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The Digi Diet, which is the most common-sense way of eating you could possibly imagine, has the potential to change the health of the world.
I did not personally create it – Mother Nature did – but I have put it into words for you so you can learn about how your body would really love you to eat. I hope you will be wise enough to try it out.
• Have you ever wanted an easy way to feel more energised and healthy?
• Are you aware of the connection between heavy foods and tiredness?
• Do want to feel younger, happier, lighter, more motivated and positive about life?
This way of eating – and the reasons for doing so – really couldn’t be simpler. ‘Digi’ is simply short for ‘digestibility’ and this diet is all about eating more of the foods that your body finds easily digestible, and less of the foods which it finds harder to digest. The effects of eating this way on the body and the mind are very noticeable.
You’ll have more energy, feel more positive, feel more balanced and grounded, tiredness will disappear and you will feel lighter, with greater enthusiasm for life. You will sleep better, look and feel younger, and your digestive strength and health will improve considerably. It could even add years to your life span.
These are significant claims, but once you understand how your digestive system works and what it needs to fully nourish you, you will realise that these things are natural consequences of eating in harmony with it.
Allow me to explain…
Our body uses a lot of our energy to digest the food we eat. The heavier our food, the more of our energy the digestive system requires. This why we can easily feel very tired after a meal, and this needn’t happen. Our meals are often used as a sedative to fill us up and make us feel restful, but this is not so good for us. Instead we can finish our meals feeling satisfied yet energised, calm and grounded. So what we want to be doing is eating foods that energise (and nourish) our body, but don’t require a lot of time and energy to be digested. Then we will enjoy the greatest benefit from them.
And for you to really maximise this benefit, you must bring in awareness. Awareness of your stomach and how easily it copes with the foods you put into it. Awareness of how your foods are effecting your energy levels and your moods. Awareness of why you are eating certain things.
The best news is that in terms of what foods are ‘allowed’, there is no restriction. No foods are ‘out-of-bounds’ and you can eat as much food as you wish.
Does this sound “too good to be true”? Why should it be? We really can enjoy eating delicious and satisfying foods and also experience excellent health. The secret is noticing and enjoying the effect that food has on how you feel – your energy and enthusiasm, your sense of calm and stability, your positivity and clarity of mind. As you notice these things, you will naturally choose to eat in a way that encourages positive feelings and positive moods within you. Why would you want to choose anything else?
Overeating
Often we eat just because we want to enjoy a particular taste in our mouth – something sweet perhaps, or salty, or spicy. Often we eat because we want to feel full and avoid a feeling of emptiness inside. On a deeper level, this is directly related to our desire to feel fulfilled. But we should all know by now that food cannot ‘fulfil’ us in this way. Fulfilment is something you feel in your heart, not in your stomach.
What we all really want is to feel full of happiness, full of Love. But if we don’t know how we can experience this, we choose to fill ourselves up with food instead. This is why there is a strong pull in our collective diet towards eating more filling foods like bread, pasta, porridge, starchy grains, potatoes, cheese and so on. Such foods fill us up quickly and they keep us feeling full for a long time. As a result, we don’t need to experience any ‘inner emptiness’ for quite a while, and we really don’t like that feeling!
We have a very strong emotional connection to food, which is natural but not always healthy. You see, we cannot bring lasting happiness and love into our life by eating more food. Yes, we can feel more nourished by incorporating healthier foods and drinks (like vegetable juice) into our diet, but consistent feelings of Love, happiness and peace cannot come from that juice or from a raw cacao and spirulina smoothie! You might feel very happy and full of love after drinking them, but then you will find that you need to keep drinking them to maintain that feeling. The same is true with any addictive food, like dark chocolate for example. It can make you feel happy, but it will create a dependency. If you want to know whether you are dependant on a particular food, go without it for a week and observe your state of happiness and equilibrium.
Truly nourishing foods and drinks greatly increase our long-term sense of well-being and balance. They increase the health of our blood and our heart, so that our receptivity and capacity for Love and happiness are also increased. This is what we can do with food, and it is a very powerful and effective way to do it. But eating more food cannot nourish us in this way. Even eating too much of something considered to be a ‘healthy’ food can be used as a way of filling up the stomach and eliminating the sense of emptiness that is coming from elsewhere.
Overeating is a very common thing, and is just as addictive as consuming addictive food substances like sugar, chocolate, coffee, alcohol etc.
Now let me ask you a question: Do you believe the more food you eat, the more energy you will have? It is not so. You can prove this to yourself by drinking only carrot juice for a day and seeing how amazingly energised you feel. Conversely, you could try eating as much pasta or rice as you possibly can, and see how tired, heavy and sleepy you feel.
When you fully understand how your digestive system works and how it gives you energy from your food, you will realise the importance of choosing the right foods to energise and nourish your body.
The Digestive System
Many people have likened the human stomach and intestines to a juice extractor, which is pretty accurate. After thorough chewing of our food in our mouth, our stomach then gets to work with its acids, breaking down the food further, turning to it a liquid mass which can then pass through our intestines for further digestion and absorption of nutrients from the liquid. Whatever cannot be absorbed by the intestines, passes out of the body as waste.
The key part here is that our intestines absorb the nutrients from the liquid mass that passes through them. The more liquid our meal has become in our stomach, the easier the absorption of nutrients occurs in the intestines. And the more naturally juicy and watery our foods are, the easier digestion occurs – fruit being a perfect example.
This is why drinking vegetable juices (e.g fresh carrot juice) is so very nourishing for the body because firstly the stomach has very little work to do – so little energy is used – and secondly, the juice is such a water-like substance (i.e. not thick) that absorption of the nutrients through the intestine walls happens very rapidly and easily. This is a perfect energy situation: little is used, lots is gained!
At the opposite end of the digestibility spectrum, it takes a tremendous amount of energy for the body to try and turn a substance like bread or pasta into ‘juice’ for absorption through the intestines. In fact, it is near impossible. What is created as bread or pasta digest is more like a thick, gloopy paste that sludges rather than flows through the intestines. The intestines struggle to absorb anything from this thick sludge. So why is bread so popular? Because it is satisfying and filling. But digestible? Certainly not, and many people worldwide are now becoming aware of the discomfort it causes in their bowels and intestines, whether it is gluten-free or not.
So let’s consider for a moment the effect of every day eating meals made up of the heavier, harder to digest foods such as bread, pasta, rice, meat, cheese. How much energy are these foods giving us in terms of vitality (to keep us feeling energised) and how much energy are they taking from us as they sit in our stomach or upper intestines being digested for 3 to 4 hours (or more)?
Again such meals are very satisfying because they keep the stomach quiet for such a long time, but surely any healthy meal must give the body more energy than it takes?
If you have ever tried a juice fast – which means drinking only vegetable juice for 2 or 3 days (or more) you will understand from first hand experience how liberating it feels to not have such a heavy stomach all the time.
On a juice fast, the fullness of your reservoir of energy is available to you all day long. You will not feel tired and you will not feel hungry, because the body is receiving an abundance of energising nutrition from the vegetable juice. There is more energy in a glass of raw vegetables juice (e.g. Carrot, beetroot, broccoli) that in any quantity of cooked food you can eat. If you try eating more and more cooked vegetables for more and more energy, you will just feel tired.
Digestibility
The key is digestibility in partnership with good nutrition. All natural foods with a high water content are digested most easily by the body, because there is an abundance of juice. Fruit is notoriously quick to digest (watermelon being a perfect example) including vine fruits like cucumber, tomatoes etc. Above ground vegetables are slightly harder to digest because of their fibre, which is why I always recommend getting a lot of your vegetable intake through raw juices.
Finely grated vegetable salads – like carrot and beetroot for example – are also easier or the stomach, because the fibre has been broken down by grating it. Cooking vegetables does make them easier on the stomach, but it reduces the vitality of the vegetables, as enzymes are damaged in cooking. Again, to experience this for yourself you need only experiment by eating a whole bowl of cooked carrots for lunch, and then in the evening consuming the same amount of carrots, but in a juice. You will certainly feel the difference in your energy!
I often use juices as an example, but I am not suggesting you live on vegetable juices. Juices are a good example because they give the body so very much energy, whilst taking little for digestion. So if you take the underlying logic, which is: consuming an abundance of easily digestible and nutritious foods, you will see how you can turn around your own energy problems quite easily.
So many people nowadays suffer from tiredness, fatigue, a weary digestive system, irritable bowel syndrome, leaky gut syndrome and so on because of the way our current ways of eating revolve around harder-to-digest foods. For example, cereal grains and their products, as mentioned earlier (bread, pasta, grains etc.) These foods are not easy for the body to digest, along with nuts, seeds, and heavy proteins (animal protein being the worst). We simply lose more energy than we gain. It is that simple.
Rich, oily foods like cheese, nut butters, tahini etc. are even worse and take more time to digest than any other foods, specifically due to their high oil content. This is why they should play the smallest part in our diet and should be eaten in small quantities.
If we can just make a little switch, so that the bulk of our diet consists of more digestible foods like vegetables, green salads, fruits (especially avocados), soaked seeds and nuts (more digestible), protein rich smoothies, juices and so on, with things like grains, cereal products, starchy vegetables (like potatoes), meat and cheese having a more periphery role, we would very soon feel a new lease of life.
There is such an abundance of delicious fruits and vegetables on this planet (especially some of the more exotic ones we now find on our supermarket shelves) that we will never feel like we are denying ourselves, and this is a very crucial aspect of being successful.
This diet does not rule out any foods. It simply suggests that you allow your diet to revolve around the more digestible ones. Is that not common sense? It’s so obvious that people are amazed that they never considered doing it before, and the results are as close as your next easy-to-digest meal.
If you need guidance as to the foods which are easier to digest, it is simple: the higher the natural water content of a food, the easier it is to digest. The lower the natural water content of a food, the harder it is to digest. Two obvious extremes to illustrate this are: watermelon (water-rich & easy to digest) and bread (a dry food & hard to digest).
All dry foods, no matter what they are (e.g bread, biscuits, cakes, crackers of any sort, even dried fruit) are not easy to digest because of the lack of water within them. You can soak dried fruit for a few hours and they become rehydrated. This increase in water content makes them easier to digest. The same is true with all nuts and seeds. If you soak raw nuts and seeds the water content increases and the oil content decreases. They become juicier, more digestible, and so much easier on the stomach.
You might well ask: “what if I eat foods like bread and pasta and just drink lots more water?” This may help them move through your system a little easier, but it doesn’t change the fact that foods such as bread and pasta create a thick gloopy paste during digestion. This thick paste offers very little in terms of nutrition, and any nutrition it does contain is not easily absorbable by the intestines. Such foods are simply not naturally digestible or assimilable, whereas all fruits and all vegetables (of which there are more delicious varieties than we can possibly count) are. They are also packed with nutrients.
The whole purpose of eating more of the naturally digestible foods is to be kinder to your digestive system and give it more of the foods it finds easy to process – the foods which Mother Nature has already laid on a plate for us. Consequently, you will enjoy receiving a lot more energy from your meals, and the change in how you feel will amaze you.
You truly can enjoy a new lease of life, just by choosing your foods more consciously and carefully. And to top it all off, any stomach problems will become a thing of the past. So what are you waiting for? Make your next meal a more digestible one…
The brightest light conquers the deepest darkness 