1. Eat As Many WholePlants As You Want
The first and most important rule of the Frugivore Diet is simply this: don’t skimp on the plants! Eat as many whole-plant foods as you want. By filling up on whole plants, including a variety of leaves, seeds, flowers, fruits, and roots, your stomach will be satisfied by the fullness of the fiber-rich foods. Your stomach will also sense all the nutrition in your meals which will also help you to feel satiated. If you do get hungry suddenly, grab a banana or apple or a healthy, whole-plants snack such as Chocolate Sunflower Balls. On a 100% whole-plant-food diet, there is absolutely no need to restrict your intake. You can eat until you feel satisfied because this is your biologically-specific diet—the one nature intended for you.
2. Avoid All Animal Foods
Rule two follows naturally from the Golden Rule and from rule one—simply avoid all animal foods. Human beings are not to be confused with carnivorous animals who, for the most part, walk on four legs, have razor -harp fangs, have large stomachs and short intestines, have smaller brains, and who usually produce litters of offspring in a relatively short time. Humans are frugivores—we stand upright and have long arms and agile fingers for grasping and plucking ripe fruits and berries. Our teeth are flat and smooth for mashing soft fruits and leaves and the occassional hard seeds. If we want to experience wellness we must consume the food that we are biologically equipped to thrive on.
3. Avoid Processed Oils
The third rule also follows naturally from the Golden Rule and rule one—avoid all processed oils. Processed oils are not much better than animal foods for your health. Oils are an unnatural food because they would never be found growing from the Earth. To make oil, we manipulate natural foods, removing just the fat and leaving behind all the other good stuff, like the protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, fiber, water, and disease-preventing phytonutrients. Because oil is a very concentrated source of calories from fat, it is very easy to over consume foods with processed oil as they do not trigger the stomach’s two satiation sensors: physical fullness and nutrient content.
4. Keep a Well-Stocked Fridge
People eat what’s available around them. It’s been this way since the beginning of time. People who stock their pantries with processed bars, crackers, and cookies will naturally eat these foods they “harvested” from the store. People who stock their fridges and baskets with fresh fruits and vegetables will naturally eat these foods. Keeping a well-stocked kitchen for success with the Frugivore Diet means harvesting only the foods that are truly good for you because these are the foods that will be available to you when hunger strikes.
Eat Your Leaves: Keep your fridge stocked with multiple varieties of leaves like arugula, lettuce, cabbage, and kale.
Add Herbs: Incorporate fresh herbs from your garden, or start an herb garden in your windowsill or in containers on your front porch.
Fill Up On Fruit: Keep a fruit basket on your kitchen table full of a variety of ripe, seasonal fruits. Bananas are an affordable and nutrient-packed option at any time of year.
Stock Up on Seeds: Seeds are nutrient-packed and add a lot of flavor to the Frugivore Diet. Stock up on seeds like cashews to make Ch-Easy Cashew Sauce or raw sunflower seeds to grind into Chocolate Sunflower Balls. Keep slivered almonds or walnut pieces in your pantry to add a sprinkle of richness to your dinner salad or smoothie.
A Steady Supply of Roots: Roots like potatoes, carrots, and yams are staple foods of the Frugivore Diet. Root vegetables are a tasty dense source of energy and nutrients that are also affordable and easy to store. Practically all of the one-pot meals shared in the recipe section of this book feature wholesome and satisfying roots.
Bark, Flowers, Sap, and Stalks: Keep a variety of whole plant ingredients in your fridge and pantry to make any meal a success. Cinnamon spice—made from ground tree bark—is a nice addition to many breakfast bowls, smoothies, and desserts.
5. Fill Up on Fruit
Fresh, ripe fruit is perhaps the most perfect food known to Man. Ripe fruit entices all our senses from our eyes to our noses to our taste buds. A meal of ripe fruit leaves us feeling hydrated, refreshed, nourished, and energized. We associate an overflowing platter of fruits with royalty for a reason—because this is the fruit we naturally desire. Health is our true wealth and fruit is the natural treasure that becomes our own wellness as we consume it in abundance.
6. Give Digestion a Break
Give your digestive system a break by simply eating foods that don’t require it to overwork and use more than its fair share of your body’s total energy. Your body benefits when it has enough energy to maintain a state of wellness. Your body is a natural vessel that is always using energy to maintain itself. You use energy to breathe, to sit, to think, and to digest food. If you are continuously devoting energy to eating food, then your body is continuously devoting energy to digesting. This means that less energy is available for other tasks like repairing damaged cells, maintaining a strong immune system, and using your brain to work out complex tasks. Different foods require different amounts of energy to digest. Fruit, not surprisingly, is perhaps the easiest food for a human being to digest. Unlike processed sugars which are rapidly released into the bloodstream causing blood sugar spikes, the natural sugars in fruits are released into the blood more slowly because they come with a complete and perfect package of nutrition including a lot of natural fiber, water, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Eating a meal of fruit will require much less energy to digest than eating a meal of meat or cheese, for example.
7. Limit Salt to Reduce Water Weight
Sodium is a natural mineral found in the earth and that occurs naturally in all plant foods. In it’s concentrated form as table salt or sea salt, it can be consumed excessively. Consuming too much salt will lead to your body holding onto water to cope with the internal chemistry created by extra sodium. Your body is essentially trying to dilute the sodium inside itself by holding onto water. To avoid carrying extra water weight and feeling bloated and uncomfortable, limit how much salt you add to your meals. Avoiding processed foods will go a long way towards reducing excess sodium in your diet.
8. Keep Hydrated
Keeping your body hydrated will help avoid you mistaking thirst for hunger, and will help keep you feeling energized and able throughout the day. Lucky for you that keeping hydrated is a no-brainer on the Frugivore Diet. Whole-plant foods are naturally made mostly of water. Most fresh fruits are in the range of 72–93% water. Once you start incorporating an abundance of raw plant foods into your diet you may find your thirst disappears and you have little need to drink water. You will see that recommendations to drink 8–10 glasses of water a day are a response to a culture that was consuming large amounts of over-salted, processed foods. These processed foods lack the natural water content of natural, whole-plant foods.
9. Make Salad Your Supper
Salad is wonderful for supper. Consider making salad a routine part of dinnertime either as the main meal or as a sidekick. Salad is full of raw, living plant nutrition including fiber and water. Salad will fill you up and leave you feeling energized and alert, a sharp contrast to the heavy and tired feelings people experience after a meal of animal products. Hours later you will still feel good and the nutrition releases at a natural pace inside your bloodstream.
While people who are used to meat in the middle of dinner may scoff at the idea of a supper of salad, salad can make a very satisfying meal. The key to a satisfying salad is to combine a complimentary variety of flavors, and to include leaves, roots, fruits, and seeds in the mix. Adding shredded carrots or beets to a salad gives it an attractive color, a slight crunch, and a touch of sweetness. Adding diced cherry tomatoes or dried cranberries contributes fruity goodness and nutrition. Adding a sprinkle of slivered almonds or roasted pumpkin seeds adds a satisfying richness and crunch to your salad. Adding a variety of leaves such as arugula, chopped kale, shredded cabbage, and mustard greens contributes a richness of flavors and nutrients. A salad a day can truly keep the doctor away.
10. Enjoy a Rainbow of Plants
Eating a rainbow of whole-plant food ensures you are giving your body all of the good stuff that keeps you nourished and well. Each color of the plant-food rainbow contributes different phytonutrients, the special disease-protecting nutrients found only in plants. Phytonutrients are most concentrated in the colorful parts of plants. Orange plants are particularly beneficial for healthy eyesight and skin. Red plants are known for fighting and preventing cancer. Blue and purple plants are known for their brain-boosting benefits. The colors of plants are clues to the nutrients they contain, and so in order to get the full array of goodness, aim to eat the rainbow everyday.
