesome!
2. And last but not least, totally increased energy across the board. I used to get up in the morning and drink two, three, or four cups of coffee to just make it to lunch time. But now I don't even need a coffee in the morning unless I want one for the taste of it.

And all of these results have just been in a little over a month. It's just astounding! We truly are what we eat!

The Plant Paradox Diet is probably not going to work for everybody because we're all a little bit different, but if you're struggling with things like brain fog, fatigue, joint pain or just gut pain and digestive issues, I’d recommend you check it out. It worked for me, and it might work for you. Enjoy, and let me know if you try it out, what kind of results you have. Have a great week!

Post Video – the results I have seen with this diet are just scratching the surface of the results that other people have seen including the reversal and elimination of diseases for which it is believed there are no cures or effective medical treatments. For a full list, see The Plant Paradox website.