“You are what you eat,” said every mum, everywhere. What does that even mean mum?! Is this more rubbish your peddling like TV turning my eyes square? To be honest, I don’t even think most mums knew what that cliche means either – if they did I’m convinced they wouldn’t be feeding their children majority of the food they do.
The adage “you are what you eat” is actually quite profound as well as it is annoying to hear. If you absorb toxic food your body becomes toxic. I’m not going to get into it because I don’t want you to stop reading, but as long as you get the gist!
I believe many people aren’t conscious or even completely accepting of the fact that we are completely holistic beings. We are incredibly complex. We are physical, spiritual, mental and emotional. Everything is intertwined, not one is without the other. If you are down emotionally your body will eventually take the hit for that. If you are down physically then the spiritual, mental and emotional part of you will be dragged down with it. It is science, and it is proven.
I want to focus on one part of our being in this post – the physical.
What I have come to realise is that no one changes until they first see the need to change. And when that person does see the need to change, they usually hide behind self-made barricades of personal excuses and justifications to stop them from actually making the change. Why? Because change is painful, at least the kind of change that requires you to give up your addictions. Hopefully, this blog post will get rid of some of those barricades for you so that you can move forward. Warning: it may be unpleasant to hear.
As I shared in my post ‘The Secret to Kicking my Sugar Addiction’ I went on a 3 month cleanse. During that process, I had to come face-to-face with all of my excuses and found all of them to be wrong…
1) Eating healthy is too expensive. False. Dying is too expensive. Disease is too expensive. Medical bills are too expensive. Not living a fulfilled life because of poor health is too expensive. Sacrificing quality time with loved ones because of fatigue is too expensive. But besides that, you actually don’t eat out as much so you save money there. You don’t buy basically any processed foods so you save money there. Baking with almond meal over white flour well, yeah… that’s way more expensive. But once you experience what a healthy body feels like, your perception changes. You realise good food is more important than another pair of shoes.
2) Eating healthy is too time-consuming. False. All of the meals I make take me 30-45mins, tops! I was shocked. And I do not meal prep. I have neither the time or the willpower to meal prep. Nuh-uh. Instead, I make enough dinner for lunch the next day (always). That takes care of when I’m starving at lunchtime and would otherwise give in to the temptation to buy unhealthy food. The only prep I do is foods like bliss balls or muffins at the start of the week to take care of the snacking. I am not a pleasant hungry person…so I make sure when I am turning green I have something to bring me back to normal levels of human.
3) Eating healthy is gross, has no variety and I’d prefer to be happy than healthy. False. So false. Now look, I am not one of those “health freaks” that will make broccoli pizza and tell you it tastes the same – no sir, it does not. But let me tell you, there is a world of variety outside of McD’s and KFC and pretty much everything else we are conditioned to eat. A whole new world! You can’t be convinced of it by someone else, you’re too sceptical and frankly, too addicted. You’ll have to try it yourself. And don’t expect substitutes to taste the same, they won’t. It is not about substituting turkey for to-furkey and pretending all is well. It is about changing the way you think and learning to love new foods.
4) Healthy food doesn’t even fill me up. False. Convenience foods are loaded with chemicals that are added purely to keep you wanting more. Ever successfully attempted to have ONE piece of chocolate or one small handful of chips? Yeah, didn’t think so. Scientists create that food for one reason… to keep you eating it. They also contain chemicals that block transmitting communication within your body. Basically, it stops the natural process of your body signalling to you it wants X, you feed it X, and now it is content.
Here’s all you need to know right now about your body and its relationship with food: Any food that has come from a lab, that has weird numbers on the label, or that has been heavily tampered with – your body has NO CLUE how to process. You literally might as well eat cardboard. Your stomach is supposedly the size of your hand right? And have you ever paid attention to how big your plate is? A little bit bigger than that I suspect… If you were eating food that your body could identify (because it is actually food) you would be full and satisfied quicker. I could literally eat a whole bowl of cake or two (no exaggeration), but when it comes to desserts loaded with whole nutritious foods and fats my body says “yep that’s what we want, that’s all now.”
5) There is too much debate about what we should and shouldn’t be eating, no one can ever know what is right. Unfortunately, this one is true. I can get super overwhelmed with this one, and very frustrated. I tried weaning off meat for about 6 months only to find out that with my Blood Type and Metabolic Type I should be eating some meat and plenty of seafood. I actually became quite sick from trying to cut out meat, even with supplementation. The truth is, there is no one-size fits all when it comes to diets. Each of our bodies is unique and each will require different foods at different times for different reasons. The best thing you can do is start the process, start with any kind of diet. As you go, you will learn more and more, change things here and there, and most importantly you will start to pay attention to your own body. Your body will tell you what it does and doesn’t want. The more in tune you become through your attempts to look after your body, the more your body will respond to you. The one thing that every single diet will tell you is this – you’ll have to change the way you eat to get results. If you don’t do anything, nothing will change.
You shine from the inside out. If you are destroying and polluting your insides there isn’t going to be much shining going on is there? Like I said at the start, eventually, all of the other facets of you will suffer as well. Look after yourself, please. It’s worth it.
