Proper Food Combining Practice Makes for Great Gut Health

How Can Proper Food Combining Help?

Another example, one of my clients, James Richards, lost 65 pounds and healed diverticulitis with food combining, and using The Happy Gut Cleanse. Excitedly, He reported that the weight melted off, and so did the tire around his belly. Best yet was the reduction of flares and pain triggered by his gut issues, now nearly nonexistent.

How Does Proper Food Combining Practice Work?

The practice of proper food combining is based on the understanding of how digestion works. The body releases specific digestive enzymes for each food group. Resultingly, when many types of foods are consumed at once, enzyme production becomes confused and slows. Therefore, food sits in the stomach like a rock. That is one reason why digestive enzymes, such as Enzyme Energy, are quite helpful for digestion.

However, even with digestive enzymes, eating foods from multiple food groups — carbs, proteins, fats, and fruits, for instance —slows digestion and halts metabolism. Putting all the food groups together at once impedes digestion and can create bloat, weight gain, toxicity, inflammation, brain fog, and constipation.

How do you feel after Thanksgiving dinner? Many people spend the rest of the day on the couch. Much of this fatigue has to do with the many types of foods consumed on holidays, within one huge meal. Yet, most American cuisines are based on proteins, carbohydrates, and fats thrown together in one dish.

Common Negative Food Combinations in the United States

In America, the common bad food combinations are:

• Eggs and toast
• Oatmeal with berries
• Sandwiches, with meat, bread, mayo, tomato & lettuce
• Pasta with meat sauce
• Chicken and rice
• Steak and potato

This is why so many people complain of obesity, blood sugar issues, and inflammatory disease. Their digestion is just not functioning optimally. Fortunately, proper food combining practice is one easy answer for healing digestive distress. This powerful concept was popularized by the 1990s best-seller Fit For Life, which documented this sensible understanding of digestive health.

The Solution for Better Digestion

Understanding food enzymes, plus the discovery of food combining, eased my digestive issues. At 22, I suffered relentless bloat, colitis, blood sugar issues, and severe low back pain. Walking through a bookstore one day—more focused on my gut pain than the latest bestseller—I discovered food combining through Judy Mazel’s, The Beverly Hills Diet. This book was taking the country by storm!

Using the principles of food combining, my bloat disappeared, my gut began to heal—and so did my low back pain (the result of constant gas!)

Many years later, Harvey and Marilyn Diamond (Fit For Life) presented food combining practice as a magic formula for weight loss. Desperately looking for anything to heal my relentless gas, bloating, and chronic lower backache, I found the solution—food combining. This protocol transformed my health, and this simple tool may do the same for you.

Food Combining is Body Chemistry

Based on chemistry, food combining was developed in the 1930s by Dr. Howard Hay. This principle is grounded in human evolution. We became farmers only 10,000 years ago. Before that, we were hunters and gatherers. For breakfast, we may have eaten berries or wild nuts. By evening, we may have found wild greens or seeds—unless our ancestral hunters had luck catching a fish, bird, or found some eggs.

Therefore, the primal dinner table did not offer multiple courses that many of us enjoy now. The human habit was to eat nuts with seeds and to eat meat alone. Frequently, food was unavailable—hence regular fasting. Complex carbohydrates, such as wheat, rice, and beans, came much later. This is why digestion is so challenging today.

To consume meat, beans, rice, salad, and fruit simultaneously seems normal to us now. Yet, biogenetically, optimal digestion came from limited food combinations, eaten seasonally. Through the advent of farming, ranching, and food storage, combinations of foods have only become available in the last blip of human evolution.

Digestive Enzymes are Key to Effective Digestion

One group of humans still express these gut instincts—kids. Watch a child eat, and you may well see them remove a hot dog from the bun, and consume it separately. They request pasta plain with butter—no sauce. Instead of being called biogenetically brilliant, we label them picky eaters. Although my kids loved a variety of foods, they wanted everything plain. God forbid I put a banana on the cereal! The children’s gut knew better.

The crux of food combining is the awareness that different digestive enzymes process carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and fruit. For carbohydrates, we need amylase, made in the saliva for predigestion. To properly digest protein, we need HCL, produced in the stomach. If we eat these two foods, carbohydrates and proteins together—as in the classic American hamburger—we create a digestive disaster.

When these two food groups land in the stomach together, the stomach acids process the proteins while the carbohydrates ferment. This is when heartburn, belching, and gas begin. In the small intestine, the enzymes for carbohydrates work overtime because the predigested amylase is short-circuited by stomach acids.

Together with food enzymes, properly combined meals create the rocket fuel of energy and ageless beauty.

Food Combining Made Simple

Ease into food combining with these simple rules:

• Eat proteins with vegetables.
• Eat carbohydrates with vegetables and fats.
• Eat fruit alone, thirty minutes before or two hours after a meal.

Blood sugar crashes occur when food is not fully and properly assimilated. Since eating many different foods at once stresses the digestive system, no wonder people are exhausted rather than exhilarated after eating. This is especially frustrating when eating healthy foods with the intention of increasing energy and mental clarity. Plus, with improper food combining, we may find that even fresh foods make us feel tired. That late afternoon coffee break becomes a critical energy booster and brain defogger. Indeed, many in our culture cannot imagine life without coffee or strong tea! This is the result of the fatigue caused by improperly combined foods.

Benefits of Proper & Orderly Food Combining Practice

The icing on the cake is the weight loss. Properly combining foods is the best way to boost metabolism, which activates weight loss and increases energy. When undigested food passes through the bowel into the blood and lymphatic system, it is not recognized as food. The fermenting mixture becomes a toxic substance that the body does not recognize and cannot use—or eliminate. Here comes the poochy tummy and tire around the middle!

After I had discovered and applied proper food combining, I experienced and episode that taught me what happens when I improperly combined my foods. Pregnant with my first child, Luke, I left the house with a long to-do list and no lunch. Feeling like I was going to perish for lack of food at midday, I stopped at a sandwich shop for a turkey sandwich (on gluten-free bread). Half an hour later, I was doubled over with relentless cramps, sharp pains in my chest and sweating. After three miscarriages, I was terrified that I was having another.

In a panic, I called my functional medicine doctor. He agreed to see me immediately, and with a smile, said, “You are NOT having a miscarriage. You are making gas and indigestion!”

Get a Flat Belly by Using this Practice

That may be the last meal I improperly combined! I am happy to share that since that time, those symptoms are part of a by-gone history of gut issues and inflammation.

Now, what I love about proper food combining is that, at 69, my belly is flat and I do not get weight gain. If you believe that a bloated, distended belly is part of the aging process, it is not. Yes, hormones do affect weight and body shape. However, with proper food combining (and digestive enzymes) you can enjoy a slim, fit body — at any age!

Scan the handy food combining chart above into your phone, and in no time, you will commit the simple principles to memory. You might discover, as I did, that this is one of the simplest, easiest ways to heal your gut, and love what you see when you look in the mirror.

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