TBK Fitness Program

Part 1 – The TBK Diet

Before starting any new diet, it is important to consult with a physician. Although this is a healthy, natural diet, there are certain medical conditions or medications that would make the diet or parts of it unsuitable for you.

Introduction

The basic premise of the TBK Diet is that many of the diseases that plague humanity – such as heart disease, certain cancers, diabetes, obesity, and certain autoimmune disorders result from following an unnatural diet. What do I mean by unnatural? Well, imagine yourself in the woods, or by the ocean or on some fertile plain, with nothing but your own wit. What would you be able to eat? Well, you could gather some berries, fruit, leaves, flowers, roots, nuts, and seeds. You could also use rocks, sharpened sticks, or other simple tools to hunt animals or catch fish. You could prepare simple traps or dig pits and cover them to trap animals, birds, or fish. You might find a bird’s nest and feast on some eggs. Water would be the only beverage available. You could start a fire and cook some of the food you have acquired to enhance its flavor, but if you ate it raw you would digest it without a problem, and would still acquire all of the nutrition you need.

You would not have access to many of the foods you are accustomed to today. For example, there would be no dairy products available. You would not be able to catch a deer and milk it. Thus, milk, as well as cheese, yogurt, butter, and cream would not be available.

You would also have little or no access to cereals or grains. Although there may be some wild grains growing around, they would be sparsely distributed, and it would be a waste of your time to gather them and then go through all of the steps needed to make flour out of them. Not to mention your reliance on simple tools, which would make the task even more arduous. Furthermore, there would be no ovens around. Most of your cooking would be limited to roasting over an open fire, making it even more unlikely that you would go through the trouble of using grains to any significant extent. Finally, any grains you would end up eating would be highly unrefined and unprocessed. There is NO way you would be able to make white flour or any other type of refined or processed grains. Most breads, pasta, bagels, muffins, cakes, cookies, crackers, pretzels, and donuts would not be part of you diet at all.

There would be some legumes around, but you would not be able to munch on them raw for any period of time without becoming ill. Instead, you would have to soak and/or cook them to get rid of the numerous toxins and enzyme inhibitors present in order to include them in your diet. However, since you don’t have bowls or other containers in which to soak them, and again, since cooking is limited to roasting over an open fire, you probably would not waste your time roasting beans on a stick over a fire. You might come upon some tubers. Most would make you ill if consumed raw, and so, as with the legumes, you would have to soak and/or cook them. Again, any processed tubers would not be included in the diet at all. You would not be feasting on potato chips, instant mashed potatoes, fries, any products containing potato starch, or tapioca pudding.

Sweeteners would be hard to come by. If you were lucky, you could acquire some wild honey. However, you would have to be brave enough to climb a tree with a torch to smoke a bunch of angry bees out of their hive. Honey would therefore be a rare treat. Sugar and other refined sweeteners such as corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup would be practically nonexistent. Thus, once again, all baked goods would not be part of your diet. Neither would candy, ice cream, chocolate, soda and other sweetened beverages.

Alcohol, especially distilled alcohol such as whiskey, vodka, and rum would be unattainable. At most, you might find some fruit that fell on the ground and fermented. But you would not have the equipment to make large amounts of alcohol.

Finally, most oils would in no way be available to you. For example, corn oil. I challenge anyone to produce a drop of oil from an ear of corn without modern machines and chemicals solvents. Soybean oil, cottonseed oil, vegetable oil, peanut oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and canola (rape seed) oil would likewise be impossible to obtain. Furthermore, hydrogenated oils, found in margarine and most packaged goods would be unavailable. To produce these harmful oils, one first has to acquire one of the impossible to obtain oils mentioned above, and then heat that oil up at high temperatures in the presence of a metal catalyst. You get the point. Fish liver oil, while potentially obtainable, would become rancid very fast in the absence of refrigeration. You might be able to press some oil out of plump olives, and you could obtain a small amount of coconut oil with some effort. These would be unrefined, unlike most of the oils available in the supermarket, and would be relatively stable. However, even if you obtained these oils, you would probably not be using them for frying, especially deep frying, which requires large vats and a lot of difficult-to-obtain oil.

Human beings who have lived as hunter-gatherers, subsisting on meat, fish, fruit, berries, leaves, roots, nuts, and seeds, and have avoided dairy products, oils, grains and cereals, sweeteners, and most legumes and tubers, seldom, if ever, acquired any of the diseases that are our top killers. However, when these hunter-gatherers become "Westernized" and adopt our unhealthy diets, they develop the same ailments that afflict us. There are two basic questions to ask in order to determine whether a food is optimal for good health:

1. Would the food in question be available to me if I was stuck out in nature with nothing but a few simple tools (e.g. a sharpened stick, rocks)?
2. Can I eat the food in question in its raw, unaltered, unprocessed form, extracting the nutrients from it without becoming ill?

If the answer to both of the questions is yes, it is healthy.This does NOT mean that you have to eat the food raw – just that you could eat it raw and extract all of the nutrients from it without any ill effects.

However, I advise you to cook all meat, poultry, fish, and eggs because of the potential for bacterial contamination. In nature, if you just slaughtered any healthy animal, bird, or fish, bacterial contamination would not be an issue, and you would be able to eat and properly digest raw meat. However, we get our meat after it has been lying around and handled many times in its journey from the slaughterhouse to our kitchen table, and thus cooking it is important.

Most of us today follow a diet containing a large amount of food which is not readily available in nature, and that must be highly processed to become edible. Our bodies were not made to handle such foods, and thus we suffer by dying of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and complications from diabetes and osteoporosis.

I am NOT saying that diet is the ONLY cause of the above disorders. Smoking and other tobacco abuse, infectious agents such as viruses, fungi and bacteria, genetic defects, and environmental pollution are well known contributors as well. And obviously, your genes play a role – some people will live to 100 despite smoking cigarettes, while others might suffer a heart attack in their 40s. What I am saying is that diet contributes a significant amount, and by following a healthy, natural, hu