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All you need to know is that there is protein, fats, and carbs.  You can get along very well if all that you remember about carbs is that there are carbs with fiber and carbs without fiber.  Eat very few carbs without significant fiber (like your starches).  Eat all you want of carbs with fiber (like your cruciferous veggies) - you can even slather them with quality fats!  If you study up on food combining, you’ll learn that you can mitigate (improve) a non-fiber carb by making the sugars less immediately available to the body.  If a carb has fiber, it still has sugar, but the body must work very hard for it.  You can’t cure a non-fiber carb and make it a good carb, but if you’re smart and eat it sparingly, you can make a non-fiber carb more difficult for your body to extract the sugars.  If a carb has no or low fiber (like white rice or something) then that means the sugars are READILY available and the body doesn’t have work much at all to get at the sugar.  Make sense?

For instance, french bread is always a bad carb, but it’s less of a bad carb if you dip it in oil or slather it with butter.  Why?  Because the fat makes it harder for your body to get at the sugar much like fiber does in fiber carbs.  Again, though… fat will not cure a bad carb and make it good, but it will make it less of a bad carb, while still being a bad carb.  It is damage control only, but very, very worthwhile.  You should always endeavor to control your damage.  If you study food combining, you’ll learn that some combinations sort of cancel each other out, making it neutral, fine, or less bad.  The mexicans eat rice and beans which is a great example of food being used to mitigate food.  The protein of the bean mitigates the accessibility of the sugar in the rice.  There are tons of examples and tips to help you along.

One tip is, “Don’t eat a sweet with a meat.”  A classic example of sweet with a meat would be a steak and a baked potato.  Know what happens when you combine them?  The whole meal is a bad carb because of that combination.  Sad, ain’t it?  In order for that to resemble a good meal, the meat AND the starch together need to make up only 20% of your plate with the rest being fiber carbs like cruciferous vegetables, so there is enough fiber in your meal to mitigate any non-fiber in your meal.

All you need to remember about fats is that it’s not the quantity of fats that’s important, but the quality of fats (eat only healthy ones like butter/ghee, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, animal fats i.e. fat from your meat, and cold-pressed virgin coconut oil).  The diet industry has fooled us into thinking that fat makes you fat.  This is not true.  Carbs with no or low fiber make us fat. Excess protein also gets converted to fat.  Fat triggers the feeling of being sated or full.  It’s what tells us we’ve had enough and we can stop eating.  If you don’t get enough fat to trigger satiety, then you will overeat and never feel satisfied even though you are full to bursting.  Ever searched the cupboards in the hour or two after a meal, knowing you want “something” but nothing seems to look like exactly what you want?  We all have, if we think about it.  It means you didn’t eat enough fat and more often than not didn’t proportion your fats, proteins and carbs well enough either.  Craving a sweet little something after you eat?  Your fats, proteins, and carbs are not in the right proportion.  Feel bitchy, gassy, bloated, or indigestion?  The answer is the same, same, same.  A well combined meal with enough fat will leave you feeling satisfied with no tummy troubles and no cravings.

Know what is primarily responsible for making you fat and disease-laden?  Insulin or more specifically insulin resistance.  You spike your blood sugar all the time by eating all kinds of non-fiber carbohydrates, which keeps insulin floating around all the time.  Insulin is toxic to your cells, so eventually your cells will put insulin on “ignore” so they can get away from the toxic effects.  People ask me all the time why they don’t have diabetes already if they are eating all this bad stuff, like it’s proof they can eat like that all their life.  Well, in an effort to make the cells listen to insulin, the pancreas will keep making more and more insulin - think of it as the cells giving insulin “the hand” and now the insulin is yelling at the cells to try and make the cells listen.  If you have a really strong pancreas, you can make a lot of insulin for a really long time.  Once you can’t you will become diabetic.

Make no mistake.  It’s not that we don’t need insulin.  Insulin does very important things, like control hormones, etc., but when it floats around all the time, it’s going to give you the disease of aging.  Yes, “aging” is a disease and the disorders that come with it are not necessary.  Are we clear on what makes insulin?  Non-fiber carbs.  Non-fiber carbs are any starches like potatoes, white flour products like breads, sugar drinks like juices, sodas, grains that are low-fiber or less than whole grains, etc.  Control insulin and you control your health, weight, sex-life, and longevity.

They’ve always told us that most heart-attacks happen in the early morning hours following a fat-laden meal.  This is not accurate, but it has served the industry and fueled a huge niche market that people are still getting rich off of to this day.  What’s accurate is that blood platelets are indeed stickiest at that time of morning, but what makes them that “sticky” is a high carbohydrate meal and specifically NOT a high-fat meal.  If you or someone you love is prone to heart attack, it’s going to come after a high-carbohydrate meal.  Plus fats are fairly neutral; they can decide whether to be alkaline or acid.

Cholesterol is not to blame either.  Cholesterol doesn’t cause arteriosclerosis.  It’s actually cholesterol that keeps your cells pliable and squishy - you need cholesterol in your body and diet.  Know what causes arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)?  INSULIN.  In the 70’s a Dr. Cruz accidentally dripped insulin intravenously into the leg vein of a dog.  What happened?  The vein very quickly got almost completely occluded with plaque!  The experiment has been repeated over and over since then and it happens every time.

Let’s clarify the 80/20 stuff.  The 80/20 rule is to stop eating when you are 80% full so you have room for digestion and make sure your plate is always 80/20 as well.  80% of your plate should be fiber carbs.  The remaining 20% can be non-fiber carbs, starches, proteins.  You don’t have to be tricked by the diet and food industries into thinking you need to buy “special” foods in order not to be fat.  Any “low fat” packaged or processed food is going to be higher in carbs… non-fiber carbs, which means you’re the loser in that game no matter how healthy they tell you it is.  “Box” and “healthy” are mutually-exclusive terms.  You can exchange the word box in that phrase with package and processed and the answer is still the same.

Do you want to eat whatever you want without getting sick or fat?  Eat the right things!  Stop eating food that other people have screwed with.  Make it a policy to stop eating food that comes in a box or a can or a package.  Frozen veggies are okay if the fresh version is not available, but not frozen veggies with sauce or crap on them.  You can make your own sauce and crap quite easily and it’ll be poison free ;). Know where your favorite foods are on the glycemic index.  Study food combining.  You’re worth the time investment it takes to learn to eat right.  Aren’t you?  Aren’t you?

I hear singles tell me all the time, “Oh, I don’t want to take the time to cook from scratch when it’s just me.”  Just you!?!!  Who else deserves your best efforts?  Who else deserves the best food in the world more than you?  Yes, your family is equally important and they deserve quality food too, but just because a meal is you alone doesn’t make you less deserving of the time and care in preparing good, safe foods.  Are you suddenly only worthwhile when you have family?  Of course, you’re not!  If you don’t take care of you, what good are you to other people anyway?  You don’t have as much to give those you love if you haven’t first taken care of yourself.