Are you planning a cleanse? purging? A drastic change of diet? Based on what? Ignorance?
One of the reasons today’s human suffers is this: you have delegated most if not all decision making to “experts”… and you hoped that you would never have to know anything about those areas of life and you’d be safely and nicely taken care of.
A step on delegation in the 67 steps begs to differ.
Unless you have at least cursory and accurate knowledge in what you are delegating, you are setting yourself up to being the sucker…
The inverse of this is the half-knowledge independent people: they know everything about everything, and do it themselves.
And if you learn what you learn from dilettantes, non-experts, ignoramus, then you’ll have an illusion of knowledge… but your results speak against that.
One of the big areas of victimhood/delegation/ignorance is health.
Most of what you can read on the internet, and even in medical text books is 7% and 10% respectively.
Not the 100% you hoped for… is it? And that is when you read it and understood it… ha-ha… never happened, right?
So, as you can see, one of the areas of health that isn’t known much about, and therefore is ignored, neglected, disregarded, is digestion.What is digestion? It is a process in which stuff you put into your mouth, gets processed and used or discarded by the body.
It’s a lot like what happens to information as it reaches you… by the way.
Now, the most important question to ask: what is doing the digestion? Your body?
The answer is: no, or mostly not.
About 8% of the food is digested by the body: meaning the digestive juices make the food directly absorbable.
This part is mostly the part we have found to be addictive: sugars and fats.
All the rest of the food needs to go through a process, where bacteria (and enzymes) digest it first, and then we digest what they poop out.
I know it sounds disgusting, but this is what it is.
Proteins, starches, cellulose containing foods, like vegetables all need to be digested, broken up, by bacteria.
Bacteria is specialized to one type of food.
A number of years ago an Australian student of mine switched to raw food diet with lots of vegetable juices.
She instantly felt horrible, cold, and irritable.
A suggested that she gets back to a mixed diet… and she did. She felt better afterwards.
Then I heard someone say that vegetable processing bacteria is needed for the processing of vegetables.
Then it got clear to me: sudden swings in what you eat disregard this fact…
Until your bacterial landscape matches how you eat well, you won’t feel your best.
But no matter what is your diet… if you increase sugars, the harmful bacteria that grows on sugar will crowd out the bacteria that digests your food.
This is one of the main reasons sugar is so harmful: your nourishing food does not get digested: there is not enough specialized bacteria that can survive the onslaught of sugar thriving bacteria and Candida.
Moreover, the dying off sugar thriving micro organisms release toxins, nerve toxins mostly… toxins that near paralyze the intestines, and effect your mood: all trying to force you to eat sugar… after all reducing sugar is what caused the obvious bad feelings of bloatedness and foggy or intolerant mental state.
Your body is flexible enough to run on many types of fuel… although it has an ideal fuel combination as well.
But you can’t switch fuel willy nilly.
In addition to that: most people have weak stomach acids…
Stomach acids are the first stage of processing of proteins.
The acids soften the protein fibers… unless the strength of the acid is not sufficient.
Unless the protein comes with food that needs alkaline juices to prepare them for digestion.
When you look at people who lived long and productive lives, you will find people with a very steady type of diet. Nothing fancy, no swings, no fashions, no fads.
Even, consistent, both in kind, in seasonalness, and in quantity.
And another factor, that is probably as essential as the rest: communities where longevity is the norm, have the correct priority: people live in tight knit communities, supporting each other. Joy is also the norm.
Joy is very good for digestion.
Lack of joy, anxiety makes you eat when your body is not ready to receive nutrients.
Result: no digestion, and a lot of waste product that kills useful digestive bacteria.
It’s both easy and not easy. Just like anything in spirituality, health, happiness: the strait and narrow.
You should try it.
It is more taking away what doesn’t work, than adding anything.
The purpose of this article wasn’t to teach you a comprehensive course on digestion. The purpose of this article was to wake you up to your ignorance, and to your obligation to gain knowledge in the area of your health… including digestion.
