Free Crazy Sexy Diet: Eat Your Veggies, Ignite Your Spark, and Live Like You Mean It! by Kris Carr, Rory Freedman (Preface), Dean Ornish M.D. (Foreword) Page A

fresh organic in-season fruits including all sorts of berries, apples, pears, grapefruit, and cantaloupe are fantastic. Think of a serving as one small to medium piece of “hand fruit” and l cup of berries or cut-up melon. Avoid canned and fermented fruits, preserves, jams, jellies, and processed or hybridized fruits that have lots of added sugar.
     
     
     

TAKE INVENTORY
     
    So now that you know just enough about acid/alkaline foods and pH to make you dangerous, let’s examine some of our favorite acid baths. Look at your plate, peek in your glass. What direction are you moving in? I don’t know about you, but I used to make crappy meal choices three times a day, every day! Check out what my daily menu used to be (see sidebar):
    An acidic menu like this makes you snooze, sneeze, swell up, gain weight, and get sick. These scraps are loaded with saturated fat and processed sugar, and they’re desperately missing our pal fiber. In fact, every single food on this typical diet, with the exception of the broccoli (albeit dead), makes our bodies work triple time to counteract the cascade of chemical reactions coursing through us.

     
     

DEBUNKING
THE FAD DIET MYTHS
     
    Now that I understand the importance of pH, I’m totally liberated from neurotic food calculations. Fad diets hold no power over me. When we consider the true measure of health, many popular diets just don’t make sense. I don’t need to know that I’m blood type O in order to shop for the right food for myself, and I certainly don’t need a degree in anthropology. And while I appreciate the benefits of traditional diets, I stop at the emphatic advice to only eat foods from my culture of origin. I’m a Colombian, Irish, and Scottish mutt who respects and understands body chemistry. Empanadas, a slab of soda bread, and haggis (the boiled and minced windpipe, lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep) ain’t gonna make me thrive.
    Many nutritionists and wellness counselors advocate moderation without any true understanding of what that actually means. Moderation is not a green light. Moderation is education and conscious decision making. Will your body tell you what it needs? For sure! But will you be able to read the signs if you have no clue what to look for? My body used to tell me to eat two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and flirt with cocaine. You can’t be moderate if you don’t know how to find your center. Once you build a solid home base, you can certainly play,stretch, and expand. But let’s get our health ducks in a row first.
    In the beginning of my journey with cancer I turned to a macrobiotic diet. In fact, during the filming of my documentary
Crazy Sexy Cancer
, macrobiotics was my sun, moon, and stars. The macrobiotic diet is a low-fat, high-fiber, predominantly vegetarian diet that is heavy on grains and soy products. After a while I felt depleted. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, strict macrobiotic eating made me too acidic. This was my first clue that something was wrong.
    Though there are many good principles to this way of eating, I was consuming far too much cooked foods and not enough raw, alkaline foods, water, and good oils—each of which I was prohibited from eating on the “healing” plan. I was told, “You’re too yin, your cancer is yin, you can’t eat raw yin foods.” Try and explain that one to your oncologist!
    Moving away from the macrobiotic diet was my first experience in “take the best and leave the rest.” It got me off the horrible Standard American Diet way of eating, and for that I will forever be grateful. Plus, macrobiotics taught me how to tolerate seaweed, love kale, make healthy (and delish) soups, de-fart my beans, and use a pressure cooker without having to call 911.
    When I did my first green juice fast (with lots of liquid nutrition), everything changed. Almost immediately my circulation came back and my blood work improved. With the addition of good fats, a moderate amount of whole