The Beauty Detox Solution (11 page)

In this order, all vehicles can speed along and traffic is avoided! But what happens when we switch the order?

 

TRAFFIC JAM

 

Under this second scenario, the highway is all backed up, and we have caused a traffic jam. The Porsche is stuck in the back, spinning its wheels. How does this apply to our food?

We've already discussed that the longer a food stays in our system, the longer it has to putrefy and ferment.

Therefore, we need to be aware of how fast foods move in general, and eat the lightest food items first, ending with the heaviest food items, to keep the food passing through as fast as possible.

The lightest foods move the fastest through the stomach and the heaviest ones move the slowest. Fruit passes through the stomach in about twenty to thirty minutes, with the exception of the banana, which takes about forty-five minutes. Starches remain in the stomach a few hours, and proteins even longer, as they are the slowest moving and take the most work to break down. That is why it is generally recommended to wait three to four hours before switching to a different food group.

 

SPEED OF FOOD GROUP

 

What if the three foods we were going to eat were fruit, salad and fish? Based on our Speed of Food Group chart, this would be the order in which we would have to eat these foods to avoid a traffic jam in our stomachs:

 

ROUTE BEAUTY

 

In this order, all food can speed along our digestive tract and a traffic jam is avoided! We would wait at least twenty minutes after eating the fruit to eat the rest of the meal to let the fast-moving fruit get through. The salad could be eaten right before the fish so we load up on water, fiber and lots of plant nutrients first. With greens and non-starch vegetables we do
not
have to wait twenty minutes to eat other foods, the way we do with fruit. But now let's see what happens when we switch the order:

 

TRAFFIC JAM

 

In this scenario, we are all backed up. The protein in the fish is sitting in our stomach, blocking lighter foods from passing through. Having fruit for dessert has created a bloating internal mess! The fruit is fermented by the time it reaches the intestines, where we need to absorb its nutrients. But now, there are barely any nutrients left to absorb.

For your Beauty Detox, breakfast starts with fruit, veggie sticks or a green drink, even if heavier foods follow while we are transitioning. Juice is the purest food of all, since it is not a solid food but a liquid, and should always be consumed on an empty stomach so that it can be absorbed into the body first. If we eat some toast or hot cereal after the fruit, veggie or green drink, those heavier foods will not block the flow of the lighter foods through our system. The same concept holds true at all meals of the day. Since salad is faster moving than a roasted chicken and packed with good dietary fiber, we should eat a good portion of the salad
first
to help increase the speed of the entire meal through our bodies. Eating the chicken first will prevent the salad from digesting easily and will cause a major traffic jam. Dr. Ann Wigmore recommends that we “eat raw food at a meal before any cooked food. Otherwise the cooked food eaten holds up the digestion of the raw and the latter can ferment, causing uncomfortable gas.”

Eating Light to Heavy at each meal will prevent any backup in our system and will keep us from squandering Beauty Energy. We must avoid a traffic jam from occurring in our stomach at all costs. We learned how this can happen in the last section with improper Beauty Food Pairing—it can also happen with eating
heavy to light.
The disastrous consequences from eating, say, fruit after a protein meal, or a green drink after an avocado sandwich, include fermentation, putrefaction, bloat, gas and weight gain. It will also rob us of our Beauty Energy.

 

MORE ENERGY = MORE BEAUTY SLOW PASSAGE OF FOOD = FAST AGING

YOUR BEAUTY FOOD PLAN

The Light-to-Heavy principle has an important bearing on our overall food plan. Most of us have been conditioned to eat in a certain way, and it has been ingrained in us that this way is the “healthiest.” Let's take a close reexamination.

We can see that eating according to this kind of schedule will produce significant backup:

 

ROUTE BEAUTY

 

There are multiple traffic jams along the road when we eat this way. Our bodies do not have time to fully digest one food or meal before a new one is consumed. Bad news!

It's clear that the old food plan doesn't work. We have to think about breakfast, lunch and dinner in an entirely new way.

BREAKFAST

We've all been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. According to this old belief, we need to stock up at this important first meal in order to supply ourselves with
energy to get going. Many of us eat breakfast first thing upon waking up in the morning or soon after. Some of us may even eat early “for energy” when we are not yet hungry.

The first new rule about breakfast is this:
We will never eat when we are not hungry.
If our body is not telling us we are hungry, it is also telling us that it certainly doesn't need any food.

What we do in the morning is critical for achieving our goals. When you wake up in the morning, you have a fresh start. You have not put any
new
food in your body since the evening before, so your body will go to work eliminating and cleaning out what is already in the system. For many of us, this is the
only
time when our body's energy is not consumed in digesting something but can instead be directed to actually cleansing. In the morning we may wake up with some pungent body odors, bad breath, a coated tongue, sleep in our eyes, etc. We can be downright stinky! All these odors and substances coming up to the
surface are the result of various forms of cleansing that our body has employed throughout the night in order to eliminate toxins.

Morning time until noon is key for cleansing and achieving complete elimination. We learned from our Beauty Energy principle that we have only so much energy to use, and that it must be carefully preserved. The second we start eating again in the day, we shut of the body's cleansing mechanism and our energy has to be directed to digestion. Morning provides us with a literal clean start to let the body root out toxins and eliminate waste. When I say eliminate, yes, I
do
mean go to the bathroom! Above all, we do not want to prevent our body from eliminating as much as possible. If we obstruct our body's elimination functions, our body will not be able to thoroughly rid itself of waste matter, which is
constantly accumulating. Toxicity will build, weight will pile on and be harder to take off, and our beauty will fade drastically.