Basic Principle of the HiFi Diet

A Simple Principle:

The basic idea of the HiFi diet is that people feel bad, have bad digestion, gain weight mainly because they eat food that has its fiber removed and not because they eat too much or too many calories. Consequently, the basic principle of the HiFi diet is you don't watch out for calories, but trust your appetite to determine how much of what you want to eat, as long as your food is HiFi. If you eat natural food, you can learn again to trust your intuition. This also means that you can and you should eat a lot of HiFi Food, because if you eat high fiber food you need a larger volume of food.


What's HiFi Food?

HiFi Food is a very simple concept. It's all plant-based (vegan) food that still contains all its fiber. Here are a number of examples: A banana, eaten straight out of the peel is 100% HiFi - all the fiber is still in there. A banana blended with some water into a banana smoothie is still 100% HiFi, since all the fiber is still there, only water has been added. Adding water has no effect on the HiFi status and neither has removing water (through drying, for example). The same smoothie pressed through a strainer, however, is no longer a HiFi food. Consequently, dried fruit are HiFi, fruit juices are not. Fruit smoothies (blended fruit and veggies) are HiFi, unless they contain fruit juices.

Peanuts eaten straight from the shell, are 100% HiFi, even if they are roasted in the shell. They are no longer a HiFi food if they are fried in oil, because oil has been pressed and filtered and is, therefore, no longer 100% HiFi. Adding a non-HiFi food to a HiFi food makes the resulting food non-HiFi.

Sugar is not a HiFi food since it's basically crystalized juice. Hence, everything containing sugar is not HiFi. White wheat flour and things made out of it are certainly not HiFi.

You don't need to eat 100% HiFi all the time, but it's important to understand this principle: Fiber is not an ingredient of food, but something that comes naturally with it. The only way to get not enough fiber is to remove it from the food by processing. Unfortunately, almost all food people buy these days is processed and has most fiber removed. Therefore, I recommend eating a 100% HiFi diet for a week to become aware of
- which foods are HiFi
- how you feel if you eat 100% HiFi foods.
I bet that after one week, you don't want to go back to processed supermarket food ...

There are of course a few other principle you should take into account when choosing what to eat, that are not related to the fiber content of food, but I will discuss them in another post. For today, I just want to state that I don't eat and don't recommend:
- Salt (unless I had a sweaty workout)
- Psychoactive substances: caffeine, alcohol, THC, etc. This includes chocolate and green tea.