I just finished reading the book “Diet Cults”.
I mostly hated it, especially when he is elaborating on his non-cult cult rules… ugh. Just as unnatural as the diet cults he criticizes.
What is most striking in all the diet-cults, to me, is their ignorance of the fact that food, unless it is prepared in a tasty, mouth-watering way, isn’t nourishing for most people.
Food prepared and offered pleasing to the mind is not nourishing, not edible for the body.
I had two health calls in the past two days, and both people ate in a cultish way. In their mind they ate for health. What they shared were these:
- Their essential nutrients were not fully supplied to the body, even though the foods they ate had them… this is what the article is about!
- They ate according to someone else’s idea of healthy eating.
- Both had a family member with serious health issues.
I came away from both calls with the same feeling: unless I teach them how to cook delicious meals with the few ingredients that agree with them, they will not get better.
And even more important: they will not get happier.
Humans do best with cooked foods, and they do best with food that is made delicious.
The way some cultures cook is tasteless… the dishes are boiled, thrown together. I have traveled enough to see that.
Other cultures, like Japanese, are painstakingly meticulous in preparing their meals… I haven’t been in Japan, I have only read books. I saw that in Marikami’s books, I have seen that in Barry Eisler’s book. I can’t be sure, but I’ll risk that maybe this is the secret to their longevity?
What happens if and when the food is not tasty enough?
The same thing that is happening in France right now: they started to cook and eat like Americans, and they are getting fat… and soon we’ll hear of heart attacks, and cancers, and diabetes in a country where the numbers of these diseases, while they cooked traditionally, weren’t high.
Same in Hungary… I remember when it all turned… because I am old enough. 🙁
When my mother started to buy oil instead of cooking with chicken and goose fat. Someone suggested that oil was healthier…
And everything went downhill from there: because oils are not only NOT healthier, they are actually deadly for most people. But for the purposes of this article, they have one other contribution to the worsening health: they make the best dishes taste like crap… because the spices don’t dissolve in oil. The spices don’t bring out the fragrance of the spices.
So what did the country that started it all? They created those horrid sauces, those horrid ketchup, those horrid concentrated tragedies of explosive taste… because what they put it on tastes bad or bland.
You need to salivate before you eat for the food to become nourishment.
The smell, the look of the food, the taste of the food need to make your salivary glands to give the message to your innards… so your innards know what is coming.
As a result, in the stomach you’ll have either acidic conditions, when what’s coming is protein, or alkaline, when what is coming is starchy.
If you don’t salivate, if you don’t chew, and if you eat the standard American fare, your stomach doesn’t know… and as a result it will
- not receive the food well… it will cramp and protest
- it will make the wrong ph… because guessing is as good as 50% wrong
- it will be forced to dump the whole undigested mass into the intestines, where the “good food” will rot, make rot bacteria flourish, and make you feel hungrier (to feed the bad bacteria) and rotten… because who can feel well with rotting stuff in their body?
Indigestion and the bad breath is what it gives you on the short term, but that is just the tip of the iceberg… You continue to crave… sex, war, hating, speed, alcohol, smoke… whatever your favorite cravings do… while your body neatly stores the toxins in fat… because it can’t get rid of it. It comes fast and furious… faster than the liver can handle the onslaught of toxins.
And all that because you didn’t salivate. You didn’t have an appetite… All that because your stomach didn’t know what was coming. All that because the food was only food in your mind, not in reality… because it didn’t talk to your body through your senses: sight, smell, or taste…
Surprisingly it is not difficult to make food tasty… it is all in the basic moves that can learn in a few lessons.
I remember when I was 18, I was a maid in a British household… I cooked a few Hungarian staple dishes because they asked me to… I observed how they cooked… And I tasted the resulting food… ugh.
And this way I actually know the no-no’s that bad cooking does…
Nature gave us garlic and onions, in most cultures, to make food flavorful. They make any savory dish delicious.
Countries that cook well know that.
- don’t salt the onions or the garlic, because they need to not leak water into the fat!
- don’t cover the dish while you saute the onions… for the same reason.
- don’t use oil… use butter, chicken fat, lard, but don’t use vegetable oils… not even olive oil… there is no marriage possible between vegetable oil and the taste and smell goodness of sauteed onions.
Sauteed onions.
Boiled onion is horrid… vegetable oil sauteed onion is horrid… ugh.
If you learn just one thing: how to saute onions for your dish, you’ll immediately increase the enjoyment value of your dish, and salivate, and slim down, and get your nutrients from your food.
There are more cooking moves, but not many. I have a book on cooking techniques from Hungary… where people started to get heart disease when they started to cook with oil… 1
I’ll try to find an online course to teach you, or if I must, I’ll teach you myself. It is that important.
As long as you eat with your mind, you won’t be well. Guaranteed.
Consider this: if you HAVE TO put any sauce at the table, including Ketchup, mustard, mint sauce, cranberry sauce, any spice mix, any condiment on your food: then it is NOT well made.
Your Chinese, your bbq, your chips/French fries, your hamburger, your sandwiches… if it is not good without mayonnaise, or ketchup, or even oil and vinegar… then it is not tasty…
Your salads don’t nourish you. Your raw vegetables don’t nourish you. Your food needs to be lovely without anything added at the table or while cooking, from a bottle.
Your pizza sauce, your tomato sauce, your Indian simmering sauce… all designed to cover up that the food is bad for you or that it is tasteless.
Learn to cook. Just the basics… it is easy… albeit it is precise… Cooking is chemistry. More like bomb making than you’d think. The Anna Karenina principle 2 applies here too: all good food is made with methods that are alike: every bad or tasteless dish is made with bad methods in its own way.
I say above to use the good food preparation technique with the foods that are good for you, or at least are not harmful for you.
But how do you know what foods are good for you? You, personally… Not your brother, not your friend, but YOU.
I can muscletest your food list for you. I am good at it, and the results speak for themselves.
I managed to bring my health number up to 70%… it used to be 3-4% by muscletesting the foods that are good for me, and even eating little of what is neutral for me.
I can do the same thing for you.
Let me muscletest the foods that you can eat
Keywords: | Description: |
food preparation | the preparation of food, any food, is to make it appetizing, pleasing to the eye, tasty for the tongue, and easier to digest for the stomach. You fail to do any of these, and you are starting to build disease, malease, that is both physical and emotional. Learn to prepare your food well. |
appetite | Appetite is not hunger. Appetite is the body’s message that it is able and willing to process food… if you pay attention to your body’s language, you’ll not eat what the mind wants to eat, you’ll eat what you feel an appetite for… Start distinguishing the yes and the no of your gut… Nothing is more important than that. |
hunger | Hunger should be rare. Hunger is a signal of your whole body, telling you that it is running on empty. The hunger you frequently feel is the discomfort caused by indigestion, or some bug in your stomach or your esophagus. Humans are closer to predators in that they are “designed” to eat rarely: when they have food, not all the time like cows. Their time is better spent hunting… or other endeavor… Intermittent fasting results prove this point famously. |
- There is more to it… but I’ll talk about it in another article… it is what happens when you don’t give your body what it needs, when it craves what it needs… Just like in America, people turned to sugary stuff… and, you’ll see in that article, what happens when you eat sugary stuff is even worse than what your oils do…
- Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Congratulations Baheej. It’s a big step, especially for a Memories soul correction.
I’m just starting to get what you mean by ‘eating with the mind’. Thank you
Hm, this is actually a point of view I haven’t looked at my stuff. You see I look at the world through a panorama wide cone of vision, where I can see connections that cannot be seen in a narrow cone of vision. Like a gazelle… I look at everything, but my attention doesn’t have to be there: it can move around, from the grass, to all around.
What you are saying is that if and when someone tries to follow me with a narrow cone of vision, it is dizzying… I remember when life was like that for me. Dizzying. And I made my cone of vision narrower and narrower, until I became agoraphobic, until I could not see another person’s face in one glance… I had to look left and right and left and right to see it all.
That is when a friend sent me to this behavioral optometrist to teach me to open my cone of vision. And my life changed, because I was able to see that life is not wrong, that life is not threatening, that I had no reason to be afraid all the time, or prove anything, or compare myself to others. Heaven became available. just wait until I share what i am about to write about today! Dizzying…
Thank you for your contribution, really. Wow, never looked from your shoes. Thank you.
Wondering how you can go from this to human design stuff? You are quite all over the board and it’s confusing.
thank you for the cooking lesson and delicious photos. my next onion experiment will be without lid/salt.