This is Chapter 9 of Heather's ebook "Helping Yourself to Health and Vitality"

Heather's Eating Plan

1 - Two and a half cups of coloured vegetables daily. 

FRESH.  Not microwaved.  This does not include the potato count.  Preferably plant your own greens and herbs - and pick them a few leaves at a time.  This is very feasible, even on a small balcony.  Remember colour selection - ensure that there is heaps of colour on your plate each meal. 

Wok and juicer become invaluable here.

Celery, lettuce and capsicum are useful snack agents.  These can be filled with the salad and fish/egg mixes that might normally go on breads.  Half raw red capsicums filled with avocado/cottage cheese/tahini/ protein/eggs of some description/babaganosh dips are amazing. 

Cooked tomatoes and capsicum stuffed with left-over rice, pine-nuts, or raisins, are stunning hot or as lunch-box fillers.  Use beetroot as a roasted veggie - step outside what your mother may have taught you that food ‘looks’ like.

2 - No more than three hours between snacks.

Divide daily intake into five portions, dramatically night time eating.  This will allow the body to heal itself.  Eating the biggest amount when everything is about to shut down ensures you don’t sleep well and don’t get the best out of your eating.  It means that you do not feel like breakfast which, may well help catapult you out of the fat/energy/health crisis you are trying to remedy.

3 - Avoid all gluten.

This is not to say that some won’t find its way into your mouth accidentally.  Many things we eat - even tomato sauce - have thickening agents.  The more you prepare your own food, the more control you have over all aspects of your inner biochemistry. 

Avoid WHEAT, RYE, OATS, BARLEY.  Check out small print on labels; you will find an immense number of things hidden within.

Before worrying about what you will eat, stop and think how drastic this really will be in your life.  Try it out for just a month.  The previous ‘hits’ you needed of bread /carbs will disappear, with the three hour protein snacks and 2-1/2 cups of vegetables daily. 

Getting the veggies in daily means you have more than just carbohydrates from non grass (gluten and rice) sources.  Eating every three hours, you will not be perpetually hungry, cranky and lethargic, which is really just the body crying out for PROPER nutrition. (Not more – just better quality).

What is the repeated invasion of these highly sensitizing products (breads etc being the pivot of your diet) doing to you? 

When you were an infant, your Mum - if breastfeeding, and all through her pregnancy with you - would also have reached for these; they were easily obtained and filling.  When you were weaned, it would have been onto these items. 

Before your system had a chance to develop properly, you were on a constant round of toast, sandwiches and pastry casings (pies), noodles, pasta, cakes and biscuits.

Over time, as this is what everyone eats, you think of this as ‘normal’, as you do with the very health issues you are trying to alter.  This is due not to ‘aging’ but to not knowing how to create wellness and not paying attention to variation and seasonal availability for your diet.

It may be that this simple change will correct the majority of the issues you thought you just had to live with’.  I am not suggesting you have celiac disease – just an inability to process gluten foods and thus have an acquired sensitivity to them.  By just giving yourself a break from them, you may discover the skin/gut and energy, migraines and chronic ill-health issues will recede.

By altering your normal diet, you may find if you subsequently eat some of these proscribed foods  accidentally you may feel very ill - bloated, foggy in the head and as though you have had a truck run over you. 

Hay fever, or other allergic symptoms may return.  By giving yourself a break from what was creating your problems and hen going back to it, your body now identifies these substances as the culprits - and gives you the message to avoid them.

STOP DOING WHAT HAS NOT WORKED SO FAR

Is it sensible to keep doing the same old things?  It’s like hitting the fence post every time you drive in your gate, and blaming the car repairer for not doing a proper panel beating job - the dings are still going to be there in the body work as long as THE DRIVER is not careful with the vehicle. 

Stop hitting the fence post and stop eating what sets your ill health and allergic reactions off, and there will be no further trouble.

Midriff fat is letting us all know our system is stressed.  Look to the fuel you are choosing.  The bloating and gas, the gastric discomfort and the wider eliminative (skin and bowel) issues will possibly be magically resolved once the gluten ‘easy’ foods are removed.

What to eat instead? 

RICE is a very versatile food and highly tolerated by all.  It can be cooked and left in the fridge as a start to the next sweet or savoury meal.  It can be heaped on a plate, incorporated in dishes, used as a substitute for flours in thickening things, mixed with other flavourings and stuffed into vegetables, fish, poultry and meat, combined with milk and eggs as a pudding, or used in all sorts of Asian dishes, to really interest the taste buds. 

It can be made into sushi, or eaten a mouthful at a time, chewed at least 50 times to alleviate hunger.  Always have some in the fridge: cooked, and stored as a leftover.

4 - Choose as natural as possible. 

Ideally, food grown in your local area and in season would naturally nourish your body.  This is no longer the case.  Very few people even grow their own food.  This means we are eating anything, grown in any part of the globe, in any season.  It also means we are not in control of the additives. 

These may be things like fertilizers, toxic residues in the soil to be taken up along with whatever nutrients are remaining, fungicides, pesticides, and irradiation and whatever else has been done to what we are supposed to rebuild our bodies with.

Biodynamic choices, where food is grown in optimal conditions may not be possible.  One answer is supplementing your shopping with actual home produce.  Searching for organic produce is another.  At least choosing to prepare and cook everything consumed yourself minimizes the additives (extra salt, flavour enhancers, colourings and preservatives) ingested.

Go back to buying ingredients and starting from ‘scratch’.

Naturally grown food is far more tasty, although maybe sometimes more expensive.  If you have children who are constantly ill, especially if the medical profession cannot assist, the partial cause may be the toxic harvest of your food and lifestyle choices earlier in your life, in pregnancy, and in early breastfeeding years ago.  Toxins can act cumulatively.  Reducing the load at any stage of life will be welcomed by your body.
Investigating any website dealing with hormonal disruption or natural living, our stolen future and the consequences of our polluted environment will show you more.

What to do? Look seriously at finding natural sources of produce.  Start buying in season when there’s a glut, preserving and freezing so you have ‘fresher’ food in home storage than is available in shops.

5 - Water. 

As a minimum, drinking at least two litres a day of non-chilled pure water will help all aspects of your return to health.  In cooler climates, it may be necessary to take the chill off; keeping the inner furnace stoked well will ensure that you do not create further problems whilst trying to do the right thing.

Please refer to the note re ‘sick heat’.  Wanting to drink cold water is a sign of inner imbalance.  Trying to self-medicate (cooling yourself down), your body is alerting you to a problem, without relieving the reasons for the heat. 

If you give in to it, there are consequences, although not often immediately obvious to those using the crisis management medical model.  If you keep forgetting to drink, put a glass by the hand basin.  Then whenever you wash your hands, you will remember.

At the computer, leave a glass within reach (but not where it would cause damage if spilled), and it will constantly just be there as a reminder that you need to look after yourself. 

Putting water in a large glass and leaving it as a visual trigger is a better idea than carrying a bottle around with you.  The glass is a simple matter of raising it and drinking.  Notice how much more you drink this way.  Using the bottle is less helpful; water should be always readily to hand.

In our culture, we seem to take umbrage if a visitor wants ‘just water’ rather than taking tea or coffee.  Yet, water is how we cleanse ourselves - the liver, detoxifying every aspect of our modern life, requires an endless supply throughout the day. 

In addition to any other beverage, always offer your guests pure room temperature water.  Adding ice as a nicety only depletes the inner fire.

Drinking when thirsty may be too late - the dehydration may have already begun.

If we are trained early to drink water frequently, we have far less serious health problems.  This will be so even just with easier bowel action but there are also complexion clearing, body odour relieving and headache preventative benefits.

If you drink coffee, you need at least 4 extra glasses PER CUP of coffee to help undo the very dehydrating and very heating effects (even if drunk chilled - we are talking of reactions inside the body here) it creates in our liver.  Most ‘habituals’ we reach for when stressed rob our systems of their regenerative abilities.  Drinking more water helps diminish these effects.

This is Chapter 9 of Heather's ebook "Helping Yourself to Health and Vitality"

6 - Fish. 

Eat this at least twice as week, preferably oily fish, as it contains a lot of helpful raw ingredients to support your hormonal system.  If you have heard danger stories about MERCURY in ocean-going fish, remember that the larger the fish, the more it is absorbing from the food chain.  The little creatures - sardines and smaller fish - have less opportunity to absorb the toxic wastes we pour into waterways to be washed into the sea, where we grow our seafood.

Amalgams in your mouth - if you have regular (ostensibly safe) metal fillings - will be doing further damage, as minute amounts leach out when we grind our teeth (to chew) and are washed with our saliva into our stomachs.  From here, they are stored in our fatty tissues (brain, nervous system, eggs and sperm and fat in general) an unintended time bomb for our unborn babies to inherit.

Two cans of fish weekly - especially eating the bones, to allow easy bony matrix regeneration -  is all you need to do to provide calcium if you have been thinking of supplementation.  Calcium also needs Magnesium and Zinc to be useful.  Eating green leafy veggies and other varied foods will provide heaps of these nutrients - thus the apparent medical worries can be relieved.

Eating every three hours ensures there is always fuel.  You will be far more alert, happy and energized, without gluten and sugar, and with plenty of protein, you will shed excess fat, and find your hormones - especially via your thyroid which controls your metabolism - magically normalizing.  This in itself will allow normalisation of bowel activity, clarity in thinking, ability to cope, memory, temperature regulation, libido, self-image and mood, and especially relief from depression.

7 - Nuts, seeds, oils. 

Eating a selection of seeds and nuts will provide very necessary good oils in your diet.  The highest food Calcium source is sesame seeds.  Including these at every opportunity is a great idea, especially for children - tahini and honey as a treat, rather than lollies and chocolate.  If small children are introduced to the less obvious when they are first being weaned, these will be their first fuel choices.  You as parents are the normalizing agents (especially if you choose to ban all diverting media, leaving the TV at other people’s houses).

WE NEED FAT TO HAVE HORMONES THAT WORK.

Fats are the base for all hormones, especially those involved with the metabolism that drives your body.  Trying to lose weight and eat healthy by following the tips from the heart foundation alone is not sensible, and is a way to damage yourself.  We need fat to survive.

I am not condoning fatty meat eating.  Meat consumption has not been even mentioned so far.  I am speaking of the vegetable, seed, nut, oil and fish sourced fats; these are highly necessary in our diets. 
I imagine this is why we want to eat it - it is tasty and has mouth texture.  We need it to stay warm and well.  It is when fat consumption is not balanced with exercise, and all other aspects of a good eating plan, that problems arise.

Losing weight is not a matter of stopping or reducing eating.  Neither is it about cutting all fat from your diet.  These are a recipe that guarantees you will feel awful, get depressed and binge on what you know you shouldn’t.

Look at cultures that have been around centuries and whose populations are well. All traditional societies had animal sources of fat.  As the altitude and latitudes changed, food choices varied but all had fat as a vital ingredient. 

Olive and other seed /nut oils are very versatile in cooking, and we need at least a tablespoon of these daily.  For any healing to occur, you MUST include oils and avocado/fish and olive oils in your diet.

8 - Cooking methods. 

Cooking allows the process of digestion to begin before we eat food.  When young, old, ill or weakened, we really need cooked food to help us get the most from our diet. 

In the past, other cultures have fermented as an aid to easy digestion.  For everyone, cooking and eating warm foods helps our inner furnace make the most of eating.  A healthy digestion is our ticket to wellness.
If you feel the cold a lot; if you have problems with energy and thus digestion, you can change this by not just the food you cook, but by how it is prepared and hence what it will do within you.   

Heating with direct heat or fat/oil heats the energy of the food more than when using water methods which have a more cooling effect on the food.

If you want to warm yourself, it is not just a food’s served temperature that counts but also what the heat source used has done to the food. 

Those people with major heartburn/reflux (inner fire) will already have discovered what makes this worse and would automatically be avoiding - anything heated in vibration - like roasted, fried and baked, (using dry or oil heat). 

Choose water heating methods and go easy on (or eliminate) all chilli, curries and strong spices, sugars, salt (except in cooking), alcohol and caffeine.

Microwaving destroys all life energy from the food you were going to use to rebuild and nourish yourself.  If you are doing this sometimes to reheat - to ensure that here is warmth going in, rather than eating something cold on a cold day - microwaving occasionally is fine.  Using it as a normal means of saving on washing up, and for speed is a very short-sighted saving.

We tend to choose food for how it looks - hence the pesticides, picking well before ripeness (hence before taste and vitamins have a chance to blossom) and for size as opposed to nutrition within.

9 - Avoiding artificial. 

What we choose to incorporate into our bodies has been skewed by advertising and often false information. 
Take soy milk as an example.  Years ago, the only way to eat soya was to buy the beans from the health food shop (in the days when they DID actually sell food), soak them and change the water many times over the next three days, wash them well, cook in a pressure cooker, and chew excessively. 

A soy powdered ‘milk’ was available for diehards - it tasted fairly unpalatable unless mixed with lots of other substances to disguise it. Those of us who were strong believers in ‘natural’ foods persevered. 

These days, to make soy palatable, at least malt (ex barley thus gluten) has been added, along with much sweetening.  Soy milk is hardly ‘natural’, although the producers would argue people won’t buy it unless they make it taste better - a circular argument.

Fermented soy is far better for all.  Small children do not need the phyto (plant based) estrogens soy milk contains.  As our whole environment is a chemical soup - there is enough other sources of estrogen mimicry creating enough hormonal disruption without willingly choosing foods that will do the same thing.  If you wish to eat soy, tempeh and miso are fermented and have many other health benefits.
10 Substances - self medication.

Many people think of COFFEE as a great beverage.  But coffee beans - whether the caffeine has been extracted or not - have been dry roasted and as a result, their vibration is very toxic and causes heating in the body. 

Any hormonal /energy/digestive /nervous or other body issue will be alleviated by stopping drugging yourself with this.  Children, whose bodies are still developing, should not have access to it. 
CHOCOLATE and caffeine drinks have the same effect in the body - the sluggish energy gets a boost.  Temporarily you feel energized, more alive - more ‘human’. 

Unfortunately there is a downside - your adrenal glands get thumped; your liver is under more pressure, and you need to drink a lot more pure water to undo what the coffee has done.

When thirsty people seek another wet treat - often yet more caffeine.  Water would tend to taste very bland after all the hot exciting thrills your taste buds encounter - sugar and other enhancers are in all purchased goods to ensure customer loyalty. 

Drinking one cup socially is possibly all right.  Many however drink tea all day, often several cups consecutively.  Tea is a mild diuretic, meaning it encourages fluid loss in the body.  Drinking two glasses of water for every cup of tea would help correct this.

ALCOHOL is another substance that moves the stuck/sluggish energy along.  It also has an anesthetizing effect.  It may be pleasant, and great as a temporary alteration to life perceptions, BUT there are life consequences. 

If there are any health/life problems that you are reading this book to resolve, alcohol plays NO part in their solution.

CARBONATED DRINKS –  avoid;  the phosphoric acids and other non-nutrient substances, in addition to the sweeteners or real sugars, are in no way designed to do anything other than cost you and make money for the manufacturers.  

This is Chapter 9 of Heather's ebook "Helping Yourself to Health and Vitality"