When we decide to clean up our diets, for a while it all goes well, we feel on a high, totally motivated towards changing things. The excitement of the new in the top of our priority list. Mostly when we have decided to do this we are cleaning out our diet of one or two key foods, that we are addicted to, wheat or sugar, often brought together to create those lovely foods that are often our guilty pleasures such as biscuits or cake.
Mostly we believe we are addicted to specific foods, we can recite them almost because life doesn’t feel the same without them, they have BFF status, and we might put them to the back of the cupboard at the beginning our resolve hard that at that point, but as the first week goes by we often can’t consign them to the back of our mind. Gnawing away at us, we are drawn back to then binge, and have a level of guilt, hoping that no one saw us. But these binges and the addiction to sugar in particular and sweet refined wheat products are partly because of the refining and processed factor. From my perspective it’s not about feeling guilty, it’s about understanding why this happens so that you can move forward and negate it from happening in the future.
These processed foods are designed to be addictive in many cases, carefully balanced so that you want to eat more of them. The manufacturers work very hard at this. We think we are yearning for that sugary sweet but what we are really looking for are the nutrients we need to satiate our appetite because they were missing.
We remove a lot of nutrients in the refining process, the benefits are often in the husk and fibre that is discarded, we isolate compounds that bring us empty calories. They give us the quick hit, stimulating our energy, and giving us an emotional lift, that high, then as fast as we feel up, we feel down. These foods don’t give us the long term health because those incredibly valuable nutrients are missing. So the body goes searching for them and the binging begins, our body sends out messages looking for more food, more nutrients in reality, because it needs nutrients to be able to metabolise its food to be able to use it. These refined foods leaving us in a vitamin and mineral deficit because the body has to find those minerals to metabolise those foods, drawing from our bones in some cases. Refined products such as sugar contain an isolated compound which have most of their minerals removed, minerals that the body needs, and instead of real food packed with vitamins and minerals that give us good health, we are eating hundreds to thousands of calories each week of nutrient devoid foods and expecting that our immune systems are still going to be able to raise its game.
Our body is made out of the foods we eat, and the drinks we consume, we can ignore this and look for other solutions to our health issues, but ultimately good health didn’t come from medications but came from our daily actions of what we eat, drink and think.
We have too many treat type foods in our diets every day, and not enough nutrient-rich foods, we are calorie counting calorie dense nutritionally poor foods, to control our weight when we should be reviewing our nutrient levels to support our immunity. That daily treat is robbing your immunity, that 200 calories are not insignificant over time it becomes a cumulative loss that could have been an apple, packed with gut supporting fibre to help modulate the immune system, some seeds that help to bring valuable essential fatty acids that help to also do the same thing. It might not feel as fun as a biscuit but it sure is healthier and a better way of raising your immunity. Whilst so many have been upping their supplement intake how many of you have sat down and thought how do I meet my nutrient intake with what I’m eating every day? Whole natural foods are of great importance to our health, to replace 100-500 calories every day with nutrient poor food such as that cheeky trifle dessert, that afternoon biscuit is doing your body a disservice.
