Are you feeling run down, tired, or you just don’t have the pep and stamina you used to have? I know we want to
think that this is simply normal aging, but it isn’t. We have a deeply ingrained mindset in our culture about how life looks and feels as we age. We believe it is truth, just the unfortunate reality of biology. But it is not biology.
Many years ago I read a fascinating article on an “undiscovered” tribe of indigenous people living high in the Andes mountains. On their first encounter with western anthropologists, a major difference was noted in their beliefs about aging. They believed that as you aged you only got better physically. These were a people that lived at very high elevations and communicated between different tribal towns by sending runners with news between the different towns. The anthropologists noted that as these runners aged, their physical stamina and strength only increased with age and leveled off when they got into their 70’s. They had a very different belief about aging than we do in the west. Unfortunately, contact with the western world contaminated them and within one generation they aged just as we do.
So biology is not the reason for our steady decline as we age. Since what manifests is the sum of the interaction between biology and environment, that says that the biggest share of the cause of our decline is our environment. A simple example from the news this morning – “Plastic trash outnumbers baby fish 7 to 1 in coastal fish nurseries.” Our world today is nothing like the lifestyle of those Andes dwellers. Our modern world is polluted in so many ways. This is not a modern problem either. Thousands of years ago cities were polluted, just with different things. Basic foodstuffs of society have been contrary to human design ever since we started growing grains and domesticating animals. The ability to create stable cities meant eating a food supply that was no longer tied to the seasons but could be stored and eaten all year long. A steady food supply is not the way the body was designed to function. We were meant to spend time without food available. We were also meant to eat a wide variety of foods, not just foods that could easily be stored for later. Wild foods are much less energy-dense and contain much higher levels of fiber. Basically food security is not part of the human design.
Okay, so what does all this have to do with veggie
rejuvenation? Simply put, it is our western diet that is making us look and feel old. If we want to feel younger and more energetic, we need to take a vacation from our traditional western fare every so often. Our bodies are filled to the max with an unbelievable mix of poisons and pollutants. More than that, the natural mechanisms for cleaning out these poisons, as well as recycling old cells so they can be replaced with new young cells, has been shut off. Food security turns off the rejuvenation mechanisms in the body. Our body recycles old worn-out cells when there is not enough food from the environment, meaning proteins and sugars, to supply the body with the basic building blocks for repairing damaged tissues. For instance, the lining of your gut has to be replaced every 24 hours. If there is no dietary source of the proteins needed to do the job of replacing the gut lining cells, then the body will kick into autophagy (recycle mode). It will scavenge old cells to break them down into the proteins and other components to do the repair work. But if we always keep ourselves well fed, these old cells just keep hanging around clogging up the works.
In my old days, I would regularly trigger a rejuvenation cycle in my body by spending some period of time water fasting. Typically I would fast a few days to two weeks. This produces a deep cleansing of the body, removing both poisons and old (senescent) cells. But over the last few years, I have learned that total water fasting is no longer ideal. Poisons have to be bio-transformed in the liver before they can be eliminated from the body. Most people’s livers are simply not in good enough shape to do this anymore. Our livers have been overloaded with too many poisons from too many sources. They need support while doing a cleanse. Fortunately research down at USC has discovered that we can get the same benefits of fasting without totally water fasting. The real key is eliminating proteins and carbs and keeping the total calories down to about 600 to 700 a day. They came up with some fancy fast mimicking diets to do this, but it is much simpler to simply do a veggie feast for a
few days.
Ellen and I did this last week for a few days beginning Sunday afternoon after our supper and we stayed with it until Friday afternoon. Initially, we were only planning to do this until Wednesday afternoon, but we discovered that we were not starting in the right place – ketosis. It took a couple of days to get into ketosis and then we did our three days. So what does a veggie rejuvenation look like? It looks like eating non-starchy vegetables three times a day, cooked in a variety of ways. I made a cream of vegetable soup with the cream actually being blended steamed cauliflower. We had vegetable stir fry, cauliflower rice, salads for several days, braised Brussels sprouts, jicama coleslaw with guacamole dressing, pan-fried cabbage “noodles” along with konjac noodles, and of course veggie smoothies.
You don’t really need to pay attention to the quantities you are eating. Just eat till you are pleasantly full. It is fine to use small amounts of olive oil or avocado oil, along with various kinds of flavored vinegars you like and any non-seed spices. Konjac noodles are also allowed as long as they are pure konjac root. Tamari sauce, fish sauce, and coconut aminos are also good for that savory meat flavor you might be missing.
About 50% of people are allergic or sensitive to nightshade vegetables (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant) so these should be avoided. Many people are also sensitive to various plant lectins (poisons) so these should be avoided also. Lectins are usually mostly around the part of the plant that contains the seeds. Leaves, stems, flowers, and roots are pretty safe, but watch out for the starch stored in the roots, like in sweet potatoes. Small amounts of raw carrot, beet, and rutabaga are okay, and jicama, onion, turnip, radish, and garlic are fine.
What you stay away from are all meat, eggs, dairy, grains, fruit, soy products, legumes, pseudo-grains, nuts, seeds, starchy tubers, seed oils, alcohol, gluten-containing products, and manufactured or processed foods. If you need some sweetness, beverages made with stevia, monk fruit, or inulin are okay. Small amounts of coconut milk may be used.
The other big trick to get the benefit from the veggie rejuvenation is to start already in ketosis. So spend three days before the cleanse eliminating all carbs from your diet to propel you into ketosis (eat less than 20 grams of carb a day). This will kick your liver into high gear, burn up any stored sugar in your muscles, reduce sugar cravings, and drop inflammation throughout your body. All these will make the three to five days eating just veggies much more pleasant and doable. Sure you are going to miss the protein foods, but that is the whole point. It is the missing the proteins that make the body go looking for proteins it can reclaim by breaking down old funky cells. This is how old hunter-gatherer peoples lived forever. The truth is they were not the best hunters, and most nights they came home empty-handed. All there was to eat was the very fibrous rough plant foods the women had managed to gather during the day. Calorie density was poor and fiber was high. This is what we are recreating with the veggie feasting. This is precisely what lifestyle factors it is that prevents the chronic diseases of aging. If a hunter-gatherer can survive past childhood, they typically live to a ripe old age with their brains intact and their bodies strong.
Brain intact and body strong – I like the sound of that.
Take care,
David