So you want to know what a diet for longevity should look like?
One of the top components of life span development is eating a diet for longevity. Secrets for success in this area include living this as a lifestyle and not a "temporary diet", being willing and flexible to change bad habits as well as being unwilling and inflexible when offered unhealthy food by other people! The search for "the longevity diet" is like a holy grail that science, nutrition and anti-aging researchers are constantly grasping for, but never actually attaining. One of the major problems I see in this area of longevity research is the unwillingness and fear around suggesting a major need for change in the dietary practices of the general public. Also there is the question of whether or not a perfect one-size-fits-all diet actually exists.
In my opinion there is no one specific diet for longevity that works for everyone, but rather there are healthy eating habits and principles that you can begin to shift your lifestyle towards following. Depending on your lifestyle you will have varying needs for nutrition. One popular myth being propagated is that we need to eat meat like our genetic ancestors did, some even say large amounts of it. This notion is not based on science, nor does it make any sense.
Regardless of these conditions, there are general qualities of diet that can be incorporated into your daily life, piece by piece. An example of this would be eating the centenarian foods found in the Okinawa diet or the Hunza diet for longevity. In the long run these healthy habit formations will contribute to; increasing bone density, improving memory, helping reverse aging, naturally detoxing your body, raw food weight loss, naturally lower blood pressure (if it's high to begin with), reversing heart disease, re-educating your body in how to handle stress and much much more. There is no need to have a specific diet to gain these qualities, but rather these are the results of the best lifestyle ever!
Like I mentioned, of all the most important factors of longevity, diet is definitely a key component to your plan. There are some general goals that you might wish to keep in mind when searching for a diet to help your lifespan development. If you're not getting all of these results, all the time, make small changes to your diet for longevity until you feel them.
#1 You'll want to get complete nutrition without any deficiencies.
#2 You'll want to feel great all the time.
#3 You'll want to look great all the time!
#4 You'll want no negative side effects that cause accelerated aging.
#5 You'll want it to be so easy to follow that it naturally becomes you.
#6 You'll want it to taste so good that you can't help but stick with it!
It is totally 100% possible to live this way all the time!
The human body is built to be a peak performance machine and you deserve to settle for nothing less than that! If you are settling for less, then it might be a good time to ask yourself why you are doing this. The vast majority of our culture has been raised in a society that has been programmed with a great deal of false beliefs about their true potential.
We are the only ones that can limit ourselves. Cast away the blame and perhaps take a look at how you can deal with the problems in your life all by yourself. Perhaps my all time favorite quote is from Peter Ragnar who is in my opinion one of the most successful people on the planet (I'm referring to success in all aspects of life). He lives by the phrase "If it's to be, it's up to me". Try printing this phrase out and posting it on your wall in a place where you will see it every day. If you start to explore strategies like this, the possibilities for success are endless.
The leading health research being done today validates the principals of a diet for longevity I have written about below. Since each topic is longer then what I can cover on this page, I have links below that will take you to a more in depth review of each subject. These are the qualities that when integrated into your lifestyle will make part of a true anti aging diet.
~Raw food benefits
~Organic whole food lifestyle
~Calorie restriction diet for longevity
~Green juice feasting
~Health benefits of drinking water
~How acid alkaline foods affect your health
~Getting vegetarian complete protein in your diet for longevity
~Wildcrafting plants
~Creating herbal elixirs with centenarian foods
~Natural sweeteners
~How to grow sprouts
~Proper food combining
Are you finding this overwhelming?
If you happen to feel this way that's perfectly OK. I can assure you that finding the best components to a diet for longevity (Which is more accurately described as a lifestyle. For many people the word diet implies something that is temporary.) is very simple and it won't leave you with the stress of trying to learn too much at once.
By integrating these components of diet one at a time, coping with stress that comes from trying to do too much at once won't be a problem. Because of this, you are also more likely to avoid something called a healing crisis. A healing crisis can happen when you start to detox your body very quickly (a very quick lifestyle change for the better can cause this) and you become sick from suddenly having an overload of "waste" trying to be eliminated from your body.
That being said, if your drive to win the longevity game is so strong that you really want to make a positive abrupt change, go for it! This also might be necessary to do in the case of severe illness where there might not be enough time for gradual change. There are retreat centres and holistic health practitioners that can certainly help guide you with this too. There are plenty of people who have literally made huge changes in their diet and lifestyle overnight and been successful. This takes strong commitment, willpower and a deep desire to improve yourself along with the planet as a whole. Sudden changes are not for the majority of people however.
Seeing the experiences and mistakes of other people as well as myself, it is apparent to me that a slow and steady pace wins the diet for longevity race. Along with the risk of causing a healing crisis, the other main reason I advocate making gradual changes over sudden big changes is that if you happen to fall off this lifestyle, you will fall back on what's most familiar to you.
This is one of the easiest ways to deal with stress in everyday life while simultaneously making positive life changes.
For example, someone eating a junk-food type of diet high in animal products who had just recently realized the benefits of raw food and then switched to an organic, raw, living food diet for longevity; if they happened to encounter a situation in their life that demanded their attention away from integrating their new healthy eating habits, they would be quite likely to fall back to the junk food diet. This is much more dangerous because their body has just detoxed and has finally received real sustenance, but has suddenly been given garbage again and will react severely to it.
According to the law of vital adaptation, if you're doing something that causes ill health, the initial reaction to the substance will be driven deeper into your body to the point where you can engage in a repeated activity and have no negative side effects. This does not mean that you are immune however, the damage is still accumulating within your body. Smoking is a great example of this. Your very first drag leaves you coughing, choking, wheezing... and maybe even turning green. However over time your body adapts and you no longer get those acute symptoms from a single drag on a cigarette. However chronic symptoms such as diminished lung capacity and poor blood quality continue to decline at an exponential rate if you become a regular smoker!
If you've eaten a mostly raw living food diet for longevity long enough to have seen the effects of detoxing your body, you can understand how going to an extreme by eating junk food again would be like smoking for the first time with virgin lungs. It won't be pleasant and could even be more destructive to you then it would to someone who is used to eating junk food all the time (although over the long term they are going to be the ones who get the severe chronic diseases). If you transition gradually so that you're used to eating in the way of the step right below the other (see below), then if you're ever caught in a situation where you're tempted to eat poorly, you simply won't. When I look at sausage roles at a gathering or event for instance, they don't even register in my mind as edible food.
The following "ladder" shows one way that you could choose to shift step by step to the optimal diet for longevity. No matter where you are starting on the ladder, the goal is to consistently progress upwards until you're at the top and experiencing the best life ever!
Raw living food diet for longevity (Eating plenty of live superfoods. No cooking of food above 115°F except herbal teas that require high heat and using raw grass fed dairy if it works for you)
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Eating a raw food diet with some cooked food some animal products
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Focused on eating a 100% organic whole food lifestyle with very little meat (Same as a Traditional Chinese Medicine or an Ayurvedic diet, max. 2-4 oz of meat a day)
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Eat only whole foods and everything is organic (Only whole grains, no processed food, no junk food)
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AllFactory farmed animal products and eliminated from your diet and replaced with organic and pasture fed foods
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S.A.D. diet (Standard American Diet, full of junk food, fast food, processed food, little or no fruits and vegetables and full of refined sugars)
The following website is a great resource for implementing some of the higher levels of this pyramid I have just outlined. Even if you're a busy vegan, then this site can provide you with the tools to make a healthy, longevity lifestyle work!
A great way to transition between "diets" is to implement the healthy eating habits I have written about over a period of time.
For example, if you can get comfortable with a cooked vegan diet, changing over to a raw vegan diet for longevity will be easier and you'll have less cravings to deal with then if you were to jump from the bottom of the ladder to the top, which is too abrupt for most people. Cravings for certain foods are perhaps the #1 reason why people fail in sticking with a new diet/lifestyle plan. If you happen to be eating mostly raw living food and you were to "fall off the wagon" while traveling for example, you'll only fall back to the cooked vegan diet since you'll be so repulsed by the alternative and you gave your body ample time to adjust. Once whatever disruptive "challenge" that had risen in your life passes, you can resume working on changing your lifestyle to one of a superior and healthier nature!
At the top of the ladder you will be eating mostly centenarian foods and live superfoods. This type of diet for longevity allows for maximum nutrition with minimal bulk. Part of feeling great and functioning at your peak optimal level is not to have to be constantly digesting food. Humans spend about 6%–17% of their daily "energy budget" on digestion. If you are eating a smaller amount of food that is high in nutrients and enzymes as part of a living food diet, you will be closer to the 6% SDA (specific dynamic action) number for digestion and thus have more energy on a daily basis for other things. People eating cooked, processed and fast foods are closer to the 17% SDA for digestion.
A great tool that you can use in developing the best diet for longevity as well as breaking bad habits is the exercise and practice of creating a "soul mirror". By following these instructions you can pin point and change bad habits that block you from developing yourself as well as bolster and impress upon yourself those qualities you wish to develop that are positive. Autosuggestion and affirmations are a tried and true way of empowering your subconscious to accept any changes you want to make for the better, whether it's related to your diet, personality or just developing good habits to make life flow seamlessly.
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