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I mentioned this a little during the cohost episode and figured I should explain myself a little more. I hadn’t even heard about this until I went back to school and found it to be very interesting!

Dietary direction, what does that even mean? The direction in which your diet is taking your health and body. This can be used for people who want to gain weight, lose weight, maintain weight the same way it can be used to build up nutrition, cleanse,

So here’s a chart to show you your percentages of macronutrients you need to go in whatever the direction.  This is not talking about calories. I’ve never counted calories a day in my life except for a homework assignment. That’s when I realized I can pound some calories!
For breakfast, I was consuming  2000 calories and I had no problem eating lunch (ha ha)  and I still wasn’t gaining weight and I was always hungry (this is a sign). but it turned out that I was in a cleansing direction. So let me explain what was going on with me.  When I was learning about this I was eating raw. Not vegan or vegetarian, just raw. This would include raw and fermented fish occasionally,  raw dairy, raw cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables. I was on this for about a year, but around 8-9 months I started to become tired. because I had run out of fat and protein reserves/storage. I had 2 scary incidences with this 1) A friend came to help me move a dresser up 2 flights of stairs and I almost blacked out after the 1st flight (this is another sign). Which if you knew me, I am a pretty strong person and laborious tasks aren’t an issue for me. I’ve carried a dryer up the same 2 flights and it wasn’t an issue, I was tired of course, but no big deal. 2) I was at a contract manufacturing facility checking out their plant and as I was walking around, that faint feeling came back again. My body was trying to tell me..look, I need some fat and protein NOW! not later, now! but I didn’t know that at the time
My experience was different than my co-host of last week where he was struggling a bit and decided to change. So his fat and protein reserves as a 6’2″ male (6 months) would be different than a 5’9″ female (11 months). I have met a body builder that lasted on raw food for 2 years, but again his storage was different.
I say this to say know your limits, listen to your body and cravings when it tells you to change directions. People always talk about how your heart works hard when you have too much. Your heart can also give up when it doesn’t have enough energy to work with.
So as you could have guessed by now a cleansing direction or phase is a detox or elimination process where your body purges waste, and excess from the body. As I said just a minute ago, if you do not have excess, it will use what you have until there is no more. So if you are a person who already feels that they have no energy, tired and weak. I would not go into this direction until you no longer feel this way. This is NOT based on your weight. We eat a lot of food that do not nourish the body or give us energy so we can be overweight and malnourished at the same time the same way we can be underweight and malnourished.
The neutral direction is exactly what it states. You are looking to keep things as they are. To maintain and stay where you are cleansing and building in a balanced way. This isn’t something that you are checking on daily, but realistically..weekly. Some days will be building others will be cleansing but they will balance out to neutral at the end of the week. This concept can also be applied for days or a day:  If one meal is building and the others cleansing, whatever works for you.
The building direction is what builds/repairs/improves areas in the body. This could be deficiencies, for example, we talked about repairing vessels and arteries in an episode. Could also be repairing or rebuilding an organ like the lungs, liver, kidney, heart. For me, it was building back up my energy reserves. If you are underweight, it can help you to become a healthy weight. If you are overweight it can help you meet your nutritional needs to help you release what it doesn’t need. This is the reason why people on a paleo/primal diet can lose weight.
So when we are talking about these macronutrients: Carbohydrates, protein and fat. I am not talking about what people in general refer to as carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are vegetables, fruits and seeds…..and let me explain what a seed is because there are multiple terms used for them. Seeds are anything that grows up to be a plant. (I know your like yeah yeah, of course)
Grains, Nuts/Seeds,  beans are all seeds. The difference is their macronutrient percentages.
  • Grains have more carbohydrates than fat or protein
  • Beans have more protein
  • Seeds/Nuts have more fat
What the target is to stay away from foods that have chemicals in them, so the more processed/refined they are, the more chemicals are typically in them.
So in proteins and fats. They typically come hand in hand like inseparable best friends.  These have such a bad reputation especially when it comes to animals and animal products but I would like for your to think about this for a moment.  What makes meat and animal products bad? What do they eat? Especially in the studies that you’ll see that are constantly shown to you. (sample size is taken from where?) These animals eat vegetables the same as you, but they are given and extra spray of chemicals before they are fed to them. We have a limit to how much vegetables we can eat, a big plate and we’re done. An animal can eat our body’s weight in vegetables in a day. So if as a human being were eating that quantity of chemicals in our vegetables on a daily basis, the illnesses that we are already seeing would be doubled or tripled.  We are eating animals with that high dosage of chemicals are in their bodies, which accelerates illness and deficiencies in our bodies. If we have these illnesses then you know these animals also have them. If we choose to be aware of what is fed to the animals that we eat and how they are treated so that they are eating what they are naturally supposed to eat in nature. Then instead of an abundance of toxicity, they have an abundance of nutrients that can help accelerate healing and rebuilding.
Our body’s do this dietary directional change naturally if you are living in a region that has seasons. in the spring you start craving more vegetables eating food that are cooler, juicier and refreshing, the same thing with your beverages. This helps you sweat out toxins, lose things that the body doesn’t currently need and endure the heat. When fall sets in and the weather cools down you have a tendency to crave richer, heartier food to help you build up your immune system to endure the cold weather.
This can also happen when you change habits, you’ve gotten a new job that can be more or less stressful. You pick up a new hobby/sport, your cycle comes on. You catch a cold…….You’ve done something that changes your body’s requirements. Your cravings change trying to steer you to a different direction. The problem that most of us have is that we gravitate to refined and processed which don’t help the nutritional needs the body is asking for but makes them worse by being more deficient (since they deplete the current nutrients you have in trying to digest them)
I think this is a really neat project to do on yourself. Do a food log for a week and see what direction you are currently in. Compare that to the cravings and what say.  Here’s the thing…It’s not necessarily what you crave, but the nutrients in it.