What is the natural diet for humans?

What a natural and optimal diet is for you depends largely on your ancestry.  Think of the habits of your longest lived, healthiest ancestors, and this is very likely how you should live too.  The food is not the only issue in this.  The level and type of activity is too.  If you come from people who, only a couple of generations ago, literally chased down their food to hunt, and had religious ceremonies that involved running long distances, you might need more aerobic activity than a 30 minute class three times a week.  You may need to eat loads of greens daily and a big plate of liver once a week to feel okay.  On the other hand, if your recent ancestors were seafairing people who didn't venture far from their village, you may need to lift weights a few times a week and eat lots of fish to feel okay.

Some aspects of a natural diet are easier to parse because nobody on earth is or ever will be adapted to eat the poison on many people's plates today.  I cover these in my hub Natural Diet: Cooking for Weight Loss.

The natural diet isn't really a diet the way most people think of one. You don't count calories at all. To a degree, you do watch portion sizes though. Even so, you eat when you are hungry, and stop when you are full.

If along the way, you find yourself "comfort eating", don't panic. It's nothing to really feel guilty over. Almost nobody makes it through this life without a few scrapes and scars. You need to lighten up. The natural diet is like when your dermatologist tells you to wash your face only in lukewarm water for a week, so he can see if you have a skin problem or if it's something you're doing to your skin.

It is very difficult to actually consistently overeat on a natural diet. If after a year or so you find you're still doing that, then it's time to see an eating disorder support group. Until then you don't really know what's wrong with you, if anything. Many people have been convinced that they have eating disorders when they're just improperly nourished. It's a kind of malnutrition veterinarians call being "off feed", where an animal is fat but undernourished. It happens to humans too.

So this is what you do to fix that.

1. Drink enough water!

Water is the most important physical need. Many people don't get enough. If you don't then nothing else can possibly work right as far as your metabolism is concerned. Click here for an easy calculator to help you figure out how much water you really need in a day.

Now that you've done that, the best way to get it actually done is to drink at least a third of what you need every morning when you wake up. The first thing you do after the bathroom should be drinking water. Get the first third out of the way in the morning. Put the rest in bottles so you have it ready and with you. Drink the second third by mid afternoon, and the last third by evening.

2. Rearrange your food pyramid.

Grains are not the base of the pyramid. Well, not in the way most people eat them. Vegetables and fruits are actually the base of it. Have a vegetable soup or salad at every meal, even breakfast. Have fruit handy for snacks. Always keep fruits and vegetables in the refrigerator, so they'll be available.

Buy local and seasonal, so that they'll always be the freshest, ripest, and best tasting. Get used to going shopping for fresh stuff once a week. Just set that aside in your budget. Fruits and vegetables are a better source of carbohydrates, and used by the body much more efficiently than grains.

If you can, sprout your grains, when you have them. If you can't because you can't afford it or don't have the time or means, remember that all grains should be fermented. Fermenting and sprouting makes grains worth more than just their starches.

3. Replace the junk with natural options.

When people think of the word "junk food" the first thing that comes to mind is cookies, candy, chips and the like. That is a horrible half truth. The truth is that the real junk foods lurking in your cabinets are table salt, hydrogenated and superheated vegetable oils, and white sugar.

The former two are just plain poison or gunk to your liver. The latter should be treated as a food additive chemical. Its use only comes into play when you're advanced enough as a natural dieter that you are baking a cake weekly or get into canning. You, at that point, would be using white sugar as a browning agent or preservative, and not a sweetener.

So aside of getting rid of the candy and cookies or just not buying them anymore, you're going to

• replace your table salt with gray or Celtic salt
• replace white sugar with honey, silan (date syrup) or other natural sweeteners
• replace your hydrogenated or superheated vegetable oils with animal fat, butter, ghee, or cold pressed or very midly heated expressed oils
• replace your old snack foods with the real thing, nuts, dried fruits, and toasted granola type goodies
• absolutely eliminate any artificial sweeteners such as saccharine or aspartame because they are poison at worst and will mess up your brain's carbohydrate limitation mechanism at best
• stop eating fake foods in general.

4. Eat consciously.

Fruits and vegetables can be eaten freely. Meat is the next priority, and should be eaten in moderation. No meat in a can or such things. Use real meat, even in your sandwiches.

Grains are the last main priority. You need them, especially if you don't get into sweets much. However, they should not be the main bulk of your diet. When you do have them, they should have been soaked overnight or the batter from the flour fermented for a few hours in the refrigerator.

For anything that isn't a fruit or vegetable, follow the "one cup-half cup rule" at the table for the first six months to a year. You can have seconds if you want, but your initial portion should be around one cup. Subsequent additional servings should be a half cup each.

This gives you a real idea of how much you actually eat. You will be aware of it when you're eating more or less. There is no "goal" in this though. Don't judge yourself for it. Just be aware of it.

One reason why is because when you go natural, you also become a seasonal person. At some times of the year you may eat more than others. Being portion aware (as opposed to portion controlled) also helps you to not waste food. Wastefulness and ungratefulness go hand in hand, and this is what messes with most people's heads on a diet.

We should be grateful for every bite of food we get. That is the natural human attitude about food. This is the main reason why conventional dieting doesn't work. It makes us view food as the enemy, when it is a basic need.

Common Ethnic and Familial Concerns

For example, we all need vitamin D-3 to live and function well.  We all also need to get around 400 IU of it per day in order to feel okay.  It's just that some people can get away with eating less of it than others because they can get it more easily from sunlight than others.  Darker skinned people living in cities and wearing clothes that cover most of their bodies, will need to supplement or eat more D-3 than very much lighter skinned people.

We all need carbohydrates to live too.  It's just that in areas of the world where there were very few other grains or sugary plants available year round, some people adapted to be able to eat root vegetables that are too toxic for some others.  So what a South American aboriginal person can eat without problems, a northern European may not have a tolerance for.  In addition, some traditional cooking styles that vary from region to region, help to stave off negative effects and reduce toxicity.  If someone somewhere else cooks the food differently, or doesn't eat complimentary foods or spices with it, it could remain toxic.

For this reason, some people prefer a raw or live food diet.  They only eat foods that can be eaten raw.  Many people do well on such diets, but many people don't.  If this is how their near family and ancestors ate, then they do quite well with this kind of lifestyle, and even find that they can eat foods that others might not be able to digest well raw, or might even get sick from.  Their immune system becomes stronger so they can handle the germs they might get exposed to from things like raw milk and eggs.

It's a risky option because some people are well adapted to cooked foods, don't have enough of a variety of foods that are edible raw available in their area, or have had their immune systems irreversibly damaged.  The latter accounts for most of us who've lived in an urban situation most of our lives.  This however, doesn't mean that we should give up completely.

Since you're already going to be eating more fruits and vegetables on a natural diet, you should try to make as much of those raw as you can.  When they're in season, have plenty of celery, lettuce, spinach, and other green leafy vegetables that can be eaten raw.

When you can, you should also try to get your eggs, dairy, and meat as close to nature as possible.  It's not always possible, but if you look around, you can often find things you wouldn't expect.  Some artisan cheese makers buy raw milk as close to locally sourced as can be for their area.  If you find them, you've found where to get raw milk.  In some cities, some people even raise bees for honey on the roof of their building.

It's only more expensive to eat healthier if you depend on the supermarkets...but I digress.  This section is about special concerns you might have based on your family and/or ethnicity.

Sugar Problems

Breast feed your kids.  No ifs ands or buts.  If you can't do it yourself, get someone in your family to do it for you.  Women can usually lactate almost on demand until menopause once we've done it once.

There is a theory floating around that perhaps our craving for sweets isn't quite a craving for carbohydrates.  In Africa and the Americas, there are plants that are sweet, but not carbohydrate based, that were a normal part of our diets.  These herbs and berries have antioxidants and other chemicals that are known to fight infection and prevent what are now common childhood problems like tonsillitis and ear infections.  Stevia and oubli berries are but two examples.  If you switch to natural sweeteners, you will likely feel much better, and won't miss the sugar at all.  You won't miss it because you don't need it.

People of European ancestry are not off the hook in this.  You may be able to tolerate sucrose so long as it isn't denatured, but corn syrup is a problem for you.  High fructose corn syrup is a very unbalanced sugar that is bad for everyone.  Corn should be converted to hominy before eating, or at least left as corn without separating out the oil or sugars.

People who tend to accumulate fat around the middle are at higher risk for heart disease and accumulating fat around the internal organs, and this is precisely where fat produced by the excess from corn syrup goes.  So people of northern European and southeastern U.S. Native American descent who tend to be top-and-middle heavy must avoid corn syrup at all costs.

Nightshade

If you're of partly or mostly northern European ancestry, and you have bouts of unexplained fatigue, arthritis, and strange immune related symptoms, it could be because of a diet that is toxic to you.  Try removing any kind of nightshade related foods from your diet, and it might help.  It's worth a shot.

See this page at WHFoods for more information on nightshade foods and why they might be bad for you.

Stale Food Allergy

Basically, the problem is that they are adapted to a diet of mostly fresh, raw or lactofermented foods.  For them, roasting a nut is not enough to neutralize the hemagluttens or other chemicals that can cause an allergic or intolerance reaction.

Most of the people I know of who have these kinds of reactions to stored foods are of eastern European and Mediterranean descent.  They are used to living off the land, and seldom ate foods that had to be stored long term.  Hopefully soon there will be an actual study done about this.  For the meantime though, if you have this kind of problem, stop pressing your luck.  Don't try to eat long term stored legumes, or anything that you're not sure when it was picked.  To be safe, you might even want to consider getting your vegetable proteins from other sources.

Summary: It's the what more than it is the how much.