Diet for Chronic Pain
The Monkey Diet Type

Diet Typing allows us to test your Blood pH (is your blood alkaline or acidic?) and glucose (how fast do you process your foods). These two tests will determine what types of foods you need to be eating more or less of.

General Guidelines to Following the Monkey Diet

Below you will see the Monkey Diet Type® Food Pyramid. The primary foods to choose for your meals include vegetables, complex carbs, fruit, and some protein. Typically, Monkeys do well with leaner cuts of protein, such as fish or chicken breast. A great Monkey Diet meal is a small filet of salmon with a large side of sauteed vegetables over wild rice. You are getting some lean protein from the salmon, vegetables, and complex carbohydrates from the rice. You can even make a nice fruit salad for dessert, to get in more fresh foods!  

What does that mean?
Typically, most Monkeys have alkaline blood pH or a pH level that is higher than normal. You may wonder how this could affect your health, but amazingly enough, it can. Very minute changes in pH can alter the way your body functions. The body is a delicate machine that can easily be thrown off balance with small changes in its physiology.

► People with alkaline blood pH tend to feel warm.
► They typically feel their best in cooler, less humid climates.
► They don’t mind winter and actually feel energized in the cold weather.

Foods that will make an alkaline person more alkaline are proteins and fats, including meat, chicken, fish, eggs, butter and oils. So what happens when a Monkey eats these foods? they don’t feel good. These foods will make an already alkaline person more alkaline. The Monkey must eat foods that make them less alkaline and push them toward balance; ie acidifying foods. Vegetables are a more neutral food that all Hauser Diets can consume.

Foods that make an alkaline person more acidic or balanced include complex and simple carbohydrates, fruits, coffee, and low fat dairy.

► Vegetables are neutral foods that can be consumed by all diets, but the Monkey needs to eat a lot of them.   

What about oxidative rate?
The modified glucose tolerance test reveals how your body metabolizes carbohydrates. You come in to the lab having fasted for 12 hours. We take your fasting blood sugar level and then three subsequent blood sugar levels every thirty minutes after you have consumed a 50 gram glucose drink. This will tell us how fast your body metabolizes the carbs. A balanced oxidizer of food will start out with a normal fasting blood sugar level (80-100 mg/dL) and then rise and fall in the normal glucose curve over time. The slow oxidizer of food may start out with a higher fasting blood sugar level that just stays high over the period of 90 minutes during the testing. The blood sugar level does not come back down.

What foods are metabolized slowly by the body?
Protein and fats. So if you are already a slow oxidizer of carbohydrates, you wouldn’t want to consume foods hat make you oxidizer your food even more slowly. Therefore you would want to consume foods that are oxidized more quickly, such as carbohydrates.

Can you see why the Monkeys need to eat the way they do?
► Both the pH and the oxidative rate point the Monkey toward more carbohydrates.  

The Monkey Diet can easily turn into a pasta and cheese pizza diet if you are not careful. You may be thinking that you get to eat “all the good stuff” like pasta, rice, bread, rolls, sweets, alcohol, coffee, and all the other sinful goodies. Well, actually you can eat these foods, but you must consider portion sizes as you must do no matter what you are eating. If you put more into your body than you burn off, then you will gain weight. It’s as simple as that.

What about exercise? Everyone needs to exercise. In our experience, Monkeys work too much and exercise too little. Monkeys need to exercise at least five days per week, but preferably every day. Monkeys need to work on muscle tone strength training, as well as cardiovascular exercise such as running, aerobics, or cycling, for example. Monkeys can become overweight and store a lot of fat. By building more muscle, they can become leaner and meaner! Muscle burns more calories than fat, so gaining muscle can also help Monkeys lose weight.

How should Monkey athletes eat during an endurance event? As you might realize, carb-loading is not necessarily a good thing for all of the Hauser Diet Types. Monkeys will do well with a carb load prior to a race. But they need to concentrate on eating vegetarian during the entire week prior to their event. One night of carb-loading is not going to make a difference in your blood pH. If your event is going to be in the heat, Monkeys need to drink cold beverages with ice, stay in cool air conditioned rooms, and eat vegetarian to keep their blood pH low. During the event, Monkeys should consume carbohydrates that work for them. This varies athlete to athlete, but many like Cliff bars, Sport Beans, Gatorade, fruit leathers, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

So let’s put it all together: Here are the take home points for Monkeys

1. Eat your veggies – this diet is a near-vegetarian diet.
    

2. Add whole grains to your daily meal plans, such as high fiber cereal, oatmeal, soy nuts, split peas and lentils.
    

3. Have a few servings of fruit per day.
    

4. Choose lean meats, fish, tofu, and legumes for your protein sources.
    

5. Drink regular coffee if you wish (but watch what you put into it – just a little sugar, no heavy creams for you).
    

6. Add a little acidic lemon or lime juice and/or slices to some water for a cool refreshing beverage.
    

7. When it’s hot outside, make sure you eat more vegetarian, lower the fat, and avoid high protein meals. When it’s cold outside, you can have a little more protein because the cold weather acidifies your blood anyway.
    

8. Exercise 5-7 days per week with a mix of strength training and aerobic training.  
    

9. Monkey athletes do well with carbohydrates, so stick to a strict vegetarian diet for a week prior to an endurance event.

Are you ready to be a healthy Monkey? You may feel that you need some assistance – diet tips, workout tips, shopping ideas, and the like. We’re here to help you with all of these things and more – give us a call and set up an appointment at the Hauser Diet Center! If you have yet to do Diet Typing – come on in! You can eat like an animal on the Hauser Diet – you just need to know which one!