It's really a double-whammy benefit, and not so difficult to do as
you might think. For the first week or so you might feel like there's
something missing from your meal, but after that you'll get used to
it. After awhile you wouldn't go back because you feel so much
better and actually feel more energised after a meal instead of tired
and sleepy.
Use fresh & organic ingredients
While you are having your salad why not make sure that you use
only fresh and organic vegetables. Chemically grown vegetables are
usually full of pesticides and other nasty poisons that'll just build up
inside you. Another thing is that organic vegetables are nutritiously
far superior to chemically grown.
As far as possible, use fresh fruits and vegetables. Frozen or canned
vegetables have lost most of their micro-nutrients (enzymes,
vitamins, etc) that are essential to digestion. Food that's alkalising
when it's fresh can turn acidifying after too much processing and
preserving. You never really know how much preservatives they
have added to the canned stuff. Not to mention that fresh
vegetables always taste much better than frozen or canned veggies.
Go raw
All the processing that is done to your food generally makes it
harder to digest and more acidifying (with few exceptions - of
course). Water and heat destroy most of the digestive enzymes and
vitamins fruits and vegetables have. Without digestive enzymes
vegetables can do more harm than good to your body.
Try to eat at least 50% of your food raw. This is where the bowl of
salad instead of carbohydrates or protein comes handy. The
digestive enzymes that raw vegetables contain help your body to
digest the other food components you eat at the same meal. Raw
vegetables are also highly alkalising so they balance any acidic
foods you eat. This places far less stress on your body to leach
minerals from your bones to neutralise the acids.
If you don't want to go eat your vegetables 100%, raw you can
slightly stir-fry or steam them. I'm a huge fan of stir-frying. Stir-
frying plenty of vegetables with noodles or some chicken, fish or
nuts makes it so easy to replace either carbohydrates or protein
with almost raw vegetables.
