~ ENZYME YOUR WEIGH TO ECSTASY!! ~
Make note that I do not get a kickback from anyone or any place for the promotion of the book mentioned within the following data. I simply find my gratitude in knowing that some readers will relish the information found just below, enlightening them to the digestive processes and the ‘why’ – and perhaps the end – of the many miasmas of the dieter or chronically ill! Whether the reader chooses to find the book – from whence this info came – and follow it in its entirety or adapt it to their own regimen of eating is their personal decision.
Through posting this information, I share the renewed HOPE that flooded my own spirit as I became once again empowered to reach for the healthy potential to which I was initially intended!
(NOTE: Don’t miss the information on vegetarianism, the ‘better half’ of this article – next in line!)
READ ON and ingest this life-changing information!
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Enzyme Your Weigh
to Ecstasy
“Food is pleasure. Food is guilt. Food is reward. Food is also the raw material and fuel that build and power your body. You are what you eat, pure and simple. The well-being of our bodies is dependent on the food we supply. It is our choice. No one forces us to eat anything. We pick the time. We pick the place. We choose the food that will become us; the food that will be converted into the flesh, bone, blood and, yes, the fat that make up our bodies.
With that in mind, let me get to the heart of Conscious Combining: It isn’t what you eat or how much you eat that makes you fat; it is when you eat and what you eat together!
This is nothing new. The principles of Conscious Combining on which The New Beverly Hills Diet is based go back thousands of years. The first recorded discussion of these principles was in China’s (classics of Internal Medicine of the Yellow Emperor 98-1606 B.C.), but the principles had clearly been known for centuries before. Food combining was widely practiced in ancient times—particularly in China and ancient Persia—and the practice has persisted right up to our century, when it was primarily the province of health faddists, as they were called.
The principles of food combining are dictated by what happens during the digestive process. The purpose of digestion, of course, is to turn food into the nutrients that sustain life: carbohydrates provide energy; proteins become the building blocks of flesh, bone and blood; fat acts as a transport medium for vitamins and hormones, while lecithin, a fatty acid, is an emulsifier and a key constituent of the sheath that surrounds our nerve cells.
As I said earlier, the process of digestion begins with and is contingent upon enzymes. These biological catalysts are in the food we eat and are also activated in our bodies by the food we eat.
There are four stages in the digestive process: (1) digestion; (2) absorption; (3) metabolism; and (4) elimination.
THE DIGESTIVE PROCESS
STAGE 1: DIGESTION
Food’s first stop in the body is your mouth, and that’s where digestion begins. Initiated by chewing and found in the alkaline juices of saliva, an enzyme called ptyalin starts the breakdown of carbohydrates. Ptyalin does not act on proteins, fats and fruits (a special category of carbohydrates), all of which continue unaffected to the next stage, your stomach.
If a carbohydrate has been properly digested by ptyalin, it is already in the form of a crystalline sugar called maltose by the time it reaches your stomach. In the stomach, maltose is further broken down before it moves on to the next stage.
The stomach is also where proteins are digested. The process begins as hydrochloric acid attacks the fat and activates the enzyme pepsin. As the hydrochloric acid and other substances convert the fat to lipids, the pepsin softens and begins to break down the protein into amino acids. Next, the hydrochloric acid and pepsin work in concert to complete the reduction of protein into amino acids.
By the time proteins, carbohydrates and fats reach the next stop, your small intestine, they have already been turned into nutrients.
Fruits, however, are carbohydrates in a class of their own. To be digested, they have no need of your body’s enzymes; fruits already contain all of the enzymes necessary to reduce them to nutrients. They pass unscathed through your mouth and stomach until, in the small intestine, the fruits’ enzymes act to convert them to nutrients. Because of their eminent digestibility, fruits move quickly through your system. Before you’ve barely finished your last bite of fruit, the first bite’s nutrients are entering your bloodstream.
STAGE 2: ABSORPTION
It is at this stage that food’s nutrients, including water-soluble vitamins and minerals, enter the bloodstream. Through the bloodstream they are distributed throughout your body to nourish your cells.
STAGE 3: METABOLISM
Metabolism is the engine that powers and maintains our bodies. This is the stage at which nutrients, the proteins, are transformed into the building materials that create and replenish our flesh, bone and blood. It is here that we “fuel up” with the energy carbohydrates provide. And it is here that we begin to feel—for good or ill—the effects of what we eat. Contrary to what you may think, there is no such thing as a slow metabolism. You control your own metabolism and metabolic rate through your eating habits.
STAGE 4: ELIMINATION
This last stage is where the by-products of the nutrients, the waste products your body doesn’t need, are discarded. It is a constant process involving respiration, perspiration and excretion through urination and bowel movements.
Each stage of the digestive process is subject to the effects of what you eat. Mix the relatively fast, alkaline-medium process of carbohydrate breakdown with the rather slow, acid-medium process of protein breakdown, and the digestive system is utterly confounded.
If you eat an apple all by itself, it will be processed through your stomach in some 15 to 20 minutes; an enzymatic fruit such as papaya will take even less time.
If you eat a protein meal—shrimp and steak, for example—it will remain in your system for upwards of four or five hours. Eat the apple or papaya on an empty stomach at the start of the day, and it moves unfettered from the stomach into the small intestine. Eat the fruit after the shrimp and steak, however, and it remains blocked in the stomach by the protein. Eat a steak and baked potato and the carbohydrate enzyme needed to digest the potato will be neutralized by the protein enzymes.
But inefficient digestion—indigestion—is more than heartburn; likewise, it’s more than just ineffective in terms of nutrition. We all have experienced the effects of less than optimum nutrition. Lack of energy, nervous tension, depression, and dull hair and skin are all potentially the result of indigestion. We have also felt the pain, bloating, discomfort, gas or stomach ache it can produce. But how many of us realize that our added fat, or extra pounds, is a product of our digestion gone awry? FAT (OR ADDED POUNDS) IS JUST ANOTHER SYMPTOM OF INDIGESTION.
If our bodies broke down food the way they should,’ absorbed and metabolized all that they should in the way that they should, and if, in turn, they eliminated the waste, then nothing would be left over. We could not gain weight. We could not get fat. The presence of those added pounds means that one or more of the four stages of the digestive process—digestion, absorption, metabolism and elimination—have not occurred efficiently.
In the case of carbohydrates, this can occur if they move through that first stage of digestion—the mouth—without being acted on by ptyalin. Your system is geared up to process maltose, so when the wayward carbohydrate hits your stomach, there it stays, well on its way to fat.
How can you make sure that the first stage of carbohydrate digestion is effective? There are three rules for moving carbohydrates successfully through your digestive system to make them nonfattening and energy producing. Contrary to what you have been hearing, you DO NOT have to give them up; you simply have to:
- Chew your food. I hate to sound like your mother, but she was right. Chewing triggers ptyalin and masticates the food to fully expose it to the enzyme. So go ahead, luxuriate in eating that flavorful mouthful. Just chew, chew, chew!
- Beware of sweeteners. It’s the sugar in the baked goods, not the fat, that makes you fat. Whenever you mix sweeteners with a grain, such as flour or corn meal, the combination neutralizes the ptyalin and you end up with a stomach full of undigested carbohydrates.
- Avoid mixing carbohydrates with proteins or eating carbohydrates after proteins. With proteins: carbohydrates do not require as much digesting time in your stomach as proteins. However, when they are eaten with proteins, they become trapped. After proteins: hydrochloric acid and pepsin are activated when a fatty protein reaches your stomach. The hydrochloric acid breaks down the fat and activates the pepsin so it can begin its work. When these enzymes act together, they create an acid medium that neutralizes ptyalin, inhibiting full carbohydrate digestion.
Your body digests proteins slowly; hence, once they enter your digestive system, your body will be unable to digest carbohydrates for the remainder of the cycle. You can expect meat to remain in an efficient stomach for up to 10 hours; poultry about 7 hours; fish 6. Bear in mind that most of us do not have efficient digestive systems and the process may take considerably longer.
What can you do to ensure that your body efficiently digests the foods you feed it? That’s the point of Conscious Combining. For starters, you can take charge of how your body processes nutrients by making conscious choices about the types of foods you eat and when you eat them. You’ll be learning how to do that on the 35-day Born-Again Skinny program you’ll soon be starting.
Critical to the success of Conscious Combining is the technique of enhancing the enzymatic action in your body through the use of the natural enzymes in certain very specific fruits—the same fruits you’ll be eating on the program.
I must admit that I’m confounded by the total lack of research addressing enzymes and body weight. True, the science of enzymology is of recent origin. Enzymes were only first “discovered” in 1878, and it was 1926 before an enzyme was crystallized in the laboratory. While the determination of enzymatic sequences dates only to 1967, and enzymes continue to be identified and their effects traced to this day, it seems that the thrust of enzyme research thus far has been on exploring the potential for disease therapies and genetic engineering, not weight loss.
However, it has been 15 years since I pioneered the idea of body fat, or added weight as the case may be, as a product of indigestion and enzymatic action in The Beverly Hills Diet. Quick to follow my example, a stream of other lay authors adopted my ideas as they explored the relationship between enzymes, simple food combining and weight loss. In the intervening years, while anecdotal evidence has mounted with each successful adherent to my principles of Conscious Combining, there still have been no controlled scientific studies to finally bring discussion of this theory into the scientific mainstream. Though they have been quick to criticize and disavow the theory, I fear that the mighty nutritional dogma of the medical community keeps the “experts” from uncovering or even asking the question: “Why does it work?”
Let me state it again, loudly and clearly: It is not food that causes weight gain, it is inefficiently digested food. The major cause of inefficient digestion is the overburdening of the digestive system through eating too many different kinds of foods together at the same time. The imbalance of the balanced meal!
Somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, in prosperous and advanced societies like ours, it became possible to obtain virtually any food at virtually any season of the year. The “balanced meal” was held up as an icon for a thriving “modern” culture enjoying a booming economy. And eating three times a day was infinitely more practical than eating “whenever.” Technologies of food preservation were refined and perfected, then taken a step further to prompt the actual creation of new foods altogether— wholly artificial or “junk” foods, touted as another important time-saver for a democracy on the move. And obesity became one of the new diseases of the age (see chapter 6).
What the “balanced meal” failed to account for is the way the digestive process works. If you combine food groups, you not only make it harder for the enzymes to do their job—again, enzymes for one food group cannot “cross over” to work on other food groups—you also actually impede enzymatic action.
I ask you, if the traditional balanced meal worked, would 60 million Americans be fat?
The New Beverly Hills Diet makes use of the facts of digestion and enzymatic action to let the individual plan eating experiences—or to “work around” the facts if the plan cannot be met—by paying attention to food combinations and to when the combinations are eaten. This is the essence of Conscious Combining. It enables the individual not only to stop miscombining, but to combine proactively for efficient digestion that rids the body of toxins, ensures energy and maintains slimhood on a lifelong basis.
That means that if you know that a dinner party is coming up or if it’s Thanksgiving next week or if you could not resist going out for brunch, you can plan for, or around, those events. And if you indulge in more miscombinations than your digestive system can tolerate, if you “binge,” you then turn to another feature of the program, Conscious Compensation, to apply corrective counterparts.
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The book that has it all: a day-by-day diary preceded by a conventionally formatted book with a full
explanation of the program. Augment this book with
the audiocassette program, The New Beverly Hills Diet
Slimkit, and CyberSkinny, my interactive World Wide
Web site (http://www.cyberskinny.com), and you have
the whole enchilada. (Oh, yes, enchiladas are on the diet, too.)
This time you can’t help but win . . or should I say lose!”
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