Eating NUTRIENT dense foods and avoiding MAN MADE/ALTERED FOODS
● Don’t eat refined foods
● Eating
● Cooking
NUTRIENT dense foods and avoiding MAN MADE/ALTERED FOODS – DON’T EAT REFINED FOODS
If you care about your health stay away from refined foods. If it comes out of a box and you cannot find the ingredients in the “food” in your kitchen then I am afraid it is no a longer food it is a man made “product”. Your body does not know how to cope with these artificial foods. Man Made “food” manufacturers are merely looking to make a profit, not to supply your body with quality nutrients. They use cheap, low quality ingredients and pack the foods with sugar, salt, artificial sweeteners, cheap fats and a plethora of nasty chemicals to make it taste ‘good’. It is your responsibility to supply your body with the best nutrients that you can. A healthful diet can facilitate this.
Also, because these ingredients are foreign to your body, your body does not know who to break it down, and even if your body did know how to break it down, there would be very little nourishment provided.
NUTRIENT dense foods and avoiding MAN MADE/ALTERED FOODS – EATING
A few things you need to know.
1. You can’t back date poor eating. If you have been making poor food choices and not eating enough macro and micro nutrients, your body can be lacking in nutrients. It is these nutrients that fuel all the processes in your body. To make sure you are running optimally you need to make sure you are eating good foods that cover all the different nutrients that the body needs daily.
You can’t wake up at Forty and start to eat vegetables for the first time and think that you haven’t damaged your body. Start EATING PROPERLY as soon as you can.
2. Eat WHOLE natural foods not pretend unnatural “foods” (Can we really call them foods when they have been man altered?) that comes out of a packet aka avoid refined foods
We aren’t growing and cooking our own foods. We just take it for granted that where we are getting our food from is fresh and of good quality.
Let’s break that down. We used to grow our own food.
If you were to grow a tomato – you pick a tomato from the plant and then prepare it and eat it.
Now a days tomatoes are generally grown using pesticides, fungicides, herbicides (will I go on?!?) it is generally picked before it is ripe (so it doesn’t produce its full spectrum of nutrients) then the tomatoes are sprayed with a chemical (ethylene) to force it to ripen, then it is flown into the country where you live, it can also be x rayed on its way into the country – add radiation to the ethylene, pesticides, herbicides etc
So how old is this tomato when you actually get to eat it? When was it picked?, how long was it stored for? Flown across the world? Land in the shop? Land in your shopping cart? Rest in your fridge for a couple of days and the finally you eat it? How long did that process that from plant to plate? What nutritional value has it? don’t forget it was picked early and then sprayed with a chemical to force it to ripen when the food company wants it to ripen. Is it just pretty on the outside with no goodness on the inside? We really need to think about the age of our food.
One of my friends works in the catering industry. They make “healthy” meals. How healthy is this? They purchase the food on a Sunday, (remember the time it takes to pick to being sold in a shop) prep it (cut it up – which causes oxidation, once a vegetable is chopped it starts losing it nutrients) on the Sunday, cook it on the Monday. It gets delivered to the supplier on a Tuesday. It might find its way into your microwave on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… Friday. It actually has a shelf life of 7 days. The food looks amazing, tastes ok but it’s how old by the time you eat it? Plus it will have been cooked by the caterer and then zapped in your microwave that is double cooking. You need to be asking, what nutrition value is left in it by the time your body eats it and absorbs it?
Eating NUTRIENT dense foods and avoiding MAN MADE/ALTERED FOODS – COOKING
This is one of the most important habits you can make for yourself this and food shopping.
So the other I said to my sister that I have observed through cancer patients food diaries that they don’t seem to be eating real food… Either they don’t cook, their spouses don’t cook for them or their parents didn’t cook for them (but every adult should be responsible for what they are eating).
Then a week later I went into a bookshop (I’m a health, nutrition, fitness book junkie) and there in front of me was a book by Michael Pollan “Cooking”. That just told me instantly I was onto something!!!
I have many clients and they don’t value their bodies. They take them for granted but what they don’t realise is you can’t back date your health. You need to look after your body every day to get the most out of it. When we are in our teens, our twenties and coming into our thirties we think we are invincible, so we mistreat ourselves with poor food choices, alcohol, cigarettes, no exercise, no sleep etc.
Take one guy let’s call him Finn. He needs to lose at least 4 stone/56 lbs but he is putting his lifestyle over what is the most important thing we have our health. He has a job in a major company in the USA. He can be away from “home” two weeks out of every month. Travelling and living out of a suit case with no routine, NO COOKING, he tries to exercise but his working day is long, some jet lag, poor energy levels from his poor blood sugar control. All play havoc with his mind and body. His lifestyle of having a beautiful home (that he only lives in for half the year), fancy clothes, a nice car and the money he earns to buy shit food that under nourishes his body and loads his organs and joints with excess calories sorted as fat. He is willing to trade his paycheck for his health.
On paper this may seem like the life that everyone is chasing a nice house, nice car, eating out etc people don’t realise that your house, your fancy car, fast food, eating out at fancy restaurants aren’t going to help your body function optimally.
It’s time to realise that we need to take control of our health and not leave it to our doctors, drug companies, restaurants or marketing companies.
It’s you who controls your health, your future and the future diseases that your body is laying the foundation for you to develop at this very moment in time.
It is ONLY you who has the power to control your health.
We need to cook our food so that we know what ingredients, nutrients, additives etc that we are nourishing our body with… No one else cares what you eat!!!
Cooking – it is YOU who chooses what you are eating.
Ingredients used in cooking:
When you go and order food in a restaurant, cafe, or take out. Just think of that establishment as a business. They want to make the most profit they can. The quality of ingredients they use is generally based upon their bottom line and not on the quality of the food you are going to consume, digest, absorb, assimilate and eventually turn into your own building blocks known as your cells. It depends on the morales of the company if they use organic ingredients, if they do or don’t use GMO ingredients. It is the food that you eat on a daily basis that determines your health. It is not a restaurants/take out priority if their food is going to increase your health and quality of life or rot you from the inside out they are generally concerned with their profit margins not with your health.
Most commercial food producing businesses use the following cheap ingredients/additives to make their foods taste better. Sugar, salt and fat (usually in the form of omega 6 – remember from the fat chapter, these are the fats we need to balance with omega 3?).
Look at any health recommendation on the internet, in magazines etc and they usually state reduce your sugar, salt and fat consumption. The food industry doesn’t listen to these guidelines and they load their foods up with these ingredients because it makes the food tasty and it’s a cheap way to making the food tasty. These 3 additives are not good for our health in excess amounts.
Cooking is a ritual that prepares our digestive system for the food that you are about to eat. While cooking our senses are exposed to the smells/aromas from the food we are preparing. These smells tell our body food is on the way. These smells initiate our body to produce digestive juices. These juices are produced by the body to digest food.
Salivary gland to produce saliva (in our mouth) which contains digestive enzymes.
Stomach produces digestive juices.
These digestive enzymes are essential for the breakdown of food, as they act on different parts of the food to break it down into the smallest absorbable parts. The better your digestive system is working the better you are going to function, the better quality of life you are going to have. If you skip out on preparing food your body may skip out on the part of creating digestive juices. Which may play a role in digestive problems now or in the long term.
By cooking your own food it is you who chooses the quality of the ingredients that you are going to eat. eg organic, sugar, non GMO, additives, chemical sweeteners, artificial colours, processed food, raw or cooked etc.
We don’t know what we are eating anymore because, we do not cook our own food anymore and we don’t grow our own food anymore.
thelifestyleleprechaun 