DIETING IGNORANTLY CAN DESTROY YOUR HEALTH

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A few months ago, I met a group of people, six women and five men. They all have the same complaints. They have been dieting for two to five years, exercise vigorously every day, and eat twice a day, at times once a day. Despite all these, their health has not improved, they have not lost weight, in fact, almost all of them said they have put weight. It is frustrating that after so many efforts, they have not achieved their aim of losing weight.

I believe there are many people like these men and women who are frustrated because they have done all they could to lose weight, but nothing seems to work. There are all sorts of dieting regimens these days, and it is difficult to know which among them is helpful. People engage in dieting for various reasons. Some engage in dieting to regain health, or manage diabetes, cancer or to lose weight.  The list of diet regimens is very long: Atkins diet, which focuses on controlling the levels of insulin in the body through a low-carbohydrate diet, the Zone diet, which aims for a nutritional balance of 40 per cent carbohydrates, 30 per cent fats, and 30 per cent protein in each meal. The ketogenic diet has been used for decades as a treatment for epilepsy and is also being explored for other uses. It involves reducing carbohydrate intake and upping fat intake.

It sounds contrary to common sense, but it allows the body to burn fat as a fuel, rather than carbohydrates. Healthy fats, such as those in avocados, coconuts, Brazil nuts, seeds, oily fish, and olive oil are liberally added to the diet to maintain an overall emphasis on fat. The diet causes the breakdown of fat deposits for fuel and creates substances called ketones through a process called ketosis. The Hallelujah Diet consists of 85% raw and unprocessed plant-based food and 15% cooked plant-based food.

Vegan diet aims not to eat anything that is animal-based, including eggs, dairy, and honey. Vegans do not usually adopt veganism just for health reasons, but also for environmental, ethical, and compassionate reasons. Beverly Hills diet is an extreme diet which has only fruits in the first days, gradually increasing the selection of foods up to the sixth week. Cabbage soup diet is a low-calorie diet based on heavy consumption of cabbage soup. The grapefruit diet is intended to facilitate weight loss, in which grapefruit is consumed in large quantities at meal times. Juice fasting is a form of detox diet, in which nutrition is obtained solely from fruit and vegetable juices. The health implications of such diets are disputed. A gluten-free diet is a diet which avoids the protein gluten, which is found in barley, rye and wheat. Most of the diets regimen mentioned above are fad diets. Fad means they are not based on any scientific evidence.

Amidst all these long lists, which diet is best for you or how does one select the best diet regimen. The fact to keep in mind is that all the diet regimen was invented outside Africa by foreigners with focus on their own culture. They recommended foods based on what they have locally available and based on the research that has been done on their local food. The fruits they recommended are the fruits easily available and grown in their locality. The other day a man showed me a list of was natural plants recommended to him by his ‘nutrition expert’ who is based in Abuja. None of the herbs in the list is available in Nigeria because they don’t grow here. They are foreign herbs that he must import.

Such medicinal herbals as asparagus, horseradish, dandelion, horsetail and cinnamon grow well in certain conditions. Herbs like a bitter leaf, pawpaw, mango leaves, ginger, turmeric etc. are locally grown in Nigeria. Our local food includes yam, rice (ofada), beans, sweet potato, plantain, cocoyam, water yam, cowpeas, pap, etc. If I were to design a dietary regimen for you, I should focus on food, fruits, herbs and spices that are grown in Nigeria, not on food and fruits that you must import into the country.

The basic rules about dieting are these.

1. Never combine two fruits.
   This is a serious mistake most people make. You should only take one fruit at a time. For example, do not combine pineapple, pawpaw, mango etc. Eat only one at a time, then wait for an hour, before you eat another fruit. Why is this so? The reason is that your intestine needs different enzymes to digest each fruit, and some will digest faster than the others. When you combine, the fast-digesting fruits will slow down the slow-digesting ones. The result is that the slow digesting ones will not digest properly and will decay in your system, leading to high acidity and pollution. If you often experience loud noise in your stomach, or indigestion after eating fruits, it is likely you are combining fruits wrongly.
   
2. The second law is, never combine food and fruits.
   The idea of eating desserts immediately after food is utterly wrong. Never eat fruits immediately after food or combine food and fruits. Give at least one hour’s interval between food and fruits.
   
3. If you avoid all processed foods and any processed wheat product, you will be amazed at how easily you lose weight.
   Wheat products include bread, semolina, wheat flour, indomie, spaghetti, biscuits, chicken, cake, meat/fish pie, malt drinks, beer and others.