Listen to Your Body… and Save It the Pain
I once chatted with two girls who were my adult ballet classmates. They were both 20-year-olds attending university, young, vibrant, full of curiosity. The subject of our discussion was the Blood Type Diet. Coincidentally, both girls were a bit on the chubby side and both wanted to lose weight — yet didn’t have a clue how.
One of them said she tried everything and was even surmising taking diet pills, even though she was aware of the futility and health risks. She told me she often has great swings in weight.
It soon became clear to me that both are Type O’s like me, and both had been eating the wrong food for their type. They loved wheat products like bread, pasta, and noodles; corn and corn-derived products — corn on the cob and Coke, which contains High Fructose Corn Syrup; and dairy products, like milk, cheese, and yogurt.
All of these are the worst forms of “poison” for Type O’s. Both also reported itchiness in the throat and mucus after drinking soy milk. I suspect they are, like me, Type O Non-Secretors, who don’t take soy products well. It is interesting that again and again the same pattern is observed: People prefer to eat a lot of what their blood cells repel and fight against.
This is not just about losing weight. It turned out that one of the girls always had headaches after drinking milk. The other had such a severe case of stomach inflammation that she was hospitalized when she was a teenager and lost almost 20 pounds in a week because it was too painful for her to eat.
I was nodding my head, thinking about how accurately the Blood Type Diet can give “prognosis” for our health. None of these experiences surprised me. As a teenager, I had frequent bouts of stomach pain and acid reflux. Later on, as a working adult, I often had constipation and diarrhea. In fact, I had the habit of drinking coffee every day for 20 years, and I loved putting milk or cream and sugar in it. Every morning I had diarrhea after my breakfast, but I did not pay that any attention.
Such gastrointestinal discomfort is a loud signal that something is wrong, isn’t it?
Why have we gotten so accustomed to our pains that we simply brush them aside, believing they are part of the conditions of life?
Our body is super smart. When it is in pain, it is sending us a warning signal. It is important to stand still and listen.
I was delighted, though, to share this knowledge about the Blood Type Diet with my young friends. It gave them a glimpse of hope. One of them was devastated to know that everything she loved to eat was an “avoid.” But she was smart enough to immediately understand the reason why she had been eating so much carb and corn was because she did not eat enough meat, thus she needed to satisfy her hunger with those kinds of food that filled her stomach.
I suggested to my friend that they each try to cut out some of the avoids — or even just one, say wheat — for three weeks and observe if their digestion improved and if they managed to lose some weight.
The other friend, also very smart, picked up the message immediately: “It’s actually liberating because now that we know what not to eat, we’ll have a chance to really lose weight!”
Bravo!
I told her: “We Type O’s are very lucky. There is still so much meat, fish and vegetables that we can eat to our hearts’ content, right?”
Below are ideas for beneficial dishes for Type O, which I regularly eat. Hope they inspire you to eat right for your type:
