I am going to finish off this week with some final thoughts on The You Plan.  

Regardless of your goals, if digestion is not working well, you likely will not feel great nor be functioning at your best.  

Let’s dig into how we digest our harder to digest foods and how to best support our ability to break down and absorb and use those food to help us rebuild and create energy.

The order of easy to harder to digest foods, as macro nutrients, it would be carbohydrates, then proteins, and then fats.  Now most foods have different amounts of all 3 of those macronutrients, but each food is higher in one of them, therefore we label it based on it’s highest amount. Example - nuts are plant based and have fibre, so they contain some carbohydrate, and they contain fat, but they are a good source of protein, so they are fall into the protein group.

With whole food carbohydrates, we are talking basically anything that is plant based - fruit, veggies, beans, lentils, legumes, and grains.  Fibre is a huge benefit of plant based foods, but if digestion is weak, fibre can be hard to digest.  Cooking fruits or veggies is helpful if needing digestive support.  

Note: we have non-starchy carbs and starchy carbs and that is what we need to use to split carbs into 2 groups.  Starches include potatoes, pumpkin, grains, rice, pasta, a few of the beans like garbanzo, kidney, navy, etc.  Non-Starchy would be items like greens, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, etc.

For protein we have eggs, fish, meat, nuts and seeds, as well as protein based animal products, such as milk, cheese, etc.

For fats, it is hardest to digest macronutrient.  The most natural fats include avocado, olive, cream, butter, lard, and veggie based oils like corn, soy, sesame, as well as nut oils.  Foods that are fried in oil (less natural) will be much higher in fats, and those are important to limit not just for food combining.

All macronutrients are important, so trying to avoid carbs or protein or fat is likely not going to provide benefits long term.

Some find benefit in doing what is called food combining in order to lessen mixing easy to digest foods with hard to digest foods.  Food combining happens just over a meal at a time and waits until foods clear your digestion before starting a new combination.

Rules of food combing:

• Eat fruit all alone - 30 minutes before any meal
• Do not combine protein with starches
• Do not combine protein with fats
• You can change your combining option meals every 3 hours as your stomach should be cleared and ready for a new combination!

So your best food combining option is to eat a meal of non-starch carbs and fats (like salad or veggies with oil dressing or butter) or a meal of non-starch carbs and proteins (like broccoli and chicken).  You can do both options in the same day, just 3 hours apart from each other.

Next best option is starchy carbs and fats (like pasta and veggies with oil and herbs, or potatoes baked with oil and garlic).

Poor choices are proteins and fats or proteins and starchy carbs.  You can find a chart of lists of foods in these groups at:  

The basis behind this is that foods digest at different rates, so tracking what foods do when they digest together, such a proteins and starches, causes the quicker digesting carbs to sit and ferment while waiting for proteins to digest, causing gas and digestive upset.   

For me, I very much enjoyed eating in a food combining manner.  I do eat some meals at times in a food combined way, but when I needed to do it longer term to help with digestion, for me, it was helpful, many years ago.  

Lots of info can be found on this if you are interested.  And your local Quality Greens market has all of your macro nutrient options in a safe and easy to shop market.  

Have a great week!

Lisa.