CONSCIOUS COMBINING EXPLAINED: HOW FOOD BECOMES YOU

I am not concerned with what you eat or even how much you eat. What matters is when you eat and, most important, what you eat it with. I repeat, diet does not mean deprivation. It means a way of life.

You can have your cake and eat it too—if you eat it one piece at a time. That's what the Beverly Hills Diet is all about

To intellectually justify this new approach to eating you must understand it. I'm not going to take your heart out of your stomach, but I'm going to put your head in. You need to understand how food becomes you. Only then can you experience food in its truest sense. Only then can you become aware of your body as a synergy of its parts, each dependent on the other, each dependent for its very life on the food, the fuel, you give it.

In simplest terms, fat means indigestion, or undigested food. Undigested food means fat. When your body doesn't process food, doesn't digest it, that food turns into fat

Essentially, your body takes the food you give it and turns it into nutrients, "body food." A nutrient is a substance needed by living organisms to maintain life, health, and the reproductive processes. The nutrients are vitamins, minerals, amino acids, glucose, lipids, and water.

Digestion, or the breakdown of food into nutrients, is done by enzymes, little chemical reactors that are in the food we eat or are promoted and made in our bodies by the food we eat Basically, different enzymes work on the three different food groups —proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

Each food group has its own set of enzymes. Generally, a protein enzyme can work only on proteins, a carbohydrate enzyme can work only on carbohydrates, and a fat enzyme can work only on fats.

Not only can the enzymes not cross over into other food groups, but they are often antagonistic toward one another, and the presence of one can actually prevent another from doing its work. Enzymes are very particular substances, and while there are hundreds there are only three you need to know about:

PTYALIN The enzyme essential for digesting carbohydrates. It appears in our saliva and is activated when we chew.

HYDROCHLORIC ACID This is technically not an enzyme but its function is much the same. It is in our stomachs and is responsible for the digestion of fat.

PEPSIN To be broken down into nutrients our bodies can use, proteins require two enzymes: pepsin and hydrochloric acid. Pepsin appears in our stomachs.

To know how food becomes you, we need to go a few steps further and understand how these enzymes work. This explains why digestibility is the key. The digestive process is the process whereby our bodies take food and turn it into nutrients so we can use it, so it can become body food, so that the process of life can continue.

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