Miguel Carrasco's Real World

The Guerrilla Guide to the Alkaline Diet

I've received a fair amount of emails asking how I was able to lose the weight so fast and decided to put together an extremely simplified and basic plan to the Alkaline Diet.  Please note that the key component to my success was pain. 

Anthony Robbins always talks about pain vs. pleasure.  In order for me to make this work, I created a state of mind of "enough is enough" and the pain of continuing my existing diet of eating whatever I perceived tasted good and relieved stress, was worse than eating healthy and improving my body through healthy eating. 

Until you can create enough pain with your current lifestyle choices, you will never be able to make a massive change.  And as we all know, Massive Results are only obtained by Massive Change!  There are no short cuts in life.

The Guerrilla Guide to the Alkaline Diet

1. Motivate yourself to live longer and stop killing your cells!
2. Drink a ton of water!  If you can, drink 2 to 3 litters of water a day.
3. Eat Alkalizing Food, and avoid Acidic Foods at all costs!
4. Buy a Juicer.
5. Make a great Vegetable Juice every morning for breakfast to kick start your day!
6. Have a Salad for lunch!
7. Go for a walk after dinner.

That's it, of course if you would like recipes, motivation, and explanation to why this works, and why Acid forming foods will cause candida, sickness, cancer, and death, buy The pH Miracle!  Below is a sample of foods you can eat, and a list of things you can't.

Foods that you can eat (Alkalizing)
Have as much as these as you want, stuff your face with them!

• Vegetables
  Spinach, wheat grass, chlorella, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, celery, cucumber, lettuce, courgette, cabbage, greens, squash (summer, butternut, yellow etc), peppers, chilli, tomato, onion, garlic, chickpeas, pinto beans, kidney beans, spring onion, root ginger, eggplant, lettuce, spinach, nuts (aside from peanuts and cashews), seeds, avocado, lentils
• Herbs & Spices
  Basil, parsley, mint, coriander, ginger, cumin etc.
• Essential Fats
  Avocado Oil, Flax/Linseed, Evening Primrose, Olive Oil
• Fruits
  Lemons, Lime, Grapefruit, Watermelon, Tomato, Avocado.  No other fruits.
• Grasses
  Wheat, barley, kamut, lemon, shave etc.
• Dips and Sauces
  Pesto, hummus, tahini, guacamole etc.

Foods that you cannot eat or drink! (Acidic Forming)

• Sugar
• Dairy Products
• Meat and Poultry
• Caffeine
• Tobacco
• Alcohol
• Wheat (aside from sprouts or wheatgrass)
• Fruit (apart from those mentioned above)
• 'Bad' fats (saturated, trans fatty acids, hydrogenated)
• Processed foods
• Fizzy drinks
• Peanuts and Cashews 
• Pasta and White Rice
• Condiments

Follow this plan, and you will drop weight.  There are hundreds of other things you should incorporate into this new lifestyle; however they are all covered in the book.  Some additional things I did to lose weight faster:

1. Although you are technically allowed to eat 20 to 30 percent acidic foods, I have kept my ratio to 95% alkalizing, and 5% acidic.
2. Make sure the water you drink is good water!  Reverse Osmosis is probably the easiest to find that works well for the body.  Make sure it’s not sitting around forever however, or it will lose its healing power.
3. Do not exercise more than 15 minutes if you are pushing hard!  You WILL make your body more acidic and will not help.  Why do you think so many people plateau, and work out hours a day.
4. Absolutely no caffeine or alcohol!
5. Buy Organic when possible!  The cost is worth it to your body!
6. Do a Colon Cleansing, buy Dr. Natura Colon Cleanse!  Very easy to do, take 2 pills in the morning, 15 minutes later you drink a special drink that cleans your intestine, and at night drink a tea before bed.  If you can, for the first three days of doing this, have only juices!

That's it, that's the high level plan of what I followed for about 3 weeks to lose 30 pounds!  I'm hoping to lose more in the next few weeks but expect results to slow as I start getting to my ideal weight of 165.

Good Luck!

The Alkaline Diet and How it Changed my Life

About three weeks ago I was completely fed up with my health.  Getting sick every few months, dry skin, overweight, feeling tired and getting constant headaches.  As a VP of Technology I'm in countless meetings every day, traveling all the time, eating out, attending parties, and basically working my body extremely hard.  Motivating my team and finding the best people requires an enormous amount of energy, and I was feeling flat dead. 

My weight had gone to 211 pounds in about 4 years from 175.  After just two and a half weeks on the Alkaline Diet I am now at 182 pounds. I work out a maximum of 15 minutes a day.  I guarantee if you have plateau in your workouts, are overweight, suffer from headaches, tired, or depressed, if you follow The Alkaline Diet, you will feel 10 years younger, and will not look back.

A few years ago, I bought a BowFlex, started going to the gym and working out, but I would drop 5 to 10 pounds, and still feel terrible.  I would just sit at 200 pounds and there seemed to be nothing I could do.  Although I have spent my whole life learning about my mind and how we can achieve amazing things if we set our minds to it, I had completely ignored my body and gotten to a state where, although I looked ok, I felt like I was literally rotting garbage. 

In order to keep my energy up, getting up at 7am and going to bed at 2am some nights, I would drink countless amounts of coffee.  Lunch time was fast so I would think I was eating healthy by going to subway and getting a veggie max.  But most days involved a trip to one of the thousands of fantastic local restaurants in Winnipeg, and ordering whatever I felt like.

I tried other diets where I had to count calories, eat lots of protein, cut out carbohydrates, and workout 45 minutes a day. I would definitely lose weight, however it wasn't very sustainable, and at the end of the day, I would plateau, and no matter what I did, would not lose any more weight.  On top of it all, I would still feel like garbage, still had cravings for coffee, sugars, alcohol, spaghetti, meat, eggs, bacon, and still walked around with low energy, unable to wake up easily in the mornings. 

There had to be a better way, and there was, The Alkaline Diet

I know this sounds like an infomercial, but it's amazing how I feel now!  In just two and a half weeks of following the Alkaline Diet, I now weigh 182 pounds.  My headaches have completely vanished, I have more energy than I had when I was 18, my skin has a glow and softness that you have to see to believe, and I am in desperate need of new clothes!

The Alkaline Diet is so simple to follow; it’s crazy that more of us do not eat this way.  Eat alkalizing foods, avoid acidic foods.  The main principle behind the diet is our body's pH level is slightly alkaline, ranging between 7.36 and 7.44.  Therefore our diet should reflect this, and be rich in high alkaline foods, and low acidic foods.  Just like the world is 70% water and 30% earth, our body's are 70% water and 30% matter.  We therefore should try and eat a diet that is 70% alkaline foods, and 30% acidic foods.

Unfortunately our typical diets are highly acidic, and low in alkaline, causing our body's to scream for help!  Your body will literally start storing body fat in order to protect its organs and save itself.  It desperately tries to get rid of the toxins that grow in your body via this acidic state by causing dry skin for peeling, eczema, rashes, growths, and in the end, cancer or other terrible diseases.

I'm no doctor, but I was so sick and tired of going to doctors for pills, feeling worse year after year, I took my body into my own hands.  I bought The pH Miracle by Doctor Robert Young, and changed my life.  It explains in detail how to follow an alkaline rich diet.  It has fantastic recipes and approaches to following the diet.  I bought the book, and could not put it down.  I feel fantastic, and you will to. At the end of the day, your body is all you have left, and nobody can take away from you, except yourself.

You can get The Ph Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health by Robert O Young Ph.D at Chapters or on Amazon.com

Watch Dr. Robert Young on CNN

Word 2007 Crashing?

Recently I cleaned up my development laptop and installed a fresh copy of Microsoft Vista Ultimate, fresh copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, and everything was running fantastic!  Then I started with the third party applications I use on a regular basis (SnagIt, Camtasia, PhotoShop, Flash).

Next thing I knew, Word was crashing all the time.  And when I say crashing, I mean it.  Every time I would click the "x" and try and get out of Word 2007, it would hang and crash.  Worse yet, any document I opened, the scroll bar would not work, and the mouse would not be able to move  the cursor and highlight text.  Brutal!

I tried going to my Word Options, in hope I could disable some add-ins, however at this point I discovered that my mouse was rendered pretty much useless, and could not click on the add-on's section to do anything.  Tabbing also seemed futile.

After re-installing Office three times, I stumbled across an article on the Microsoft knowledge base to fix this very common problem.

1. Close Word 2007
2. Load the Registry Editor (Type: RegEdit in the run and search box).
3. Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data
4. Rename the "Data" Key to "DataBackup".
5. Close Registry and Load Word 2007!
6. Do the happy dance!

This should resolve the problem!  This problem is due to a corrupted key.