Op Ed: Pimp My Digestive System

“What do I want to eat?” This is a question that I ask myself sometimes up to like five hundred times per day, but it’s a question that I didn’t consider to be as important as it really is. That is until recently.

I used to live by the motto of “eat whatever you want, and match your exercise to your diet.” This worked pretty well for me, or so I thought. I have never had a problem with being overweight or unhealthy, in fact I have to struggle to maintain muscle; I am what the weight-lifting community calls a hard-gainer. To the sports medicine community I am an “ectomorph.” To most people I’m just “lucky.” Whatever though. I have a natural predisposition toward health and fitness, and it gave me the excuse to completely disregard any kind of eating guidelines, calorie-counting, weight-watching or any other self-regulation of diet; I ate what I wanted, when I wanted it, and I ate until I got a pregnant appearance. “You gotta eat for big.” I was an eating machine. Skinny guys usually are.

Recently curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to attempt a true test of will: go on a diet. My general rule of life says to set the bar as low as possible in order to ensure success, but this time I made an exception; I wanted to really test the effectiveness of a diet to satisfy my skepticism. No biases, no half-efforts, no jeopardizing the empirical process.

I researched various diets to find out which one would be best suited for someone of my physique and beliefs, and I landed on a fruit and nut-based diet. Allegedly pecans and almonds are the MacGuyvers of nuts, the go-to guys, while grapes and strawberries fill the same niche in the fruits. There are arguments that claim that one can sustain exclusively on fruit. Others claim that nuts are required. Some even require that green leafy vegetables or raw eggs be included. Some add that combinations are the most important thing. It’s very confusing to put together a diet, much more confusing than I had anticipated.

I just kinda started eating fruits and nuts. I began my diet and cheated virtually every day, completely destroying my empirical validity, but when I was feeding my dog, who is on a BARF diet (bones and raw food, not actual vomit), I realized that the diets all had a common point; they called for the consumption of raw foods.

Pasteurization, homogenization, processing and certain cooking conditions can be destructive to food‘s nutritional value, making it partially into waste before it‘s even eaten. High heat, prolonged exposure to heat, exposure to water and freshness of the food can all affect nutrient loss in cooking, and these are the exact methods that create processed, pasteurized and homogenized foods. Nutrient deficiency and consequent buildup of waste material in the digestive system can cause indigestion, constipation, skin conditions, mental fatigue, physical stress, weight… the list goes on.

During the short time that I have been on this diet, I have noted some gnarly things exiting my body. It gives me a sense of repulsion/pride to see what I have removed from my system, and it reinforces my effort to phase out processed foods from my diet. You really are “what you eat,” and processed foods are inferior, unhealthy, cheap garbage. It may be slightly more expensive, but I consider it to be my own personal health care stimulus bailout reform package.