No S Meets Paleo

My Lama tells me that in order for a practice to be effective, one must follow the teacher’s instructions for seven consecutive days and notice the results. By seven days one will know whether or not a teaching or a practice is worthwhile. If it is, continue. If not, discard it and find another teacher, practice, etc that works.


When I wrote Lama Jigme and asked what he thought about incorporating the No S diet  into my daily nutritional routine, his response was the same: do it for a week, notice the results and then report the findings.

I did this and I am forwarding what I learned along to you.

What is this No S diet? Does it mean I cannot eat anything that has an S in it?
No.

The No S diet is a set of simple commonsense guidelines that keep your eating habits under control. The no S diet works like this…no snacks, no sugar and no seconds, except on special days. Yep that’s it. How easy is that?

Before dietitians, nutritionists, big agriculture and even bigger diet companies got involved in our nutritional habits, it was normal to eat 3x a day with little or no snacking in between meals. As a child growing up in a working class household, we had three meals a day, no seconds and desserts were meted out only during special occasions, such as a birthday or holiday. Every now and then my step mother would bake something on the weekends, but that was a rare treat.

Think about your parents or your grand parents. I’m willing to bet that they ate 2-3 meals per day, rarely if never snacked, and had desserts only on special occasions too.

I understand that there are those folks who must eat six SMALL meals a day, but that doesn’t pertain to the rest of us who are healthy. The rest of us gets along just fine on three meals a day.

You see, it’s unnatural for humans to graze. We are simply not grazing animals. We’re predators. Our bodies have a natural cycle of fasting and sating. In other words, it’s perfectly natural and even acceptable to be hungry. Our ancestors went hungry, often for days if the hunting and gathering thing didn’t work out. They didn’t eat six meals a day plus snacks. They ate when they had it, hunted when they didn’t and adapted accordingly.

It makes sense, to me at least, that eating six meals a day (which as I said earlier, was designed for people with metabolic disorders) could contribute to the problem of obesity and diabetes instead of preventing it. Think about it. Eating all the time doesn’t give your pancreas or liver time to rest, to readjust insulin or enzyme levels. That means that your digestive tract is constantly working overtime, pumping in insulin, not to mention acids and enzymes at a pace that’s neither natural nor normal.

Because of this, I married the concepts of the Paleo Diet with the No S diet and voila! It worked very well, especially with several issues that I was having, which I will share in small increments throughout this week. The first thing I want to do is simply introduce the concept to you and let you think about it. Perhaps do a seven day consecutive trial run of the No S /Paleo Diet pairing and see how it works for you. For myself, it rid me of excess cravings, allowed myself to be hungry—truly hungry—and to savor my meals when it is time to eat. And of course, there’s Dharma practice involved, because unless an activity is connected to the Path, what good is it?

Until next

Om mani padme hum