Food Separation, The New Way To Lose Weight!

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(clicky) separate carbs and proteins to lose weight!
the jist of the article, is that proteins [meats and nuts and such] need an acidic digestive environment to digest properly, while carbs [breads, rice, pasta and such] need an alkaline digestive environment to digest properly- combine both together in the same meal and the digestive juices cancel each other out, leading to failed digestion and weight gain due to accumulated undigested food stuck in the gut. the solution is to eat small meals every 3 hours or so, alternating between pure protein meals and pure carb meals. it's an interesting idea, for sure.

sounds like a convoluted "diet program"

It is somewhat true that your body is better at dealing with food types separately, to a degree.
I like to eat carbs first so they can just go straight through and then I follow them with the fats and proteins that will hang out in the stomach longer. However I don't eat grains or refined carbs of any kind... only veggies. Sweet potatos and fresh veg juice are the only real carby things I eat.

I'm very against the idea of "lots of small meals throughout the day" because that's just gunking up the works. Screws up your intestine's cleansing waves and often leads to over eating.

When you eat a solid meal and give it time to digest, the intestinal muscle will create waves to push and pull everything through cleanly. BUT if you are constantly eating small meals and snacking all the time, the intestines lose coordination and the waves that should cleanse your GI tract just slosh everything around back and fourth, leading to bacterial overgrowths, candida and the like.

We are not grazing animals. We are better adapted to go longer without food and eat a couple meals a day.

Most people just eat too damn much.

Sounds fad diety.

It's premise is the same as the "colon cleanse" and whatnot. Yes, it's possible, if you eat junk food and like French fries everyday or something, to have food collect in the gut, but you solve this by having a "clean" diet high in fiber. Of course, you can also use raw foods to clean the digestive tract out. Sometimes there's diminished returns doing that, though. But basically, eat a bunch of kimchi or something everyday and your digestive tract will be pretty clean.

As far as the diet itself, I don't think there's really any culture throughout history that first off, could eat every 3 hours, and second off, would do this food separation thing described here. Carbohydrates with your meat or protein is very good for muscle building, which would be important if you were exercising vigorously, which would be everyday in ancient times, you'd be picking up logs or whatever, chopping wood, hunting, whatever. The reason for this is, carbohydrates make you release insulin, which allows the proteins to get to your muscles. Unfortunately, it does in some individuals make you fat, since it's more or less a storage hormone, so then you get into insulin sensitivity, and the underlying causes, which could be a whole host of hormones (which can be quite easily manipulated by your mental health, too!) or food sensitivity, and then the bigger underlying hormone is usually high cortisol, a stress hormone. The cortisol will trigger the body is in stress, and if the body is in stress, it'll wanna store as much as possible, ie, for winter like a bear.

So if this food separating thing works, it would work based on that principle, of somehow manipulating insulin. Not on acidity or alkalinity of food. That said, again, the idea of eating 3 hours or six meals a day or whatever is completely foreign to most cultures besides America. I remember even reading about a Chinese Olympic lifting coach, a Westerner brought up the "six meals a day" thing and he was like "How do you find time to do anything besides eating, then?" He didn't understand the concept at all. Some people swear by it, and if it works, you know, it works. I feel it's just an extreme. The opposite extreme of the "eat 6 meals a day" thing is intermittent fasting, where you eat in a window of like 4 hours a day or something and don't eat the rest of the day. I feel it's best to just avoid extremes like that.

Lastly, regarding the acid/alkaline thing mentioned, that's more general body condition. There's acidic and alkaline foods that'll influence how your body works. Leaning towards alkaline is generally better, as acid tends to make you sick in various ways.

My take on it anyway. If you wanna try it, go ahead, it might even help you in some way to eat healthier, but it's certainly not a "magic bullet" by any means. I can say the only "fad diet" I'm at all interested in is blood type dieting, eating for your blood type seems interesting. Lastly, too, one thing about excess weight that's really stubborn is a lot of times it's due to accumulated toxins in the body. If your body can't expel them or process them, it gets stored in fat. That's why weight loss a lot of times is unpleasant feeling, as you're having to deal with a backlog of toxins.

I can't buy it.

How much weight could you actually gain from food trapped in the gut?

No, I'm convinced that weight gain/loss is due to hormones (specifically insulin).

If this diet works at all, I'm betting it's because it effects insulin levels.

I think part of it is due to water retention from eating foods your body is sensitive to. I lost 10-15 lbs very quickly when I elliminated grains from my diet. I increased my meat/fat intake by 60% and still lost weight.

^^^Yeah, short term water loss is part of the process. Most low carb/high protein diets recommend drinking lots of water and maybe something like chicken broth to keep hydrated.

The long term weight loss is generally due to lower insulin levels promoted by that sort of diet.

If you are interested in the processes here's a good book:

Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It (click)

i read that people who underwent coffee enemas/high colonics, lost weight because [in one user's observation] "the old dead food came out of me in sheets." this person [a writer for GQ who investigated high colonic regimens] said "my [protruding] gut disappeared."

i did something very similar when i lost weight before, though sometimes a couple of food groups were included.

it first started when i was morbidly obese and started to get signs of hypoglycemia (now gone). i needed to start eating small meals more often, which meant a snack or something every 2 or 3 hours. i wasn't a big eater to begin with, so it would have been a ridiculously small portion size to eat a miniature balanced meal every 2 hours! so i had a banana at 8, oatmeal at 10, egg at 1, smoothie at 4, etc. that wasn't exactly what i ate, but i can't really remember.

i have always liked eating that way, even as a child (simple on my tastebuds, no surprises). when i started to lose weight, i continued with a similar sort of plan. it made it easier to track caloric intake and so on as well. i didn't look obsessively at that stuff, but i figured out some benchmarks so i couldn't lie to myself.

p.s. i never lost weight from cleaning out my gut. i had to do that for some tests, and it made no difference whatsoever even in the short term. i tend to have digestive issues so i think i don't store a lot of food there.

Sure, I get that. But that could only be a very limited amount of weight.

I'm sure I could lose some of my protruding gut that way.... the problem is, my protruding gut is under a thick layer of fat!

^^^
yeah, i imagine we'd both be happier if we were as fit as this fella-