Be Healthier, Eat Less

Is this even possible?

If you ate just one meal a day—small meal not big, the smaller the better—you would be a healthier person? Most of us who are used to eating three meals a day will find this hard to believe, even absurd.

The truth is eating three meals a day is a very unhealthy practice. Our illness comes from toxins produced by the food we eat. The more food we take, the more toxins we produce, and the greater the risk of being ill. We produce toxins because we do not chew our food well. We are not conscious about chewing food because we get bored with chewing. We want to take every mouthful as fast as we can, so without knowing it, we often swallow half-chewed and undigested food, which our stomach in turn fails to digest. So the food, instead of becoming a nutrient, becomes garbage. It is lodged in the intestines where it ferments to produce acid and putrefies to produce toxins. Some of the food-turned-garbage stays in the intestines for a very long time, sometimes for many years, would you believe? It impairs peristalsis, and thus blocks the bowel movement, causing chronic constipation leading to colon cancer. Amazingly, the unmoved bowel can become as hard as stone. If you fail to move that bowel chances are you would be carrying big stones inside your belly. That would sap your energy, and you would easily feel weak. Every minor task will be an energy sapper.

Most people at present do not realize that they are actually constipated because of the three-meal-a-day diet. It’s not just three meals, actually, but six meals if we count the snacks in the morning, afternoon, and night.

According to Dr. William Howard Hay, if you fail to move your bowel even for just one day, you are seriously constipated. Dr. Hay says that the normal bowel movement is one hour after taking a meal. That is the case if the colon is empty. For health reasons the colon should always be kept empty. Thus, if you eat three meals a day, you should be moving your bowels three times a day. Consequently, if you eat just one meal a day, you only need to move your bowel once a day.

The one-meal-a-day diet can have a curative advantage. Dr. Hay himself suffered a deadly illness, the Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidney that causes a lot of albumen to escape from the body through the urine. The disease is also usually accompanied by heart ailment (in his case, dilated heart) and hypertension.

As a student at the New York University School of Medicine, he felt proud that he was strong physically, and continued to think that he was healthy. But one day this illusion was shattered. At the train station, on his way to work, he ran to catch up on an oncoming train, but suddenly he felt pain on the chest got dizzy and collapsed. Upon checkup, it was found that he had a dilated heart. As a doctor, he knew that the tissues of his heart were weak, thus, the dilation.

Because of his weak heart his blood circulation was poor, resulting in swollen leg that stretched the skin to full capacity. He was unable to lie down and sleep for fear of drowning in his own fluids. This condition was very familiar to him as a practicing medical doctor. He had seen this symptom in some of his patients, “and [I] had always told those in a similar state to prepare for the final hop-off, which was never far in the future.” Some colleagues who had diagnosed Dr. Hay told him he had only 3 months to live. Since he knew the utter failure of medical treatment in this case, he refused to take any medicine. “What’s the use?” he thought.

Dr. Hay made a careful analysis of his previous habits. He realized that graduation from the medical school 16 years ago; he had eaten only at hotels, boarding houses, and restaurants where he had no control over the preparation of food. It was only during the last 5 years after he got married that he had eaten in his own home, “with controllable conditions at table.” An analysis showed that he had been eating meat or other concentrated protein food at each meal, “usually combined with white bread and generally potato in some form: the ‘plain food’ of the American table.”

In his book Health via Food, Dr. Hay relates that “he had been eating pastries freely as a top dressing for this (protein, bread and potato) incongruous mixture of incompatible foods, the whole washed down with two or three cups of coffee, sweetened thoroughly with white sugar and aulaited with rich cream.”

Dr. Hay changed his diet, removed two of his three meals. He ate only a little vegetable at night.

“The coffee was also discontinued, and in a few weeks, the stimulants cured themselves through loss of desire for them. In a few months the tobacco was given up, and for 4 years there was no desire to smoke, even after many years of heavy smoking.”

This followed a period of rejuvenation that was truly remarkable. In 3 months, his weight went down from 223 pounds to normal 175 pounds. He also discovered he could run again as far as he desired without disturbing the rhythm of his heart, and “there was surprising endurance and long-windedness.”

Needless to say, Dr, Hay fully recovered from his deadly illness. He lived for another 33 years and died at the age of 74.

Think about this: given the toxins in the foods we eat, and the way we generally ingest our food, if we ate just one small meal a day, and managed well our nutrition status, it is indeed possible to be healthier. Hence, eat less, live long.