How Should We Eat

Oh Nooo… not another diet!

Nope. No new diet here. But an old lifestyle way of eating yes. A diet but not a diet.

I’ve pretty much always known that eating whole foods is healthier than not. However, until recently I didn’t realize how many nutrients we actually take in when we eat whole foods. In this example I take in an extremely simplified version of one of my favorite meals. Brown rice, black beans and tofu, seasoning it with only cayenne pepper and Himalayan pink salt.

I knew it was a pretty good meal but would you imagine it having over 100 vitamins, minerals, and elements combined? I would’ve never in a million years guess such nutritional value from such a simple meal. Last week my meal prep for the week had brown rice, quinoa, sweet potato, kale, carrots, tofu, ginger, garlic, pink salt, cayenne pepper, onions, and mushrooms. The number of nutrients in each meal is unimaginable. All with zero added sugars or processed foods, much less animal fats or proteins in it.

There’s just no way we can eat from a box, can, jar, or a bag and get the kind of nutrition without any chemicals than we can from eating a whole food plant base diet. I’ve always hated the word diet. I’ve done lots of diets in the past. Now I choose diet as a way of life rather than a specific meal based diet. A lifestyle diet is a lot easier to adhere to than following a million restrictions.

I try to shop in the produce department for most of my food. If I’m cooking for today, I may go to the back and get me a nice piece of fish too. I do go through the vegetable isle in order to grab brown rice, quinoa, and my beans. Otherwise, the rest of the market can be a scary place. Oh, I do go to the potato chip isle too. I love grabbing me one of my favorite snacks, unsalted, plain rice cakes with almond butter. All almond butters are not made equal though. Most have sugar added and or some other ingredients. The only ingredient I want to see in mine is almonds. If anything has say, over three ingredients and one of them is sugar, bleached anything, or it’s hard to pronounce, then it isn’t for me. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy my occasional calzone or slice of pizza. I believe if I usually make good choices, I can steer away from healthy foods without causing too much harm.

I can go on and on referring to the dozens and dozens of studies I’ve read on the benefits of whole foods, especially plant based. The fact that eating in this manner avoids obesity, diabetes, cancers, auto immune diseases, even to some great extents, aging is not even enough. Truth be told the most surprising part to me is that it can even reverse many of these diseases. Unfortunately, many decide to test this notion way too late.

Some folks feel that they won’t live a happy life if they give up ice cream, sugar, extreme fats, sweets, meat, cheese, and the likes of those. Fun fact, a happy life begins with life. You’ll literally live longer with a much better quality of life and enjoyment without those foods that are likely more poison than foods.

Once you begin to eat whole foods, your taste buds evolve to a whole new level. You’ll begin to enjoy earthier, deeper flavors.

I want to live a life where I can run around with my grandkids. I want to be able to get out of a chair without help. I want to be able to walk and jog pain free. I want to be able to be active in my later years. I don’t want to deal with inflammation, memory lost, arthritis, medicines, doctors, treatments and such.

Inflammation is something we hear a lot but most of us don’t really understand it just like many of the diseases mentioned above. But with inflammation, most of us if not all of us deal with constantly. Obviously, we swell up when we stump our toe or when we cut ourselves. That’s essentially inflammation, the body rushing cells and blood to the are attempting to fix the issue.

Now, the bad inflammation comes when we swell up whether on our feet, legs, hands, brain, etc. Because we eat garbage, poison, by eating non nutritional foods especially processed foods, our body’s and cells become confused and think that it needs to go on attack mode. Inflammation is a lighter version of what autoimmune diseases do to us. Our body fights itself, it’s just highly confused because of the poison and garbage we keep putting in it. We really are what we eat.

Our body is resilient but a car can only go so far if you fill it up with a little gas and the rest trash.

Hippocrates knew it over 2,000 years ago, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Yet we walk around and act as if it doesn’t matter.

If you do a simple Google search of causes of death in the USA you’ll come to see that heart disease and cancer win the race by far. About 1,700 people die each day from cancer alone. That’s over a person a minute. The very sad truth is that living a healthy lifestyle can avoid that. Eating well can even reverse it.

Hippocrates also said, “Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.”  As well as, “Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” 

Our body’s are amazing vessels designed to fix itself but you must fuel it properly. We play the poor little me card when we get sick yet most of the time it was our own fault. Then we hear the great excuses about genetics. Guess what, genetics will make you more prevalent to getting sick if you have bad habits and you fuel your body with junk.

Now, if you’re just a rebel, let me try to guilt trip you. Do you love your family, your loved ones, your children? If so, why would you not fix your genes by creating good ones for them, their offspring and their offspring to carry?

How about loving your children enough for them to feel good about traveling and experiencing life without having to worry about taking care of you because you didn’t take care of yourself.

How about loving our children enough to allow them to spend their money how they choose to rather than on healthcare for you. Not such a fun fact that we as Americans spend roughly 20% of our income on healthcare. We already spend about 50% of our income to have a roof over our heads, 20% on taxes, yet we’re ok spending 20% on healthcare?

I like to believe that we’re the brightest in the animal kingdom but at times I find myself scratching my head.

We don’t do things for one of two reasons,
1. We don’t know.
Or
2. We don’t care.

Although the information was out there when our parents were young, I don’t blame them. They were duped by high dollar advertising by businesses trying to get them to buy their products. Now,all the data, information is not only in our face but at our fingertips.

Again, I can go on and on about why we should make better choices. There’s absolutely not one single reason as to why not evolve past our bad lifestyle and eating habits. Some of us need a complete overhaul of our lifestyle and eating habits.

But at the very least, we need to move the needle. Maybe, it is to start educating yourself on these things. Maybe it is to spend more time selecting items in the produce department. Maybe it is avoiding the middle sections of the super market. I don’t know what it looks like to you. I know in my life, progress equals happiness. I always try to do better than before. This doesn’t mean I’m a saint, it means I try to raise my standards and self accountability every so often and that seems to work for me. I don’t pretend I know what works for you but by looking at the trend, statistics and at what seems to be selling in the markets today, we all need to make better choices.

Love y’all, Live Responsibly my friends!