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The purpose of Glow Kitchen is to liberate you from a lifestyle of eating and exercising that is restrictive, overindulgent, erratic, abused or misinformed; instead, it reconfigures your former convictions, empowers positive choices, respects your taste buds, and simplifies your lifestyle. Glow Kitchen brings the realness back into your kitchen in an honest and straight-forward way.

Integrating the following dietary principles into your life will reap phenomenal, glowing results.

The GK-6

Principle 1: Raw Food

Raw foods are any that have not been heated above 118 degrees Fahrenheit.  Heating beyond this point begins to destroy inherent nutritional properties. A high-raw diet is rich in live enzymes and is a sure-fire way to get the glow.

By making a conscious effort to eat raw foods in place of cooked foods, you’ll begin to see a change in your body, complexion and overall mental clarity. One thing to be careful of, though, is to avoid emphasizing the wrong raw foods. Be sure to emphasize green leaves in your diet, as the chlorophyll in leaves provide your body with much needed oxygen and makes a huge difference in your overall well-being. Focusing on raw nuts/seeds would defy the point of eating raw in the first place, as nuts and seeds tend to be heavy on the system and not nearly as health and beauty-facilitating as raw fruits and vegetables.

Principle 2: Real Food

GK considers simple, unadulterated food to be real food.  If you can look at your plate and easily distinguish all the components of a dish, then you are eating “real” enough.  You don’t need chemically processed foods, fillers, antibiotics and hormones to achieve taste. In fact, you’re just compromising taste! The real deal is so much better.

Here are some tips:

• Replace pasteurized cow cheese with raw goat/sheep cheese.
• Replace steamed greens with a fresh green salad.
• Look for “raw” labels on your nuts and seeds.
• Make sure there is no sulfur or sugar in your dried fruits’ ingredient list.
• Cook with pastured butter instead of oils, and try to consume only cold-pressed oils.
• Replace store-bought pasta sauces, salad dressings and bread/chip dips with your own home-made versions.
• Replace all white starches–flours, sugars, and breads–with healthy starches–sweet potatoes, quinoa, millet, etc.
• Know the sources of your meats–organic, grass-fed is best!
• “Pastured” is the preferred term for the realest poultry items, but this can become considerably expensive, so do your best. Just make sure there is some sort of health disclaimer on the label–better than nothing at all.
• Avoid packaged vegan foods and faux-meats and cheeses. These are oftentimes heavily processed and burdensome on digestion.
• Peanuts are actually not classified as nuts. They are starches that are tough on digestion and easily become moldy.
• Soy is one of the most mucous-forming foods!
• Brown rice is a better alternative to white rice, but it is hard to come by a genuine source, making most brown rice options simple starches rather than healthier alternatives. Choose quinoa, millet, rye or buckwheat instead.
• Fresh, raw fruits and vegetables are as real as it gets. Go get ‘em!

By being more aware of everything that goes into a dish, from start-to-finish, you are living a more conscious lifestyle that is truer to your body and your mind.  And by all means, do the best with what you have–baby steps lead to marathon-like results.

Principle 3: Digestive Health

A healthy digestive system is the key to good health.  By eating a high-raw, very real diet, you are also improving the condition of your colon and the ability for your body to assimilate and process the foods you eat.

Principle #4 and #5 go beyond what to eat and explain how to eat in order to improve overall digestion and keep your body light, fit and nourished.

Principle 4: Sequence Eating

Eating light-to-heavy is a tool that helps a lot of people stave off upset stomachs, gas, constipation and other symptoms of indigestion.  Imagine eating a salad after a Thanksgiving feast–doesn’t quite make sense does it?  Your body doesn’t get it either.  While it’s working to digest heavier material, alone sits the light salad, awaiting digestion.  While it waits, it putrefies and collides with the heavier material before it.  Had you eaten the salad first, it would have digested quickly enough to allow for the heavier stuff to come through after.

It’s a great tool to use–eating lighter foods first and heavier foods last.  This applies to what you eat during the day and within the day’s respective meals.

Principle 5: Food Combining

The idea behind food combining is that certain foods require different digestive enzymes to break down properly.  For example, a starch such as quinoa, would not digest properly if eaten with fish, a protein.  The two require digestive enzymes that become inefficient when released in the stomach at the same time, thus causing delayed digestion and the capacity to lead to bloat, constipation, weight gain and the works.  You can learn about food combining here.

With that said, while many find food combining useful, others find it a hassle.  In my experience, applying the rules strictly leads to a lot of confusion and feelings of being restricted. That’s the last sentiment you want to experience in your life.  The good news is that the body is an efficient organism and powerful at that.  Mis-combining is not the end of the world–combining properly is simply a gesture to help facilitate the digestive processes. I generally don’t mix starches (all carbs) with proteins (all meats, poultry and cheeses). I find I benefit from applying that one rule, but if I were looking for subtle results, I would try to apply the others more strictly.

Principle 6: Chew your liquids and drink your solids

Sounds kind of strange, right? This principle is to say that you should take your time with liquids and solids.

Digestion begins in the mouth with the excretion of saliva.  If you drink liquids hurriedly, prepare for a water-belly.  But, if you swish liquids around in your mouth to allow for the digestive enzymes in your saliva to begin doing their job, and then swallow, your body will digest said liquids more  effectively.

With respect to food, you should be chewing it thoroughly enough so that when you do swallow, the food has already reached a liquid-like state.

Bottom line: take you time with what you ingest, chewing and swishing and enjoying every last bite or sip!

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