Many, many years ago when I started eating real food again I would make myself steal cut oats for breakfast and flavor it with some maple syrup & butter and I would add a tbsp. of coconut oil for a little extra health. I would eat this when I arrived at work in the morning and it never failed, just an hour or two later I would be famished and I always had to have a snack in between breakfast and lunch. My snack was usually a piece of fruit. And then by noon time I was famished again and so ready to eat a bountiful raw salad.

Meanwhile, I would make my young son, who was in elementary school, two eggs from pastured chickens smothered in butter and often with two pieces of bacon from properly raised pigs for breakfast so that he had plenty of brain food for the day. One day I was pressed for time to make myself oatmeal and so I made myself two eggs as well and ate them at home, at least an hour earlier than I would generally eat my oatmeal. And guess what happened? I wasn’t famished! I didn’t get the oh my gosh, I need a snack before I fall out my desk chair onto the floor feeling like I did when I had oatmeal for breakfast. I didn’t need a snack in between breakfast and lunch and I wasn’t starvin’ marvin’ right at noon either. The protein and fat in the eggs kept me satiated and full for hours!

I remember telling my cousin and her husband, Fred, about this switch and how much better I felt eating eggs instead of oatmeal in the morning and Fred commented that oatmeal kept him very full just as I had described my experience with the eggs. Everyone is different, everyone has different nutritional needs. Everyone is going to be different when it comes to the amount of vitamins or minerals needed and everyone is different when it comes to the required amount of macronutrients – protein, fat and carbohydrates. This is why I find that the American Dietetic Association’s recommendation that everyone eat the same percentage of protein, fat and carbohydrates daily is crappy advice. Everybody is different and one formula applied to all people is just not going to work.

There’s an easier way for you to figure out your nutritional typing than the way I did, which was accidentally… one of my favorite resources, Dr. Mercola, offers this free nutritional typing test. You will have to give your email address in order to take the test which will subscribe you to his newsletter, but you can easily unsubscribe from the newsletter, or you might even find that you really like it!

I took this nutritional typing test many years after fixing my breakfast problems on my own and the results helped improve my diet even more. I found out from this test, and confirmed through changing my diet, that even eating a whole piece of fruit is too much sugar for me and that I need to eat some fat or protein with it and what a difference! If I ate an apple before I went to exercise, at the end of the session I would get that oh my gosh, I’m going to pass out feeling. So now, I always eat an apple with peanut butter. Or other fruits I’ll eat with cheese or yogurt or milk kefir or in a salad. I need to have fat and protein present in order for my body to slow down the absorption of the sugar – even just a small amount from a single piece of whole fruit.

Since I have made this change I very rarely experience that feeling of oh my gosh, I’m going to drop right where I am if I don’t eat in the next 30 seconds. And the now infrequent times that I do feel that way, I know I am going to feel that way before it happens – such as when a friend gives me a cookie or another treat early in the morning.

I do best eating lots of fat, eating lots of carbohydrates in the form of raw or cooked vegetables (grains, even whole grains, are not really my friend) and eating smaller amounts of protein. Eating this way keeps me very satiated and I do still get hungry when my body needs more fuel and nutrients but the days of feeling famished are gone.

If you missed the last installment of Take the Stress Out of Food, which covered reading the list of ingredients so that you always know what you are eating, you can read that post here.

Keep reading the list of ingredients (even I still get tricked occasionally when I don’t read the list of ingredients) and keep on cutting out ingredients that are illness and disease promoting one by one. Stay away from ingredients that you can’t pronounce, that you can’t identify or that seems like something you studied in chemistry class. Likely those ingredients are promoting illness and disease in your body instead of promoting optimal health and longevity, which is what food is designed to do!

Be Well & Love the Earth,

Grace