We began to follow food combining principles and he taught me some great recipes that he had come up with. I began to make vegetable sandwiches with cucumber, sprouts, carrot slices, green leaf lettuce, tofu mayonnaise and then slap it between two pieces of dairy free bread. I’d eat entire raw vegetable platters with a little dip and began eating fresh squeezed carrot juice from the local Save-on-Foods grocery store.
Rhythm’s Of Food
I learned a great deal about food, about the body, about how the body uses food and suddenly realized that food was fuel for the body. I was introduced to the concept of “rhythm’s of food” and how our body has a 24 hour cycle split into 3 parts:
- consumption of food – Noon to 8 PM
- use of food (assimilation) – 8 PM to 4 AM
- elimination of food – 4 AM until Noon
I had never realized how important it was to eliminate the food we’ve been eating, or that it was a specific 8 hour cycle of it’s own. To simplify, it goes something like this: noon to 8 PM is time for consumption of food, 8 pm until 4 am is assimilation of food and from 4 am until noon is the elimination cycle.
What I learned was that if we do not clean our body and eliminate the waste material, we set ourselves up for disease. When our body becomes toxic, it will store fat as a method of keeping us safe from the toxins. The solution was to eat only foods that require no digestion from the time we wake until noon and then have our first digestible meal at noon, and not before.
The Power Of Fruit
I learned about the power of fruit. Fruit is special in that when eaten in ripe form, requires no digestion but rather – slides through our stomach and into the colon. Fruit is meant to be eaten ripe, on an empty stomach and then given between 20 minutes and a half hour for processing in our stomach.
And so it began.
I had never heard of this before. I decided to try it. I ate only fruit and fresh squeezed fruit juices for each morning of my day and only at noon would I have something else. I continued this practice for years to come.
The other easy principles that I learned was about combining foods together. The idea is that protein requires an acid to digest it, starches require an alkaline and vegetables can be digested in either. So, simply put, eat only proteins and veggies or starches and veggies, but never proteins and starches together.
The fat began to drop off quite quickly.
The rest of food combining can be read about in the book Fit For Life.
But it didn’t end there.
I began a journey of natural health. I read everything I could on the subject and then implemented a wide variety of ideas from many different disciplines.
I began to preach Fit For life like it was gospel. It was making such a huge change in my life and my energy levels that I told anyone and everyone about it. My roommates became quite pissed off at me and the next stage of my evolution came from one very simple comment:
Rob, you’re basing everything around ONE book – read a little more on the subject
I was hurt for just a moment, but then I realized she was right. I began to search out everything on the subject of natural health.
Ayurveda
I learned about the colon, about fiber, about acidophilus, about the heart and lungs and about good and bad fats. I learned about Ayurveda or the Indian science of eating for your body type and realized that not only are there 24 hour cycles our bodies go through, but seasonal as well. I learned that different body types respond differently to tastes’, smells, foods and exercise. As I learned, I tried things and then kept what worked and discarded what did not.
The Power of Your Mind
I began to use the power of my mind to attract success. I used creative visualization, affirmations and the power of the written word to set intentions. I learned a unique concept regarding thought – that I could create my life exactly the way I wanted it, just by believing it to be so.
It’s not just about what we eat, but also how we think and what we believe that plays such a vital role in our success. Reading books such as “the magic of belief” and “the power of your subconscious” were instrumental in my understanding that we’re not to just sit idle and watch the world go by. We can have what we want and create it ourselves. Eventually “Unlimited Power” by Anthony Robins was on my reading list and I learned about reframing our beliefs. There were times I put the book down when Tony gave an exercise to do. It was intimidating to think that I was about to let go of very negative thoughts. They were my comfort zone. I worked through it. Tony also had a chapter on Natural Hygiene in that book which solidified my belief about what I had learned and had been practicing from Fit for Life.
I read a book called “The Silva Mind Control Method” and began my first experiments with meditation. Frankly, I didn’t get much out of the practice I learned in this book, but it opened me up to the idea of meditation.
Transcendental Meditation
I remembered a documentary that I had watched years earlier about the Beatles and their experimentations with Transcendental Meditation. I had a seed planted about it early in life and I reached out to it now. Funny thing is that when people ask me why I began TM, my answer was “for the bodybuilding aspect of it”. What? Well, what I had come to understand about bodybuilding was that the body grew from the stimulus of bodybuilding, not from the work performed. I realized that growth occurred when we rested and if we ate properly to supply the body with the raw materials for that growth. What I came to know about meditation was that it was a way to lower stress and deepen the resting ability of the body. The body “becomes still” and technically, with better stillness and rest, growth should occur. Good enough for me to try. I continued the practice for 10 years twice a day for 20 minutes. Do I recommend TM? Nope. I don’t do that anymore. I find that a very simple audio technique called Holosync Audio Technology provides me with the same benefits if not more and I now use their CD once or twice a day. Much simpler and no hype or negativity associated with it.
I consider myself to be quite masculine and I’m comfortable in my masculinity. People seem to have some sort of major disbelief when they learn that I meditate. They see a very large bodybuilder / power lifter type person and exclaim “you… meditate?”
I use what works. Yes, I meditate.
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