The Real Combo Meals – I’ll take the #5 with veggies!

One of the topics I commonly talk about with clients is food combining. People are generally curious about what things to eat together (and what not to eat together).  It can be a very complicated topic, but the reason to combine properly is important—your body can digest food much more efficiently if your food is combined well.

The best example I have of this involves a steak dinner. Let’s say your dinner consists of steak, veggies, and a salad. This may take 5-7 hours to exit your stomach and enter your small intestine. Compare that to a dinner of steak, a roll, and a baked potato. This second meal will take approximately 12-15 hours to leave your stomach(!)

Why? Because you’ve combined carbs/starch with meat/animal product. Your stomach has to digest things from different “classes” at the same time.  It’s not efficient because it has to release different types of enzymes to do the work, and the food is all glopped in together. Our goal should be to combine foods in the best way so that our bodies can digest efficiently, and spend more time on things like metabolism, cell repair, and detoxing.

There are some great charts out there explaining all of the food combining rules.  My advice is to test these things out for yourself. Everyone is different, so you may be ok eating a little cheese (dairy/animal product) with your bread (grain)…or you may not!

Here are the basics:

Eat fruit alone, never after other food (it sits on top in your stomach and rots because it would have exited your stomach in 15 minutes if nothing else was in it’s way).

Eat veggies and greens with everything/anything except fruit (it combines with everything, and even aids in digestion of other foods).

Don’t combine starch and carbs with animal products.

Based on this, the standard American lunch that includes a sandwich of meat, cheese, and bread, plus an apple, is one of the worst combos you can eat!  Replace the meat and cheese with cucumbers, other veggies, and avocado or hummus (and eat your apple for breakfast!), and you’ve got a great combo.

Most people are ok with making fruit/greens smoothies and having it digest well.

My dinner last night:

quinoa, veggies, and goat cheese

How did I do on the combining?

On another note, I bought this yesterday on sale at Lori’s Natural Foods and I can’t wait to try it!  I’ll let you know how it works—Last week, I had to use Joe’s detergent because I was out, and I’m still feeling like the chemicals are seeping into my skin from that fake nasty flowery smell!