Mono Diet: A Beginner’s Walkthrough
A mono diet is a great way to maximize nutrient absorption and reset your body. This walkthrough is a great starting place for beginners to make changes.
Mono-Eating” can be interpreted a couple of ways and done for a couple of reasons. Any time you get an “anything goes” scenario, you eventually end up with “everything goes” and things get a little lost. Here are the basics in three minutes flat!
WHEN
1) When easing in or out of a cleanse.
2) When wanting to lose a few pounds.
3) When healing*.
4) Regularly, as part of a healthy lifestyle**.
WHY
Because it is much easier on your digestive system and creates better nutrient absorption.
It takes different enzymes to digest different foods. So unless you are practicing food-combining at a very strict clinical level (as in separating even fruit types), your body needs to work and figure out how best to process meals. When you Mono-Eat, your body can process mostly on auto-pilot. Actually, I’ve done food-combining at clinical levels for months and I still get better results with Mono-Eating, especially for weight loss and cleansing.
Mono-Eating is a great way to hit the re-set button without starving on a fast.
WHAT / HOW
What it is in one sentence: eat pure organic unprocessed foods, only one at a time, 30-60 minutes apart.
This does NOT mean you eat only bananas for days on end. Unhealthy fad diets have promoted this over the years (only cabbage for two weeks???), but it’s not nutritionally sound long-term. The body needs variety. See Super Tip #1 below if you want to experiment a little.
For a more nutrition friendly Mono-Eating experience, you eat several kinds of foods (preferably all fruits and vegetables), just not all together. Example: banana 9am, grapes 10am, avocados noon, baked sweet potato 2pm,…
3 SUPER TIPS:
1) Don’t isolate to a single food for more than 24 hours.
If you do, make it a power food: avocado, banana, coconut (water and inside meat), papaya or mango. Also included in power foods are all the dark leafy greens, but I don’t know a lot of people willing to chew raw spinach leaves for five to six hours a day; whereas you can get enough energy and calories from eating several bananas or avocados.
I’d avoid the cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts), unless you are going to steam or juice them, because they can be tough on the digestive system in large quantities. My number one pick for a single food for 24 hours is avocado, for a healthy lifestyle habit, or papaya, when recovering from a digestive disorder (due to its powerful unique enzymes). Both are excellent choices all the time.
2) **Try Mono-Eating as a weekly health habit.
You can combine it with “Meatless Mondays” or, better yet, start “Simple Tuesdays”. (“Meatless Mondays” are actually a great way to ease into it). Pick any day that works for you but make it a day where you’re not going to feel deprived (like Saturdays, when you might regularly have events).
It’s a great habit to get into, just don’t become obsessive about it and don’t worry when you miss one here and there. This is real life, not food prison. Always make it pleasurable!
3) Mono-Eating is great for one more thing: reminding you what food is.
Real food. I say this because of how often I’ll see things like “smoothie” or “granola bar” in people’s food diaries. Even if you think of it as a health food, a smoothie made up of five fruits + pasteurized sweetened milk (yes, even nut milks) + protein powder containing 48 ingredients = not the same as “an avocado”. One is a food, the other is a mixture of many. So, no smoothie “mixes”, no fruit or vegetable juice blends.
Jaqui Karr
*If you are healing from severe illness, please always consult a qualified health care practitioner — this article (or any other, even from an MD) does not replace medical care).
