Most of us do not have the ability to even comprehend the level of power and freedom and enlightenment that could be accessible to us, as a result of optimizing our diet.

Most of us hugely underestimate the role of our diet, and many of us are promiscuous with what we eat. We randomly eat whatever we happen to find in front of to us, without any planning or premeditation. We spend most of our lives never truly appreciating the role of our diet, because we never directly experienced what life would be like when we have truly superior, optimized diet. We think that by improving our diets, we may get some benefits here and there, and some added energy, but that’s it. Most of us don’t have the ability to appreciate how diet can affect our consciousness, our being, our brain, our thoughts, and even our identity and our personality, at a core level, far deeper and beyond increased energy or “feeling better.” It is something that we need to experience firsthand, for long enough, to truly appreciate and understand it.

In the pursuit of improving my life and overcoming my health challenges and my suicidal depression, I was blessed to be able to experiment with different diets, foods, herbs, supplements, and their combinations, until I found a way of eating and living that deeply enriched and nourished my life, and saved me from so much pain and dullness. And what I learned was almost identical, in a way, to what I learned from my pursuit of creating wealth and achieving success in other areas of life, which is this: the majority is always wrong, misinformation is ubiquitous, open-mindedness is almost non-existent, reliable sources of information are painfully rare, and firsthand experience is the best mentor of all. I had to go on a long and challenging, yet exciting, journey to discover a way of eating that truly empowered me, and made a monumental difference in my life. Here, I will share with you what I learned.

Perfection Vs Optimization

Throughout my life, I was always a perfectionist. I had to have the best of everything, otherwise I wouldn’t be happy. Once I realized the role that diet can play in my life, I carried my perfectionism with me to my diet journey. I was always determined to find the best foods and herbs and supplements, and have nothing but them, and avoid everything else, which actually helped me learn many new things. However, doing so was very stressful and unrealistic, because I was putting too much pressure on myself, which never works. After years of learning and experimenting and failing, I eventually found a way to have a truly powerful diet, while doing it effortlessly and with ease and grace. I will refer to this way as, optimization. Perfection is unrealistic, optimization is perfectly realistic.

Optimization is doing the absolute best you can and constantly working on improving it and making it better and better, over and over again, and continuing to do that for the rest of your life. The mathematical definition of optimization is: “the selection of a best element (with regard to some criteria) from some set of available alternatives.” When it comes to diet, my definition is: the selection of the most nourishing and empowering and nutritious foods available to us, that deeply enrich our lives and are aligned with our purpose in life and our goals, given our times and circumstances, our resources, our abilities, our environment, and our location, from a set of available alternatives. Most of us are eating foods that are not optimal for us, because we haven’t gone through the hassle of experimenting with and trying everything out there and then reaching a decision for ourselves as to what objectively and relatively works best for us, and because we don’t have enough information about other available alternatives.

In our day and age, having so many alternatives available to us changes the whole game. The decision to eat an apple, when all you had available to you is an apple, is a very, very different decision from that of eating an apple, when you now have thousands of other, nutritionally superior options available to you and technologies that will allow you to quickly and readily have the best foods on earth for an equal investment of time, money and effort. Eating an apple in this example is no longer the most optimal and rational decision you can make.

There are many seriously empowering foods that are now widely and easily available to us, and it’s almost foolish for us not to take advantage of them and use them as allies, just because we’re so attached to what we’ve been doing our whole life and what we thought was right and what our parents and “ancestors” did. Many people are still attached to green juices and salads and “eating local/fresh/in season,” but there is a level far beyond that. Change is the only constant, and like everything, what is best and optimal for us to eat will constantly change. Only 20 years ago, we didn’t have sites like iHerb.com that can ship huge amounts of food to anywhere in the world for almost nothing within a few days, nor did we have the overwhelming abundance of the cleanest and most nutritious foods easily available to us. Now, we do. I could now be in Zimbabwe, in the middle of nowhere, and still have foods like Canadian wild rice, Peruvian wild quinoa, Hawaiian spirulina, and Chinese schisandra berries shipped straight to my door. That, changes everything.

I’ll shortly list the foods that I found to be the most deeply nourishing, empowering, nutritious, and the most complete. These foods are the highest in nutritional density and contain the broadest variety of nutrients. And, I know, I know, I know, many of these foods are “weird” and are not considered “real food” and may not work for our “lifestyle.” We’ve all been programmed for a lifetime to believe that vegetables and fruits and meat and fish are the pinnacle of healthy food and the only healthy options we have, and they may have been at one point when they were the only thing available to us and the planet and the water were cleaner and the soil rich in minerals and nutrients, but now, everything is radically different, and we need to have the willingness to change and adapt and let go of all the shit we’re so deeply attached to, otherwise we’ll never evolve and transcend our current level of consciousness and health.

When it comes to vegetables and fruits and local/fresh food, they should be extremely nourishing and nutritious, but, most of what is available to us right now in most countries is really nothing but empty fiber, and doesn’t provide the body with any deep nourishment at a core level or correct any serious nutritional deficiencies. The deciding factors of how nutritious a vegetable or fruit is, are the soil in which it’s grown, and the quality and cleanliness of the water used, and nowadays, the soil is becoming increasingly more devoid of nutrients, and the water used is not clean and loaded with toxins, all of which severely affect the quality and the nutrient level of the plant. Wild or bio-dynamically grown vegetables are a completely different animal than conventional or “organic” vegetables. i always seek to enrich my diet with quality vegetables and fruits whenever I can, and If you can have vegetables grown at a farm like this one here in Iceland, then, by all means, have all the vegetables you want. But, if you’re in California and you’re getting your “organic” or “local” vegetables from the Whole Foods Market or the farmer’s market near you, then you’re most likely just wasting your money, and you’re better off upgrading to something else, or growing your own vegetables.

The reason why vegetables are thought of as a very healthy choice is that they’re relatively neutral and far less problematic compared to what most people are eating, and so they don’t cause as much harm to the body as most other conventional foods. So when people switch from a toxic diet to a seemingly healthy diet and to eating organic vegetables and fruits and green juices and nuts and seeds, their body stops reacting very negatively to what they’re eating and they start to heal and feel noticeably better. Vegetables and fruits may be a healthier choice, but in most cases, in our day and age, they are not the healthiest choice.

I used to be a raw vegan, and I ate nothing but fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds, for years. And, it royally fucked me up. I started having serious nutritional deficiencies, an uncontrollable addiction to the sugar in fruits, mood swings, and severe depression, and I lost a dangerous amount of weight (at some point I literally almost disappeared,) but most importantly I never really felt nourished by eating vegetables and fruits, they just felt like a liability and a serious stress on my digestion and just something to curb and distract my hunger for a couple of hours. I used to be very toxic, and most people who are toxic have very weak digestion and can’t fully digest and break down vegetables or assimilate any of their nutrients. I always had undigested vegetables in my stool, so I knew that I wasn’t really getting any benefit from eating them. And, now, I don’t eat vegetables unless I’m in a place where the vegetables are still the way they should be, and if that’s not the case, I’d rather go hungry than eat them.

The same goes for meat. I have seen people get deeply nourished by eating quality meat, but such quality meat is rare to find and not as widely available, even if it’s labeled as organic. When an animal is domesticated and eats grass that grows in soil that is severely deficient in nutrients, the meat of the animal itself will be far, far less nutritious, than the meat of a wild animal, and that too, makes things like conventional meat and chicken, a suboptimal choice.

Another problem with eating animal flesh, is that toxins accumulate as we move up the food chain. We live in an extremely toxic world where animals are exposed to countless toxins in the air and the food they eat, such as pesticides, insecticides, heavy metals, and genetically modified crops, and all of those toxins transfer on to us as we eat the animal. And so, as we move up the food chain, the more toxicity we’re exposed to. This is more obvious in the marine world, where a whale or a dolphin has far higher levels of mercury than sardine or krill (watch the great documentary The Cove for more engaging and interesting information on that,) and the phytoplankton (which is what the krill eats) has lower levels of heavy metals than the krill or the sardine. Eating large amounts of seafood over time is now becoming a major cause of mercury toxicity and many of the health and mental problems that are becoming more prevalent such as autism (the book Diagnosis: Mercury: Money, Politics, and Poison does an impeccable job at explaining this in greater detail), and such toxicity is increased as we move up the food chain, and can be minimized to an extent by eating reasonably lower on the food chain.

I personally eat many animal products such as colostrum, egg yolks, butter, ghee, and royal jelly, but I don’t eat animal flesh, not because I’m married to vegetarianism, but for spiritual reasons, and because I think there are enough animals dying everyday from all the fucked up shit we’re doing by polluting the planet and making it dirtier and more toxic, and because domesticating and eating animals is not sustainable in the long-term for the whole population of this planet (watch the documentary Cowspiracy for more information on this,) and, because there are more than enough superior options available to me that I no longer have to bother with eating meat, and, finally, I just personally find it disgusting and gross to eat the flesh and organs of a dead animal (sorry.) I used to eat meat, chicken and/or fish 3 to 4 times a day and I’m happy that that period of my life is behind me. I strongly believe that there is a link between eating animal flesh and having emotions like anger and aggression, and it’s something I personally experienced. As soon as I experimented with giving up meat I noticed that I’m much calmer and more emotionally balanced, and whenever I tried reintroducing it to my diet I would notice that I would get angrier and start acting like a bitch. This is of course just my personal experience. I know many people who thrive on eating meat (especially if it’s wildly hunted, not the grocery store garbage,) so it’s something that differs from one person to another, and you’ll have to find what’s best for you and your own body.

And with that being said, for all the strict vegans and vegetarians in attendance who are clapping right now, please know that hunting and killing and eating animals has always been a part of life. A female polar bear will starve to death if she can’t find a seal to eat and feed to her cubs, and it’s even believed that polar bears prevent an overpopulation of seals by eating them. Either way, hunting, killing and death seem to be unavoidable, and that seems to be nature’s intention. You’ll have to use your intuition and decide what is more in alignment with you and what feels best for you. Don’t become dogmatically attached to one diet or belief system, and always be open to experimenting with new things and changing everything and letting go of what you thought was true. Whether you eat animals or not, always optimize, and go for the absolute best quality and the cleanest you can find.

All of the above, brings us to many uncomfortable conclusions. We live in a world that is very different from the way it was 100 or 1000 years ago. Issues like toxicity and soil deficiencies deeply alter our body’s nutritional needs, and what makes a food optimal for us, and affect our ability to tolerate, handle, and digest certain foods. This, along with the ferocious abundance of choice that we have available to us, aggressively changes the criteria for what makes a diet optimized and nutritionally superior.

Based on the criteria I outlined above, the following foods are what I personally found to be the most powerful, healing, and nutritious foods available to us, from my own research and experience, and from coaching many people and helping them with their health. I divided those foods into six groups, because I think every group is irreplaceable and deserves to be in a class of its own. Those groups are: the nutritionally dense foods (NDFs), fats & oils, gluten-free grains, fermented foods, spices, and herbs.

1- The nutritionally dense foods. These are the foods with the most healing abilities and the most nutritional density. A small amount of each of these foods, will have more nutritional value and a far broader array of nutrients, than a much larger amount of most conventional foods. This is one reason why some of them are relatively expensive, but when I looked at it more rationally and objectively, I found that I was actually saving not only money, but time and energy and effort and headache, by choosing these foods over other foods and making them a major part of my diet. The biggest problem with these foods is that many of them taste terrible, and taking them can be a pain. How to take and prepare these foods and make delicious meals and concoctions and elixirs with them will be the topic of my next article, so be sure to subscribe. Many of those foods are also considered weird by most people, and so expect to receive some tickling criticism if you eat them in front of others.

I did my best to rank these foods by the most powerful and nutritionally superior from my experience and all the research I did, but what I found out is that different foods can differently influence different people, and so you will want to experiment with as many of these foods as you can and create your own ranking. I’ll list the foods and the highest quality products and brands I recommend, both for people living in the US & internationally. I’ll soon update the article with more about each food and my experience with it.

1- Colostrum. Colostrum is truly a complete food. Whenever I’m traveling or going out for the whole day and want to carry food with me, I’ll always put some colostrum powder in a small 8-16 oz container, and if I really want to make it a full meal, I’ll add a fat to it, like a tablespoon of ghee or coconut oil or red palm oil or the yolk of 1-2 eggs, and that will easily more than sustain me for the whole day. I’m always on the lookout for fresh colostrum and try to have it whenever I can, but the one I regularly use is the Surthrival colostrum. This is the highest quality and the most legit colostrum product on the market, and I’ve had amazing results with it. It is the best thing I found for building muscle mass almost without exercise. You can read more about it and order it here. I usually order the largest size and pay $100-200 for international shipping, but it’s more than worth it, because a large bag easily lasts me for a whole month and I can rely on it for food, and it can be life-saver especially whenever I’m traveling.

2- Shilajit. Shilajit is used in India and parts of Russia, also known as mumio. You’ll sometimes read product descriptions that say things like “shilajit comes from above 6000 ft in the Indian himalayas and exudes from cracks in the Himalayan rocks.” I haven’t really been able to confirm that directly nor have I harvested shilajit myself yet, but I know that shilajit is the shit, and it’s a serious, very potent energy tonic. When I first added shilajit to my diet, I noticed a huge boost in my physical energy. One of my favorite drinks is a mix of shilajit, 4-6 egg yolks, ant (more on ants later), chocolate/cacao beans, and a sweetener like stevia. This research paper here explains some of the benefits and cognitive effects of shilajit in greater detail: http://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3296184/ The highest quality shilajit I found is the shilajit by Omica Organics https://www.omicaorganics.com/ products/high-himalayan-dark- shilajittm-1-2-kilo-bag.html

I usually order the 1/2 kilo size as I found that to be the most economical option especially that I like to use it a lot and add it to almost everything. They ship internationally but you can also get the Dragon Herbs Shilajit here from iHerb. It’s less economical but offers cheaper international shipping. As far as I know both companies get their shilajit from the same source.

3- Marine phytoplankton. You keep hearing about omega-3 and the importance of it, however very rarely do you hear about marine phytoplankton and algae oil as the best sources of long-chain omega-3, and you will always hear about flax and hemp oil, which actually do not contain any long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Phytoplankton is by far the highest source of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids DHA & EPA. It is what krill eats, and krill is what fish, whales, seals, squid, and penguins eat, and it is, along with other algae, where they get their omega-3 from. By eating phytoplankton and algae and taking algae oil, you’re going straight to the source, which is far more potent and effective than taking it through a middleman like fish oil. Watch the timeless documentary by the legendary David Attenborough titles Planet Earth, to understand the role of phytoplankton and algae in our food chain. In fact, in many farms, animals are now being fed algae to increase the omega-3 content of their meat, milk, eggs, and a very similar thing is happening with bees. If you have a backyard where alga grow, you’ll probably find bees almost fighting over it, and that is because algae is a serious source of nutrition, and the bees have the intelligence to know it.

According to this powerful study here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090543/ “ Marine phytoplankton are the primary producers of omega-3 PUFAs, which are essential nutrients for normal human growth and development and have many beneficial effects on human health.” “The primary source of omega-3 PUFAs in the human diet are marine products. Specifically, marine phytoplankton and other single-cell algae are the main producers of omega-3 PUFAs, particularly EPA and DHA, and represent the basis of the food web for all aquatic creatures.” “Humans obtain omega-3 PUFAs through multiple levels of this food web: microalgae, which are directly used for food products or as animal feed; fish, which consume phytoplankton directly or eat other animals that feed on phytoplankton; and livestock, which are fed meal produced from various organisms in the food web (Borokowitz 1997). In essence, phytoplankton are the origin of the majority of our omega-3 PUFAs.” “While land plants such as flaxseed are a good source of another omega-3 PUFA, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), a very low metabolic conversion (<5%) of ALA to EPA and DHA makes land sources insufficient for meeting our dietary needs, as these three types of omega-3 PUFAs have distinct biological functions with EPA and DHA being more beneficial (Anderson and Ma 2009). Marine phytoplankton, due to their fatty acid composition of relatively large amounts of EPA and DHA, are thus particularly valuable in maintaining the availability of the important omega-3 PUFAs in our diet.”

According to this study here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC3131561/ : “The omega-3 fatty acids found in the oils of certain cold water marine fish, which are believed to be capable of reducing the incidence of coronary heart disease, are likely to originate from the phytoplankton in the food chain. Many of these phytoplankton species are found to be rich in reserves of oils containing various amounts of EPA and DHA. Indeed, the oil obtained from the microalga Schizochytium sp. has been authorized by the United States to be used as a new food ingredient because of its high DHA (n-3) content and because it contains higher levels of squalene and phytosterols but three times less cholesterol than fish oil.”

According to this study here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC3206402/ phytoplankton are still the source of DHA for all aquatic animal life. “When larger and more elaborate brains evolved in marine vertebrates, their neurons could continue to rely on large amounts of DHA because the phytoplankton producing this long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid also lay at the base of their food chain.”

And according to this study here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736422/ “In the marine food web, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (≥20 carbon atoms and >3 double bonds) are primarily formed by phytoplankton and transferred onto herbivorous zooplankton, hence affecting food quality for organisms at higher trophic levels”

4- Garlic. Garlic, garlic, garlic. Anyone who says that garlic is bad or shouldn’t be eaten in large amounts, does not really know garlic. Garlic is a super powerful food and medicine, but we need to understand it and build a relationship with it first. Years ago, before I learned about detoxification and many of the things I write about here, I had an excruciatingly painful abscess the size of a lime, right on my butt, and whenever I would accidentally sit on it, I would scream to the top of my lungs just like a little girl, and I would do it even if I was with a group of people or if Ms. Universe was sitting right next to me. And, at some point I just had an intuition to try eating garlic and onions in extreme amounts and see if that helps, and it worked. I ate 2 to 4 full bulbs of garlic (which is a lot), along with 2 onions, for 2 days, and In less than 72 hours, the abscess literally just painlessly melted away, and a disgusting liquid came out of it, and the whole problem was solved, just like that. Garlic is a true medicine and a healing food; its spiciness and unpleasant odor are the price we have to pay for its powers, but, you gotta pay to play.

A problem you will face with eating garlic is its strong unpleasant odor. My solution for that is to either cut all people from your life who would get offended by the smell of garlic, or start feeding garlic to all the ones you love. Once both of you are on garlic, you don’t notice the smell, and the whole problems goes away. The smell of garlic, to me, is sacred and is something to be celebrated, not masked or hidden. For whatever reason, I actually feel sexually turned on by the smell of a hint of garlic on a woman (garlic has actually been shown to improve sexual functions in men and women,) and I far prefer it to the toxic perfumes that smell like cough medicine and do nothing but give me a headache. If someone has a problem with your garlic smell, fuck ’em. With that being said, the smell of garlic can sometimes get out of hand, and people’s reaction to it in that case is very understandable, and in that case, you should use essential oils to kill the smell. A few drops of peppermint or lemongrass essential oil will murder the garlic smell and make it regret the day it ever showed up in the first place.

As with everything, I recommend getting the highest quality garlic you can find (wild, biodynamic, or organic). The success I had with my abscess was due to using imported wild garlic from Kenya (I didn’t go to Kenya to get it; it was being sold where I was), and I am not sure if I would’ve had the results if I just used any ordinary garlic.

Blue-green algae

ant

Royal jelly

Fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, kefirs, miso and natto.

Spirulina

Eggs yolks from organic, pasture-raised or free-range chicken.

Noni

Chlorella

Schisandra berries

Bee pollen

Wild Rice

Black Quinoa

Camu camu berry

Cacao beans

Kelp

Goji berries

Coconut oil

Maca

Ghee

Brazil nuts

Maitake & shiitake mushrooms

Maqui berries

Acai Berries

Pine pollen

Aloe vera

Moringa leaf

Ashitaba