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Lifestyle Diets: Who Eats What and Why?
So what do I mean by a ‘lifestyle’ diet? Basically, I mean it’s long-term. Not just a fad diet, but something you can sustain for the rest of your life. It’s a change in the way you eat, and a change in your lifestyle; A commitment to a way of life.
Personally, I favour the 80/10/10 vegan diet, aka the high-carb / low-fat vegan diet. But I here I want to give you information on all the various options so you can choose the one that’s right for you. Everyone is going to have different goals and abilities, and I think it’s important to realize that one thing won’t work for everyone. Hopefully this blog will give you a better idea of the options out there and you’ll be able to determine which one suits you best. Maybe you want to try eating vegetarian a couple days a week or maybe you want to plunge right into going fully raw. Any way you do it, leaning about why certain foods are considered healthy and why others aren’t can be a great inspiration.
The main point is that you’re feeling good with what you’re putting into your body and you’re giving it fuel that will sustain it for the rest of your life – until you die of natural causes, not cancer or a heart attack or any other disease. We shouldn’t be dying from diseases, it’s literally not natural, but our society is so plagued by illness that we’ve begun to think it’s just a part of getting old; just a part of life. We shouldn’t need to go to the hospital so often, we shouldn’t even need a hospital except for emergencies (which wouldn’t take place so often if people were eating food that supports their body’s natural protection mechanisms). Hippocrates one said:
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”
This quote really makes sense when you know the nutritional properties of food. There are so many problems we could fix just by making a simple change in our diet. When you know what nutrients are good for what and what foods contain high amounts of those nutrients, you can give your body the means to heal itself without having to get drugs to ‘fix’ the problem. I say ‘fix’ because a lot of the time the drugs won’t fix the problem. The’ll act as a band-aid to cover up the symptoms and make you think things are getting better, but they aren’t getting to the root cause of the problem. Any gardener knows that in order to remove something completely, you have to dig out the roots. It’s the same with food. When you treat the problem and not just the symptoms, you’ll finally get the results you’re looking for. So many people these days are chronically taking medications, and they know that your body gets accustomed to the dose after a while and then they have to increase the dose; it’s not a permanent solution.
Getting back to the 80/10/10, I know not everyone is ready to take that leap – not just yet, anyhow. And I want to make it clear that I’m not here to tell you what to do, and that I’m not doing it all ‘right’ either, in fact, there really is no ‘right’ because everyone’s body is different, with different limitations, tastes, and preferences. So what’s right for me might not be right for you, and vice versa, and I don’t always follow my own advice anyway so I won’t hold it against you if you take what I say with a grain of salt…not that I advocate the use of a lot of salt… But I think you get the jist. I’m here to share information I’ve found through both research and my own personal experience, and to hopefully inspire you to find the path that’s right for your life. So let’s get down to it.
The breakdown…
So what’s what these days? With so many variations and spin-offs, it’s hard to tell what the boundaries are in diets and who is actually eating what. Here are some general categories (not including the SAD Standard American Diet – read that how you like 😉 ):
1. Gluten-free
2. Vegetarian
3. Vegan
The vegan diet can be broken down into 2 main categories: raw and cooked. From there, many people refine it further. That’s where 80/10/10 diet comes in; 80% of daily calories from carbohydrates, 10% from fats, and 10% from protein.
4. Paleo
What’s right for me?
There are so many different diets out there and with them many reasons people choose each. You can find out more about them by checking out the individual pages I have listed under this page at the top of this site.