7 Steps to Healthy Eating as a Lifestyle
Make the commitment Find it within yourself to make food important, to make your health important. Commit to learning how to eat healthier. It doesn't matter how well you eat now, generally most people have SOMETHING they can learn about and improve when it comes to how they eat. Nourish your spirit and recognize that food is the key to health. Commit to the steps you choose to take on the path to eating better and decide to make a life long adjustment to your eating habits.
Educate yourself about MSG, Preservatives and other food additives, about refined sugar (white death) and genetically engineered (GE… often referred to as GMO) foods . Learn why they are so bad for you and how to identify them on food labeling. Learn what foods are good for you and why. Knowledge is power, it will help you stay on track and help you answer questions when people find out you have eliminated certain things from your diet. Continue to research, question and accumulate knowledge as an ongoing thing. Don’t fall victim to food fads.
Choose ONE THING to eliminate. Pick any one of the top three nasty things in our foods and remove it from your diet. Our family started with MSG and hidden sources of MSG. We took a year and our main focus was on not eating anything with MSG in it. That may seem like a long time but when you consider MSG as an additive is highly addictive, it does take a long time to detox your body from it and stop having a taste for it. Don’t be impatient and rush into too many changes all at once, and you are more likely to achieve long term success. Once your first year is done, eliminate one more thing, and so on. Over time you will find that you may be ready to eliminate food additives completely, but even if you only got as far as getting rid of MSG and artificial colouring and flavouring you are eating infinitely more healthily than you were at the start of your healthy eating adventure.
Add in ONE THING to your weekly menu. Maybe you add a smoothie for breakfast a day or two (or more) a week, maybe it’s a green salad with your supper meals, maybe it’s experimenting with vegetarian cooking and having one vegetarian or vegan meal a week. It doesn’t matter how big the change is, or how many times a week you do it. JUST DO IT consistently. Every week for a year. You may find that after a few months you want to add in more healthy choices. You may find after a year you can’t imagine not having a salad at least 3 times a week.
Do something drastic. After you have armed yourself with knowledge and experimented a bit with your diet take the plunge and follow a detox meal plan, or find a menu plan that you follow diligently for a month that is a complete shift from your normal diet. For example do something like the 21 day Raw Food Reset by Young and Raw . The goal is to break some of your food habits and addictions and learn about a new way of eating. It doesn’t have to be a life long change but it should be something that will teach you new ways to look at food. Be adventurous! Try out new types of food and different cooking styles be open to new ideas and tastes.
Reduce or eliminate animal sourced food. We all tend to eat far too much food that is sourced from animals, and sometimes our entire meal plan revolves around meat leaving no room for grains, vegetables or other food items. This not saying you NEED to go completely vegan, but limiting meat, dairy and other animal sourced food ingredients allows us to be more varied in our diet. It can help place emphasis on creativity and awareness and helps us to not fall into old habits.
Listen to your body. Once you have conquered your food demons and addiction; this can take years of dedication! LISTEN to what your body tells you it needs. Be willing to break the mental patterns and beliefs you have about food. If you want to eat fruit for a whole week with very little else, if you want a big plate of asparagus for dinner and nothing else, if you want a nice organic, ethically raised chicken breast or steak with a healthy dose of fresh vegetables, if you want to eat nothing but raw veggies and the occasional nut and berry, Do that! But, continue to educate yourself, make sure you pay attention to your nutrition and how you feel. Do not fall into the trap of a food lifestyle ‘ideal’ at the expense of your health. There are healthy ways to be an omnivore, a vegetarian, a vegan, a raw vegan, etc., regardless of what style of eating you find yourself drawn to, make sure you remain flexible and in touch with how food is adding to your life experience.
(c) Moonfyre Cardinal June 2014
