The message of RRARF is simple: "Eat the food!" But this often inspires questions like, "What food? How much food? When do I eat it?" As human beings, we like to make simple things complicated. That's just our nature. But RRARF really is simple, once you get to know the guidelines.
First and foremost, you have to eat. Not till you're 80% full. Not on a small square blue plate. Just eat. This isn't permission to binge on ice cream and pizza. But it is permission to eat as much whole food as you can possibly enjoy, without counting calories, carbs, fat grams or any other arbitrary measurement.
What to Eat
The basic formula for RRARF meals would be: a generous portion of unrefined starch, an ample serving of protein, plenty of veggies, and enough quality fat to make it all tasty.
Here's an example of what I had for breakfast this morning:
2 cups hashbrown potatoes fried in coconut oil
3 slices of bacon
2 eggs
(I'm still having a hard time adding veggies at breakfast. Sometimes I throw a bunch of fresh salsa on everything to add to the veggie content.)
And the other day, this is what I had for dinner:
2 cups quinoa with plenty of butter
4 ounces roast chicken
1 cup of onions and carrots, sauteed in butter
The kind of whole, real food we've talked about here at The Nourished Life since the beginning is highly recommended while on RRARF. But there are some important keys for making RRARF work for you as far as food choices go:
1) Fat should be mostly saturated, with a view toward limiting polyunsaturated fat as much as possible. That means no peanut butter binges. And veggie oils are definitely out. Stick with good old-fashioned dairy fats and tropical fats. Beef fat is also pretty good.
2) Carbs should be unrefined: yams, potatoes, quinoa, buckwheat, brown rice, whole corn grits, popcorn, etc. If you tolerate gluten then whole-grains like wheat, barely and oats are acceptable, as are beans and legumes if your digestion is good.
4) Keep it real. Processed food has no place on RRARF (or anywhere else, for that matter). Keep all refined foods to a minimum as much as possible. Of course, we live in a world where it's close to impossible to completely avoid processing or refinement of some kind, but just do your best.
How Much to Eat
I've sworn off calorie counting for RRARF (and hopefully forever), but for those of you who are curious, I believe my meals average somewhere between 800-1,000 calories each. I eat 3-4 times per day, depending on how large my meals are (more food per meal generally means less meals for me).
RRARF is a refeeding strategy meant to stimulate metabolic functions by providing the body with tons of energy via real food and rest. So we are not--I repeat not--limiting food intake. As Matt says on page 41 of the RRARF e-book:
"You don’t have to feed yourself to the point of being uncomfortable and gagging, but the calorie, assuming it is accompanied by a great deal of nutrients, is a powerful weapon in the battle to increase metabolic activity."
When to Eat
And as for when to eat? That's the simplest of them all: eat when you're hungry. Not every three hours, not every six hours, not at a predetermined lunchtime... every time you're hungry, eat until you're no longer interested in eating another bite. That's it!
More About RRARF Foods
I really can't compete with Matt's excellent food list and definition of the appropriate RRARF diet that he lays out in his book. I highly recommend you download the complete RRARF e-book for free and check out his recommendations yourself.
And if you think I'm nuts for eating a high calorie diet, then you might want to see what Matt has to say concerning the truth about low-calorie diets in this video presentation.
For years we've been told to avoid butter and instead use vegetable oils as our primary fat source. Mainstream science claims this will save our hearts. But industrial oils like soybean, corn and canola oil are hiding a dirty little secret: consuming them could very well increase your risk of cancer.
What Are Polyunsaturated Fats?
Saturated fats have no double bonds (like those in coconut oil) and monounsaturated fats (like those in olive oil) have one double bond. However, polyunsaturated fats (also known as PUFAs for short) are linked by multiple double bonds. This is what makes polyunsaturated oils highly unstable and fare more vulnerable to oxidation than other fats. Bruce Fife offers an excellent explanation of the different kinds of fats and how they affect our health is his book The Coconut Oil Miracle.
The Cancer Connection
Many experts now acknowledge that refined polyunsaturated oils are damaged fats and should be avoided. This leads to the assumption that cold-pressed organic oils are inherently acceptable because they are less refined. However, even gently processed polyunsaturated oils are unstable, and oxidation can still occur once these fats are in the body. And oxidation is linked to cancer and other degenerative diseases.
In addition to the dangers of oxidation, there are also bonafide concerns about the omega-6 content of polyunsaturated oils. A recent San Francisco study demonstrated that under laboratory conditions, omega-6 fatty acids could accelerate the growth of prostate tumor cells.
Other studies show that improving the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio can lower the risk of certain cancers. Experts vary in their specific ratio recommendations, but most suggest a ratio of between 1:1 and 1:4 at most. The average modern diet has an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 1:20 (or more!).
The blame for this imbalance can be squarely placed on the rapid increase of vegetable oils in our diets during the past century:
While some vegetable oils do contain small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, for the most part they consist of omega-6. Eating more vegetable oils does nothing to correct the imbalance of omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acids in our diet.
To combat this effect, the typical recommendation is to increase omega-3 consumption. That's kind like bailing water out of a sinking ship with a baseball cap. This problem is far more effectively resolved by reducing omega-6 intake. Eliminating or drastically decreasing polyunsaturated oil consumption is the best way to do this.
How to Decrease Your Polyunsaturated Fat Intake
Here's how you can cut excess PUFAs from your diet:
1. Avoid commercial fried foods. With very few exceptions, these are cooked in polyunsaturated oils and contain highly damaged fats.
2. Avoid commercial salad dressings, mayonnaise and other fatty condiments. Unless otherwise noted, these are generally made with refined vegetable oils.
3. Avoid commercial baked goods. Riddled with bleached flour, refined sugar and chemical additives, these items should be avoided in general for obvious reasons. But their high PUFA content gives you yet another good reason for leaving these items on the shelf where they belong.
4. Cook and bake with butter, coconut oil, olive oil and other heat stable fats. Frankly, these taste a whole lot better than veggie oils anyway, so making this trade should be easy. Find quality sources of healthy oils here.
5. Go easy on the nuts. While these may be hailed as a health food by many experts, in excess nuts can easily skew your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio and push your polyunsaturated fat intake over the limit. A few servings a week is more than enough, though I personally choose to eat them even more sparingly than that. Hazelnuts and macadamia nuts are the most forgiving since these contain the lowest PUFA content (and they also taste pretty darn good!).
A Historical Perspective on Vegetable Oils
Traditional cultures simply did not liberally use polyunsaturated oils in their diets. Keep in mind that these cultures often exhibited excellent health and did not suffer from modern diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Weston A. Price noted in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration that industrial vegetable oils were one of the modern foods that brought health problems to traditional people when they started using these oils in their diets. We should take a hint from our ancestors and ditch the industrial fats.
If you've been hanging around real food and natural health blogs, you've probably run into rants entitled something along the lines of "it's not the burger, it's the bun." These posts usually explain how it's not the meat and saturated fat that's causing the current epidemic of obesity and degenerative disease, but that it's the carbohydrates.
It's a compelling theory, and I certainly like how it exonerates natural fats. After all, traditional cultures have been consuming saturated fats for millennia without a hint of the obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease that plague the modern world.
But they were also consuming carbs.
Really.
In fact, certain traditional groups like the Kitavans consumed a whopping 70% carbohydrate diet (and were surprisingly not obese or diseased, even with pretty normal caloric intakes). Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to convince anyone that all traditional cultures ate a high-carb diet. We know that's not true. Common examples are the Inuit who ate a lot of meat and very few carbs; the Masai who chugged milk (and animal blood) and got plenty of fat and protein from those; and the Loetschental Valley residents who ate loads of dairy and grains and probably got a good bit of fat, protein and carbs.
So let's be clear: traditional people did not espouse one set of macronutrient ratios. And Weston A. Price didn't come back from his ventures peddling the idea that a diet should consist of a certain percentage of carbohydrates, fat or protein. In fact, if anything, his work proved that robust health could be achieved on a variety of diets.
The question is, what has invaded our diet in the last several decades to fuel the obesity and disease crisis?
Fans of Ancel Keys and the China Study would have you believe it was saturated fat and animal protein. But we know that wasn't true because traditional cultures placed high value on these foods and often ate them in abundance. But carbs--and even grains--also had their place in traditional diets, and even in more recent diets, long before the obesity epidemic reared its ugly head.
When it comes to the burger and the bun scenario, I would just stop looking at the hamburger altogether. It's got flaws, to be sure (refined white flour, feed-lot meat, MSG, etc.). But when it comes to finding a food to blame for the deterioration of modern health--point to the side items!
It's not the burger or the bun--its the fries and the soft drink. These two items contain the ingredients that should be held responsible for the obesity and disease epidemic. What ingredients am I talking about?
1) Fructose
2) Polyunsaturated Fats
These are two foods that have been industrially refined and are currently consumed in amounts far greater than ever before in history. And while obesity and disease certainly existed before these foods became mainstream, the real epidemic didn't begin until refined fructose and polyunsaturated fat became a significant part of our diets. In the coming weeks I plan to spend at least a couple posts getting into the nitty gritty of the dangers of these two substances (and when they aren't so dangerous, as well).
Remember, the point is not that fast food burgers should be considered a health food (duh!). It's that blaming individual macronutrients for the gamut of modern health issues is a mistake. The USDA made this mistake when it shunned fat in the food pyramid several decades ago. And it's just as much of a misdeed to lay all the blame on carbohydrates instead. Instead of making blanket statements about carbs, fat and protein, we should take a closer look at modern industrial foods that violate our natural body chemistry in such a way that it causes widespread damage to our health.
Today I'm just giddy to share with you a guest post by one of my favorite bloggers, Matt Stone, who embraces the subjects of health and nutrition with an unprecedented level of unorthodoxy you can't help but appreciate. Anyway, there's nothing I can say that can add to the fantastic post below, so dig in and enjoy! You won't be disappointed:
Hello fans of Nourished Life, this is Matt Stone of http://www.180degreehealth.com/. Recently Elizabeth and I connected and have been hitting it off really well. This is one way of saying that I have been brainwashing her thoroughly over the past couple of months, and she is soaking it up like a sponge. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome, or whatever that thing is where the captive starts really digging the captor.
The Nourished Life is the sole possessor of the best name in the internet health blogosphere. Nothing could possibly resonate more deeply with my own inner desires to live a life of abundant nourishment – not only with food but with deep emotional nourishment, being nourished by being in the pursuit of our greatest passions in life, finding intellectual nourishment for those pesky brains of ours that seem to have an insatiable appetite for growth and learning, and more. In fact, the original name for my blog was “Sacred Self,” as I, at that time, felt that I had uncovered a powerful mindset towards pursuits of all kinds… Love yourself, respect yourself, always be on your own team, trust the wisdom of your own mind and body and be there to meet its needs, and strive to nourish yourself with abundant and high-quality nourishment.
Anyway, let’s talk about abundant nourishment, what it means to have such a communion with your mind and body, and why living in a constant battle with your own urges, desires, cravings, and hunger is not only a futile pursuit – it is extremely harmful, self-deprecating, and counterproductive to whatever health endeavor you may be seeking. Pardon me while I geek out a bit. I don’t know what it is about The Nourished Life that makes me want to blind you with science, but I simply can’t help myself. It’s just too flippin’ interesting.
Elizabeth, with a little prodding from me, recently decided to try the old-school milk diet. I have aspirations to try this at some point later in 2010 myself. It is the epitome of trying to take the maximal amount of quality food – teeming with enzymes, vitamins, minerals – and calories, while resting deeply on a physical, mental, and emotional level as much as possible. Elizabeth referred to this as being sort of a spa treatment – but one in which the person is well-fed instead of starved on salads, beet juice, berries, soy milk, wheatgrass juice, and flax crackers. Yes, nourishment like a baby gets--not a young rabbit, like typical spa food is geared towards--in which afterwards the little tyke gets that stoned look of deep satisfaction, gives a little belch, and then passes out cold. Now that’s nourishment.
Why is this important? What could this possibly do to heal us from chronic illness? How could chugging 25% more calories than you’re used to getting while exercising less help someone deal with, say, a weight problem – one of the most common illnesses in the United States and countries like it (particularly in Elizabeth’s home state of Alabama)? Well, let’s talk about it.
Modern humans are literally starving. Now this might seem strange, but hear me out. There is hardly a bigger and more powerful shift in thinking than what you can achieve by realizing this nearly-irrefutable truth.
It is known that Americans, for example, have increased their caloric consumption over the past few decades while obesity rates have climbed. Why did we eat more? Because we were hungrier. Why were we hungrier? Because we were starving.
During that same time period the average body temperature declined. Even the NY Times has written about this in a recent article entitled “Rethinking 98.6.” Why did body temperature decline? Because we are starving. The body does not run its temperature at below-ideal levels for fun. In fact, if you want to read about how little fun it is, I suggest you read the 80-plus chapter on symptoms of having a low body temperature in Mark Starr’s, Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic.
The body lowers its core temperature to conserve energy – which is one of the first and most reliable changes that occurs when someone decreases their food intake.
Along with this drop in body temperature and increase in hunger, we have other powerful starvation phenomena going on. One is that food that we eat is packed away into fat cells instead of being used as energy or to build lean tissues (like muscle). After all, if we are starving, and the body is taking obvious strides to conserve energy by lowering the basal temperature, why would it build more lean tissue? Lean tissue burns tons of calories and requires more nutrients than fat, which are the worst enemies in the face of starvation.
Intelligently, our bodies seem to know, when we’re starving, what foods will provide the greatest storage of fat and least deposition of protein into active tissues like muscle, organs, and bones. Starving thus changes our appetites. Therefore, generally speaking, the more a person is starving the more they will crave the most fattening things on earth. The big three are: alcohol – especially beer, sugar/sweets, and white flour. We are likely to crave, not just these 3 primary things, but we crave these foods paired with lots of fat in the most rapidly-digestible form. Uh-oh. Bad combination. We are in fat storage mode and crave the most fattening things combined with lots of fat to assist with building fat. Oh, and let’s not forget, while we’re at it, that being in calorie conservation mode due to starvation causes us to be more fatigued, lazy, unmotivated, and tired.
But how in the world can a person that is 100 pounds overweight be starving you might ask? Doesn’t this mean they ate too much and exercised too little? Took in more calories than they burned? Yes and no. They ate too many fattening foods, exercised too little and burned fewer calories from having low levels of lean body mass and a low body temperature, built too much body fat, and so forth BECAUSE THEY WERE STARVING. In other words, all of the problems leading to their weight problems were a result of the body’s natural adaptation to starvation. They did not get fat because they were exercising too little and eating too much. They did not get fat because they stored more calories than they burned. They were eating too much and exercising too little and storing more calories than they were burning because they were starving. That’s just what starving people do.
Obesity researcher M.R.C. Greenwood did a study comparing genetically-prone-to-become obese mice vs. regular mice. Each group was given the same amount of food. One group turned that into muscle, bone, and energy – the other group of mice turned that food into fat while they had no energy and their lean tissues starved. After they got fat, they began eating more food. In other words, if you’re going to store 20% of your food as fat, you need to eat 20% more food. People overeat because their food, instead of going to their lean tissues and being used as energy, goes to their proverbial “hips, butt, and thighs.”
In other words, if your lean tissues and basic energy requirements demand that you eat 3 slices of pizza to meet your needs, and you slip one of those slices into your back pocket, you’re going to need to order 4 slices to get the same amount of pizza to your body as it takes for a lean person to get 3. So what in the world is causing these bizarre fat storage phenomena?
The low-carb masters of the universe will tell you it’s all about insulin. When you eat carbohydrates, your insulin levels rise, which stores food into fat cells (after all, that’s what it does… insulin – as in ‘insulation’). Makes sense right? Well, it does to some extent. Fat people do produce more insulin and therefore store more fat. But when you consider that half the world’s population eats a very high-carbohydrate diet without having any of these problems, the low-carb mantra doesn’t look so nice, neat, and pretty anymore.
In actuality, a hormone called leptin was discovered by Jeffrey Friedman of Rockefeller University in 1994. Leptin is a hormone that is produced by our fat tissue. It then gives a report back to the rest of the body to tell it what the nutritional state of the body is. It functions like the treasurer and calories are the currency. When fat tissue increases, leptin is secreted, which:
4) Increases fat burning and decreases fat storage
5) Increases energy
Yes, the body has a simple system of regulating energy. Eat more, and the body does everything it can to insure that you burn more calories, ingest less, shed fat, and stop storing it.
Go into a famine state, and the body will demonstrate the opposite feedback system, or what Jon Gabriel, that dude that lost 200 pounds and author of the The Gabriel Method, calls the “FAT programs.” And it is, in fact, a system that runs when leptin levels are low to stimulate maximal fat storage. After all, low levels of leptin are supposed to mean low body fat levels, which means starvation.
Basically, what the entire modern epidemic of obesity boils down to is the leptin system – more or less. There is a “fault” with the energy regulation system. People are “resistant” to the action of leptin even though 99.9% of overweight people produce lots of it. They are basically unresponsive to the hormone and operate like a starving person in all regards – low body temperature, fat storage, insatiable appetite – particularly for junky sweets and alcohol, low energy, and, as a bonus, they often display several of the 80-something pages worth of “hypothyroid” symptoms excavated by Mark Starr. Yes, there’s hardly any system in the body that is not impacted directly by cellular and systemic energy metabolism. Not a big shocker really when you think about it.
The big question is “what causes leptin resistance?” A big question indeed. Here are a few primary going theories. After all, it’s only been 16 years since the discovery of leptin. No one knows, with exact certainty, how leptin resistance arises and what can be done to overcome it.
1) Omega 6 overload – Omega 6 is a type of polyunsaturated fat found most abundantly in nuts, seeds, grains, and the oils from those food sources. Although it’s rare that a person, prior to the 20th century would have too much omega 6 overload on a cellular level, since the dawn of refined vegetable oil in the early 1900’s, omega 6 has been consumed in unimaginable and unprecedented quantities. This is key because several inflammatory molecules associated with obesity and numerous other inflammatory disorders (like autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and so on) have a strong association with inflammatory cytokines. Two in particular, TNF-alpha and IL-6, have the strongest correlations, and studies have shown that the quantity of omega 6 ingestion is closely correlated to higher concentrations of these two inflammatory cytokines in a dose-dependent fashion. This is very relevant to obesity because inflammation of any kind is met with a surge of the hormone cortisol – a natural anti-inflammatory adrenal hormone that very likely triggers leptin resistance. Not only that, but a protein called SOCS (suppression of cytokine signaling) is also released as an inflammation response to IL-6 in particular, and the latest in biochemistry is pinning much of the leptin-resistance blame on SOCS. Read a little more about SOCS in this paper: http://www.jbc.org/content/278/16/13740.full.pdf
2) Cortisol – Cortisol, as mentioned above, is also implicated in the causation of leptin resistance. It’s well-known that having too much cortisol – in the blood or at the cellular level (which blood tests cannot reveal), is easily capable of inducing weight gain – particularly abdominal fat, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and so on. The extreme form of high cortisol levels being referred to as Cushing’s Syndrome, which you can read about at Wikipedia. Excess inflammation from omega 6 overload is not the only aggravator of cortisol though. Cortisol can be raised by any chronic stressor – from dieting to overexercising to mental/emotional stress to injury to chronic infection to free radical damage to environmental pollutants. There is no one single cause of high cortisol levels. This is often why people gain weight after divorce, death of a loved one, during stressful times, and after restricted dieting of any kind. Yes, I consider unwanted attempts to eat less and exercise more to certainly be a primary cause of obesity – not a cure. Hence 180DegreeHealth. [Elizabeth here: read more on cortisol at this post.]
3) Fructose – Researcher Richard J. Johnson has shown clearly in a laboratory setting that excess fructose consumption can lead to leptin resistance in lab animals. This makes a lot of sense considering that fructose consumption has radically increased in modern times, taking an even bigger leap along with obesity and type 2 diabetes rates when high-fructose corn syrup began displacing other sweeteners in the late 1970’s. If this induced leptin resistance, and leptin resistance made you crave more sugar and be ever-hungrier, than this would certainly explain the self-perpetuating nature of sugar consumption, which is known to be powerfully addictive. Hence ever-larger drink sizes since the dawn of Coca-Cola and the powerful obesity correlations with the consumption of fruit juice and sodas in young children.
4) Nutrient deficiency – Leptin resistance could very well be a natural human response to a lack of any particular nutrient. This is a fascinating thought, as nutrition pioneer Robert McCarrison noted in laboratory animals in the 1920’s that no matter what type of deficiency he created, his animals always showed the same endocrine patterns – the most significant being enlarged adrenal glands (think more cortisol in response to the obvious stress of nutrient deficiency) and atrophying of the thyroid gland (a subsequent response to stress as the metabolism drops in response to stress/cortisol).
It is certainly obvious why one would try to nourish themselves with the greatest abundance, from natural and traditional foods as advocated by Elizabeth Walling, in response to the greater biochemical understanding of modern health epidemics – obesity just happening to be one prevalent manifestation. Nutritional superabundance, lots of rest and relaxation, a diet that stresses natural fats over oxidized and omega 6-loaded vegetable oils, elimination of refined sugar, strict avoidance of stressful hunger-inducing diets masquerading as health programs, and more are all extremely vital in addressing our individual and collective health problems as a society.
So you best be listening to Elizabeth Walling. She is on the right track, has the right attitude, and is thirsty for more (milk).
And we delve into this caca every flippin’ day at my blog: http://www.180degreehealth.blogspot.com/, so please come join us. 180 is always thirsty for more ideas, your input, your experiences, and more.
olive oil) have one double bond. However, polyunsaturated fats (also known as PUFAs for short) are linked by multiple double bonds. This is what makes polyunsaturated oils highly unstable and fare more vulnerable to oxidation than other fats. Bruce Fife offers an excellent explanation of the different kinds of fats and how they affect our health is his book 
.
and chemical additives, these items should be avoided in general for obvious reasons. But their high PUFA content gives you yet another good reason for leaving these items on the shelf where they belong.
that industrial vegetable oils were one of the modern foods that brought health problems to traditional people when they started using these oils in their diets. We should take a hint from our ancestors and ditch the industrial fats. 
would have you believe it was saturated fat and animal protein. But we know that wasn't true because traditional cultures placed high value on these foods and often ate them in abundance. But carbs--and even grains--also had their place in traditional diets, and even in more recent diets, long before the obesity epidemic reared its ugly head.
.
fact, a system that runs when leptin levels are low to stimulate maximal fat storage. After all, low levels of leptin are supposed to mean low body fat levels, which means starvation. 
