Trending in nutrition and health is the idea of eating only two meals per day. Why? Because that’s what Greek Orthodox monks do. The Greek Orthodox monk diet is currently receiving publicity and is being researched by scientists from all over the world. They were drawn to that well-known fact that Greek Orthodox monks live very long lives and live them in good health.
The monks eat only two meals per day and skip lunch. Conversation is limited during meals and the process of serving, consuming and cleaning up after meals becomes somewhat of a ritual. Meals last at least twenty minutes so that there is plenty of time for digestion!
Monks eat: fruits and salads at both meals, legumes, fish on Saturday and herbs and spices instead of salt.
Monks don’t eat: sugar (they prefer honey or petmezi – grape molasses or concentrated grape juice) and meat.
Father Savva Savvidis’s Decalog For A Healthy Diet
1. The raw food diet is very popular with good reason. According to Father Savvidis, you should eat most of your food in its natural state, raw and uncooked. Cooking food at high temperatures or preserving it in low ones destroys its nourishing value, and consequently the food itself. Only natural foods contain organic elements and vitamins required for life. Avoid preservatives in food as much as you can, as well as processed foods that are full of chemicals giving them a longer shelf life.
2. Eat fewer types of food at each meal. Your gastric juices digest complex food combinations with great difficulty, causing fatigue. It’s true that your body needs a variety of vitamins and nutrients to thrive, but that doesn’t mean you should include such variety at each meal. In fact, you should avoid the following food combinations because they cause harmful chemical breakdowns within your body leading to gas, pain and indigestion. These symptoms are also usually the first steps to getting an ulcer.
The following combinations cause harmful chemical breakdowns within your body:
A) White foods – meaning meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk. These should not be eaten together with starchy foods like rice, pasta, white bread, and potatoes.
B) Milk in combination with other dairy products.
C) Milk together with cucumber, melon, cherries or other fruit and vegetables. Milk can only be combined with a few raisins or with some whole grain bread.
D) Milk and eggs are also a bad combination.
E) Sweet fruit with sour fruit is a bad combination.
F) Watermelon combined with grapes.
G) All fresh fruit, but especially sour fruit, combined with cooked foods – as desert – cause destructive chemical breakdowns. Fresh fruit when eaten alone is beneficial.
3. The health oath. Overeating exhausts the peptic system. Everything superfluous that is not required by your body to function at its best is destructive and toxic. Overeating causes disease. Thousands more people die from overeating than starvation.
4. If you have a sedentary lifestyle forego breakfast or replace it with fresh fruit or fruit juice. Since you do not eat lunch on the monk diet, there is plenty of time to work up an appetite naturally throughout the day. The midday rest of the stomach will increase your appetite naturally.
5. Fruits, vegetables, and full-fat milk should make up ¾ of all your food intake. You should try to buy fresh, seasonal fruit instead of preserved fruit.
6. If you want to be healthy, you have to learn to chew your food well. Food that is not chewed well causes indigestion, toxicity, and disease. Don’t drink alcohol; it destroys the heart, memory and the nervous system.
7. Never eat when you are not hungry. Never eat when you are experiencing intense emotions, are in a bad mood, tired or angry. If you are feeling agitated, then first take the time to improve your emotional state with rest, breathing exercises or reading until you reach a level of calm that is beneficial to healthy eating and digestion.
8. You should often fast from food for short periods of time. These brief fasts and juice cleanses, or fruit therapies, cleanse the blood from salt and poisons leading to illness prevention and treatment. One or two days per week eating just fruit is very beneficial to your health.
9. Never drink water during a meal or right after it. Wait one or two hours after your meal to drink water because it dilutes your gastric juices. What’s worse, about ten minutes after you drink it, it leaves and takes a lot of undigested food with it to the liver, causing harmful chemical reactions in your body, toxicity, and gas.
10. Never allow yourself to be poisoned by hate, anger, sadness or avarice when eating. If you are influenced by these emotions on a daily basis, the food you ingest becomes your real poison. Replace all of these harmful emotions, that invade and undervalue your worth, with the higher ideals of patience, love, and generosity. These ideals save and serve people, giving us that which is most valuable in life, complete physical and mental health.
The Rules For Food Types
By eating 60% of your food raw, you make your body 80% alkaline and 20% acidic. This is the cornerstone of a diet which protects from illness and disease and leads to a long and healthy life.
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