One of the surefire ways you can reduce your pain, especially joint pain, is to eat an Alkaline-Forming Diet. This guy Yuri Elkaim is one of my favorite nutrition and health experts and although his book Eating for Energy is promoted as being for energy and weight-loss, it is an excellent resource for learning about the correct foods that your joints and muscles thrive on – as well as almost every part of you!
An Alkaline-Forming Diet includes most fruit and vegetables, especially when eaten raw. It even includes citrus fruits, which confuses some people because citrus is acid. But that’s where the “-forming” part comes in. Acid-forming foods which include most meats and lots of carbohydrates aggravate muscle and joint pain, causing friction and reducing flexibility. But foods that form alkaline in the body reduce inflammation in joints and increase flexibility in muscles.
Yuri’s great book Eating for Energy is about eating raw food and the vast majority of it is alkaline forming. I eat a lot of raw fruit and vegetables, but still have meat which is mostly acid forming. Even though my diet is not completely alkaline forming, I eat enough of the right foods for it to make a difference.
And how do I know it’s the food that makes a difference to my pain relief, and not some of my other methods? Because it turned out to be an amazing experiment while on an intensive project while I was a student. I was practically chained to a computer and did hardly any exercise for three weeks. Within days of being on an alkaline forming diet, I was amazed at how much less hip pain I was in, and nothing else about my lifestyle had changed.
But the great thing about the food in this book is that it all has a low GI (glycemic index) meaning it gives you lots more energy and a lot less likely to be tired. And when we are tired we of course eat more of the wrong foods, so this diet is self sustaining!
It also keeps you fuller for longer, so you naturally eat less in general because you don’t feel hungry all the time. This has a synergistic effect on your body in tems of relieving pain, because as you already know, when you are tired, as well as eating more to make ourselves feel better, we also have a lot more aches and pains, and feel stiff all over. For people who suffer from chronic pain, that effect is multiplied and our normally just about tolerable pain can become unbearable.
So a low GI, high energy, alkaline-forming diet like the one suggested in this book, is perfect for a number of reasons. But don’t just take my word for it; try it yourself and if you’re not impressed, Yuri has a full 60 day money back guarantee.
And don’t forget, the great side-effect of using the advice in the book, is; you get to lose weight too! So you’ll love it, I promise.
