Can eating better nutrition make a difference?
I started on my natural nutrition journey 42 years ago. I was young and just married and thinking of having a family. I wanted to be in good health before thinking about creating and nurturing a life inside me and was so fascinated to learn how the body can react to eating healthy and especially more natural.
Now I did not go extreme and even today I don’t eat 100% natural but I do make more good choices than bad, and more importantly I have personally experienced the effects of making better food choices.
I have learned, and experienced, how the body can feel stronger, healthier, more energizes AND happier when given the right nutrition that powers our bodies and our lives.
Today I have pulled one of my first nutrition lessons and sharing it with you here.
It’s all about nutrition and the difference between feeding your body in a healthy way or in a way that encourages low energy, illness, disease and aging at a faster rate.
Part of the discussion is understanding the health response that your body has when you start to make changes in the food you eat.
We aren’t getting into the specific foods because there is an abundance of info on that available. This is more about the WHY we should choose natural nutrition.
What does better (more natural) nutrition (including natural, food-based supplements because we use those too) mean?
In the most simple way to understand, it means higher quality over lower quality food.
What does that mean?
Sometimes we forget that the closer food comes to the natural state in which it was made, or the closer it is in raw, unfired form, the higher the quality it is.
All of the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements, carbohydrates, enzymes – ‘life force’ are still intact. REAL, natural food ingredients make healthier cells in your body.
The many TRILLION cells (yes trillion) that are in your body need to be healthy for you to have good health. It’s crazy and powerful to understand that you have a WHOLE LOT OF INPUT into how healthy you want to be.
What happens when you make healthier choices? Eat healthier foods? Use healthy nutrition supplements to bridge the gaps of the nutrients you can’t or don’t get from foods but that your body needs?
Remarkable things can happen in the body* as well as the mind*.
When your body gets better quality nutrition, it can let go of the less healthy cells and tissues inside your body and make room for the healthier replacements.
Your body is designed to be healthy, to look for the healthier state. Alternatively, if you feed your body with unhealthy choices, it creates interference with good health and makes it harder for your body to stay healthy.
Making Changes
When you do start to make some changes, and especially if you get real motivated and start making lots of healthier changes, there can be a period of time where you feel more sluggish before you ultimately start to feel more energy and stronger. This is due to multiple things happening in your body and part of your body’s way of ridding the toxins.
Things I have experienced when I have cut back on caffeine (maybe you are life me and can go heavy on caffeine at different times), you feel effects like a headache or feeling tired because your resting heartrate can go down.
With changing foods you usually get the effect on the external closer parts of the body such as muscles and skin, before the changes in your vital internal organs. So you may feel less energy initially but what I found interesting to learn is that the energy is actually starting to work in other areas of your body – it is rebuilding your internal parts.
It could benefit you to go with the feelings of less energy and spend more time resting during this time. It won’t be for long – your body is adjusting and it is an important to give your body this time for regeneration. Maybe you need to plan a time when you know you can have more down time and not have to turn to caffeine or other stimulants that will interfere with your body working toward its healthier state.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I loved learning about this process of the body healing or rejuvenating itself and getting to a healthier place where you feel more naturally energized, stronger and less stress / more happy!
I had to check back in my notes to be able to share the correct terms I had learned. If you are able to stick with this and improve your nutrition choices, your body begins a process called ‘retracing’. To use an analogy it’s like your body realizing better ingredients are coming into the body; and similar to rebuilding an old house your body is getting rid of things it doesn’t need and rebuilding your body.
Some examples of what is actually happening are thinks like getting excess bile out of the liver and gallbladder and sending it to the intestines for elimination, moving sludge out of the arteries and veins, cleaning up arthritic deposits in the joints, and getting things like preservatives, excess over the counter drug ingredients, and masses of fat that have been a burden to the body out of the way.
You can lose weight during this period and I have always believed this is the healthiest way to lose weight. You aren’t starving yourself and exercising like crazy and feeling crappy. You aren’t on some intense diet where you eliminate entire food groups. You are eating healthier and this is naturally reducing calories. You are moving but don’t have to go hard with exercise to the point of almost breaking.
Are you familiar with the statement that weight is lost in the kitchen, not the gym?
Next after this elimination phase, there is a stabilization period.
During the stabilization period you have lost that initial weight while you started to improve your nutrition and you sort of level off. Your body is still regenerating and getting healthier in all areas. And you will move into the third phase which is the ‘Build Up’ phase.
Your weight can actually go up in this phase but your diet is still lower in calories than it was before, and new tissues are being formed including new muscle (which weighs more than fat).
People are individuals and they go through these processes very differently. I remember learning about people who have had some challenging health issues such as with skin during the retracing time, where there could be some eruptions due to getting rid of toxins. Some people may get a cold or virus even though they hadn’t been sick in a long time. These things can be part of the process especially for people who had eaten very poorly. As long as you are sticking to the better nutrition program, they are mostly short term and something your body is needing to do as part of the process.
There can be other symptoms as well; however most people have symptoms that are tolerable and as long as you are really on board with improving your nutrition for the ultimate benefits, you should keep moving forward.
Remember to rest if you need to, and think about writing down how you are doing and documenting the changes you feel. If you truly want to be healthier AND you do the work, it has been my experience that your body will start to feel stronger and even younger (my grandchildren think I’m their age and should be able to run and tumble right alongside them!!).
When you throw off wastes and toxins that would bring on pain, illness or disease, it helps your body stay healthy, energized and feeling strength instead of pain.
Your body is cyclical like so many things in life. It is a gradual recovery process when you start giving it better nutrition. You make progress and there are life events that can challenge you and even set you back. The difference becomes that the time recovering from a challenge gets shorter and shorter, and the periods where you feel strong and healthy get longer and longer.
This is why some people are so beat down or unhealthy feeling and looking. They may have one challenge after another and never give their body what it needs to fight them and to rebuild. If you are eating poorly, how is your body going to heal the best?
Ultimately better nutrition IN is equal to better health OUT.
When you FEEL healthier you can experience things like feeling less stress, having increased joy and overall happiness and well being. Your focus improves and your mind can open up and start to be interested in all kinds of new things.
This isn’t about reaching perfection. There is no perfect 60 or 70 or 80 years. You are aging, but you can do it the healthy way or the unhealthy way. That is your choice!
And nature (natural) can help.
Aligning ourselves to nature is aligning ourselves to what was intended for our bodies. Eating foods closes to the way they are found in nature is exactly how our bodies were built to not just survive, but thrive – physically, mentally and even spiritually when you feel so strong and healthy.
We also take high quality, food-based, natural nutrition supplements to bridge the gaps of what we don’t get from food and need more of in our body for optimal health. We have used the same brand for 42+ years and they make it easy to start with a free health assessment – no obligation to buy anything but gives you some great personal health recommendations.
You can do that at no cost by going here: Free Health Assessment
*Statements are my own based upon my personal 42+ years studying nutrition and using what I learn in my own life. *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.