Maker’s Diet: Overview

I’m posting a letter I wrote to my god-sister Natalie to explain the Maker’s Diet. January is just around the corner, and I know I can’t wait to detox from all the great holiday food I’m about to completely stuff myself with!

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Dear Natalie,

I told you I would write to give you some “basics” about the Maker’s Diet. We’re going to do the forty-day “diet” in January to start the year off on a great foot, nutritionally speaking. There are three stages to this forty-day experience, the first being the most restrictive, and the last being the stage you stay at, ideally, for good. After the forty days are over, we try to stick to the third stage as much as possible.

We did the diet in September, but November and December we’ve not stuck too faithfully to it—too many delightful holiday goodies around to pass up! I was a skeptic of the diet before we tried it, but we saw such dramatic results that I’ve become a convert. We both lost weight, and we noticed a big difference in our energy levels. Last winter, Jesse was sick every single month. He hasn’t gotten one cold since starting the diet. (Though the past two months we’ve noticed a big difference in how we’re feeling when we don’t eat as well.) Doing the forty days also helps you rethink the way you eat and shop; it changes your habits.

Since we’ll be doing the diet starting the second week of January, I suggest indulging over the holidays and then using the first week of January to prepare for the diet. We’ll probably eat at stage two or stage three for that week to transition ourselves. The first time we did the diet, we overindulged the week leading up to the diet and then crashed when we had such a drastic diet change.

Here are some of the major principles of the Maker’s Diet. It’s based on the traditional Hebrew diet.

1.    No industrial processed foods and simple carbs (white flour, white rice, preservatives, additives, artificial flavorings, soy products—except traditional foods like fermented tofu and miso)
2.    No sugar (except honey, fruit, and sweeter veggies like sweet potatoes and carrots)
3.    Plenty of fresh (organic when at all possible) meats, veggies, and dairy (whole milk, no hormones added—we’ll get to dairy in a minute)
4.    No pork or shellfish
5.    Grains must be either sprouted or fermented (more on this in a minute)

Okay, so I’ll briefly explain some of the reasoning behind those points. For more information, I really recommend reading the book (The Maker’s Diet). I also highly recommend In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and Real Food by Nina Planck.

First off, the idea is to eat traditional foods that people have been consuming for ages. People have not been consuming soybean oil, soy flour, skim milk, bleached and enriched white bread, MSG, and so on, for ages. What we have been eating are whole foods, things that God made, not scientists. Basically, if it has a label, then it warrants closer inspection. There’s no need for an ingredients label on a cucumber. I’m not saying everything in the grocery store with a label is bad—just that it needs to be read, and carefully. A lot of the “food-like substances” you can buy in the store is packed with sugar, soy, trans fats, etc.

That brings us to sugar. Limit this, if you can’t eliminate it entirely. (And look for it in places you wouldn’t normally expect—odds are your chicken broth, ketchup, and canned peas, just to name a few, have sugar added.) Diseases love sugar. And our bodies weren’t designed to have much sugar; we don’t have an off switch for our sugar cravings because we weren’t supposed to have access to so much of it. How often are you going to run across a beehive full of honey?

So, dairy. A lot of people avoid full-fat dairy (whole milk, butter, cream, etc.) because they’ve been told that diets high in fat cause all kinds of diseases, like heart disease. But we’ve been eating butter and red meat and cheese for ages—and we’ve just started having heart disease within the last century or so. In fact, our consumption of animal fats have decreased as our rates of heart disease has increased. There’s plenty of evidence out there to suggest that the low-fat hypothesis is outright wrong.

However, not all dairy is created equal. There are plenty of proponents of raw dairy, i.e. non-pasteurized. We haven’t taken that step yet because I need to research this further. But we try to stick with organic dairy whenever possible, and we don’t use low-fat versions. (For instance, they add powdered milk to skim and two-percent milks—powdered milk is a great source of oxidized cholesterol, which is very damaging to your heart.) Industrial dairies are wretched for the animals, too.

We’ll wrap this up with grains. We are excessively exposed to wheat from a very young age. Most people have wheat allergies or sensitivities without knowing it. Eating sprouted grains (you can find sprouted-grain “Ezekiel” bread in the frozen section of your grocery store) breaks down the enzyme that people are sensitive to in wheat. Also, look for bread with grains like spelt, which are less common and therefore less likely to cause allergic responses.

I’ll post on the blog the do-eat and don’t-eat lists for each phase. I’ll also post recipes and menus for what we’ll be eating (you learn a lot going through it once). And I will post “modified” menus for if you’re not able to stick to the diet completely but want to get as close as possible.

Some caveats: It takes a lot of time. You have to cook. For a little while, you’ll feel like you’re constantly doing dishes. But with a little preparation and forethought, it’s not too hard. And there is a lot of satisfaction in knowing that you can list every single ingredient of everything you’re eating (and feeding your family). The other thing is, it can be expensive. The way I see it, you’re going to pay one way or the other—with your food or with your health. And if you do things like buy whole chickens for roasting instead of buying chicken breasts all the time, you can cut down on costs. Once you reach phases two and three, your costs go way down because you can add things like beans and grains, which are cheap and super nutritious.

I hope you’ll go through the forty days with us, or at least try a modified version. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak—you’ll lose weight, you’ll feel fantastic, and you’ll have a much better immune system. (asterisk: I’m not a fortune-teller or doctor, so don’t sue me if you don’t experience the same things I did!)