Your Are What You Eat; Literally

Ever wonder how you make new cells, organs, tissues, skin, muscles, bone, and even brain cells? You don’t just manufacture them from thin air. The raw materials all come from what you eat.

Food is the biggest lever to impact your health. The wrong food harms each system, and the right food helps optimize each system. The right food regulates the health of your microbiome and immune system, reduces your levels of inflammation and oxidative stress, and improves your energy systems. It balances your hormones and brain chemistry, supports detoxification, and improves the function and health of your circulatory and lymphatic systems. It even provides the raw materials for every cell, muscle, tissue, organ, and bone in your body.

Your structure, which determines your function, is dependent on what you eat for the building blocks—the proteins, fats, minerals, and more—that make up who you are. Do you want to be made of Doritos or grassfed steak? Coca cola or wild blueberries?

The problem is that our processed diet is about 50 to 60 percent carbohydrate, mostly low-quality, refined starches and sugars that are the raw materials for processed food. If those carbs don’t become our structure, where do they go? We burn some, but most get turned into dangerous disease-causing unwanted fat. Your structure matters —not just to keep you all together standing straight up and not collapsing into a pile of muscle and bone on the floor. Every part of you has a structure and function. If you’re made up of poor-quality parts, you’ll create a poorly functioning body.

Combine Foods

Combine carb-rich foods with fiber, protein or anti-inflammatory fats. Never carb it alone! As the Glucose Goddess says: “Adding clothes” to carbs means adding fats, proteins, or fiber to sugary or starchy foods to reduce how quickly glucose is absorbed into your body. A powerful change you can make is to eat each of your meals in this order: veggies and plants first, then high-quality proteins and fat, and lastly starches and sugars, including fruits. This blunts the glycemic response but also satiates you faster and leaves you craving less junk food.

Food is Truly Medicine

There is no other activity you do every day that has more power to change your biology than what you eat. You literally ingest pounds of foreign material into your body daily. If all calories were the same, it wouldn’t matter what you eat, but unfortunately, this is not the case. Food carries information molecules instructions and code that program your biology with every bite, for better or for worse. Industrial food drives inflammation, creates imbalances in hormone and brain chemistry, damages your microbiome and changes your gene expression to turn on disease causing genes. Real, phytonutrient- rich whole food does the opposite.

DO EAT THESE

Hydrate Well

Use natural spring water or filtered water. How much water you should drink is based on activity levels, climate, current diet and overall health. Listen to your body, do not get to the point of being thirsty, monitor urine and make sure is clear or very light yellow in color, pre-hydrate before starting exercise or going out in hot weather and carry a bottle of water with you.  

Eat Whole Foods

Real food comes from the earth, and your grandparents would have recognized that. Real food fuels your body on a cellular level, gives you energy, and sustains you. The more colorful, the more phytochemicals it provides to your body to operate efficiently and at its greatest potential.

Stock-Up on Clean Protein for Each Meal

Proteins are the building blocks of the body which includes your immune and detoxification systems. During exercise, growth and development in children, pregnancy and lactation, aging in older adults, illness, or during weight loss, protein requirements are significantly increased. Organic, clean, and ideally, pasture raised animal protein when possible as well as plant-based proteins (legumes, nuts/seeds) are important to get with each meal and snack.

Prioritize Polyphenols in Colorful Vegetables and Fruits

Generally-speaking, the more colorful a fruit or vegetable is, the higher it is in polyphenols, which are natural immune-boosters. Whole plant foods are generally high in vitamins 6 and A, and phytonutrients that support your immune system. Choose more leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, Brussel sprouts, and cauliflower), peppers, sweet potatoes, and winter squashes.

Load-Up on Spices & Herbs

Add spices to your meals; garlic, onions, ginger, oregano, turmeric, cumin, paprika, parsley, rosemary, thyme, black pepper and more.

DON’T EAT THESE

Avoid Processed and Fried Foods

It is the industrialized, hyper-processed, hyper-palatable junk that degrades us and makes us sick. The sad reality is that most of us don’t eat food anymore. We eat “Frankenfoods”—factory-made, food-like substances which contain some combination of trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG) artificial sweeteners, colors, additives, preservatives, pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones—none of which you want in your body.

Generally, this means selecting foods that you recognize as coming from the ground or nature and avoiding or limiting foods that come wrapped in plastic, in boxes, or as pre-made meals in the freezer. Our body doesn’t even recognize these molecules as food. This means:

• Avoid processed foods or anything things that come in package or box. If you do, read the ingredients label first.

• Eliminate all deep-fried foods. The more fried, the more inflammatory.

• Avoid anything with trans-fat (look for “hydrogenated¨ on the label).

• No foods with high fructose corn syrup (check the label).

Eliminate or Reduce Inflammatory Foods

• Sugars in all forms: syrups, nectars, honey stevia, sucralose, and xylitol. If you have to ask “ is this ok?” it isn’t.

• Flours in all forms—including seemingly benign gluten-free. Avoid and reduce when possible: bagels, wraps, pasta, pastries, and bread.

• Any form of industrial dairy, which is mostly cow derived.

• Alcohol. I know for some it hurts to hear, but no matter what you’ve heard, it is inflammatory. So reduce it, and use it occasionally.

Every single bite you take today is a set of instructions, actively coding your biology and building the actual cells you live in. Look down at your next plate and ask yourself: Are the building blocks I’m choosing right now creating a body that can thrive, or a body that is just trying to survive?

Wellness to your health,

Virginia