What's on My Plate, Part I
Blueberry spelt crepes: organic cream cheese, local raw organic honey, fresh, local, organic blueberries, organic coconut oil, local free range eggs, organic ground cinnamon, organic juice from a lemon
One of the very first steps in living a healthier lifestyle is learning to answer the following the question:
How did what I am eating get to be food on my plate?
Unraveling this mystery and taking responsibility for this information could change your health and your food habits forever. Think about it….even when you are dieting, what is the hardest part? Changing your habits. Isn’t it that way with everything? Habits. We tend to be creatures of habit, especially when it comes to food. What we have found, however, is that as we understand the processes by which our dinner comes to be on our plate we are empowered to adjust and change certain habits forever. It even worked for my kids!
So then, where do you begin? Well, one of the first things we did was pick up the book, Eat to Live by Dr. Colbert. This simple book (lots of pictures and large print!) taught us much, in a very simple way, about many of the ingredients in what we were eating and what they were doing to our bodies. It also taught us much about what we could put in our bodies instead.
I actually took the book to the grocery with me for the 1st couple months to help me read ingredient labels. I’d been reading the label with calories, fat, sodium, etc. for a long time, but I never took the time to read the ingredient label…you know, the one that tells what is in the can, box, bag, or package I was about to consume. I must say I learned pretty quickly that while we must be conscious of calories, fat, and sugar, those things kind of take care of themselves if we become more conscious of what is actually in the food.
SO, your first step in a healthier you is to take a trip through your cupboards and refrigerator and learn what you have been eating:
Is it Mexican rice? Or is it enriched rice, titanium dioxide, monosodium glutamate (MSG), silicon dioxide, nitrate, modified food starch, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, “flavoring”, yellow # 5, and a plethora of other ingredients that are neither actually food nor pronounceable.
Why then, if it isn’t really food, why are we eating it? Because it tastes good? Well, we learned that even the taste of food changed once we broke our addiction to MSG, an addiction we didn’t even know we had. I remember the day, a few months into modifying our food habits, we sat down to enjoy dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant and, for a moment, we thought they had changed the ingredients. It just didn’t taste that good any more…oh, and we felt horrible later, too. The restaurant had not changed their ingredients, our taste buds changed. During that same time we stopped by one of our favorite chain Italian restaurants and my oldest daughter ordered pasta. A few bites into one of her favorite all time dishes (she ordered the same thing every time there), she made a funny face and declared how mushy and blah her pasta was. It had happened. We could no longer eat “non-food”. Chemicals, actually. Genetically engineered food.
Dr. Colbert groups food into two major categories: “living food” and “dead food”. Simple enough, right? Living foods are foods exist in their raw or close to raw state. They are colorful, robust, healthy, and are found in their divinely created wrappers such as peels, skins, and shells. They are plucked, harvested, and squeezed and they are not the ones found in the aisles of the grocery store – they are instead found at local markets, farm stands and the outer ring of the grocery, in the refrigerated sections. Dead foods are those foods which are not really foods at all. They are consumable products that have been highly processed, modified she bleached, refined, preserved, or chemically enhanced. We also quickly learned that living food promotes life and healing and restoration, while dead foods do just the opposite – they are linked to obesity, sickness, disease, degeneration, allergies, and ultimately toward death. Simple? You bet!
How did what I am eating get to be food on my plate?
Unraveling this mystery and taking responsibility for this information could change your health and your food habits forever. Think about it….even when you are dieting, what is the hardest part? Changing your habits. Isn’t it that way with everything? Habits. We tend to be creatures of habit, especially when it comes to food. What we have found, however, is that as we understand the processes by which our dinner comes to be on our plate we are empowered to adjust and change certain habits forever. It even worked for my kids!
So then, where do you begin? Well, one of the first things we did was pick up the book, Eat to Live by Dr. Colbert. This simple book (lots of pictures and large print!) taught us much, in a very simple way, about many of the ingredients in what we were eating and what they were doing to our bodies. It also taught us much about what we could put in our bodies instead.
I actually took the book to the grocery with me for the 1st couple months to help me read ingredient labels. I’d been reading the label with calories, fat, sodium, etc. for a long time, but I never took the time to read the ingredient label…you know, the one that tells what is in the can, box, bag, or package I was about to consume. I must say I learned pretty quickly that while we must be conscious of calories, fat, and sugar, those things kind of take care of themselves if we become more conscious of what is actually in the food.
SO, your first step in a healthier you is to take a trip through your cupboards and refrigerator and learn what you have been eating:
Is it Mexican rice? Or is it enriched rice, titanium dioxide, monosodium glutamate (MSG), silicon dioxide, nitrate, modified food starch, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, “flavoring”, yellow # 5, and a plethora of other ingredients that are neither actually food nor pronounceable.
Why then, if it isn’t really food, why are we eating it? Because it tastes good? Well, we learned that even the taste of food changed once we broke our addiction to MSG, an addiction we didn’t even know we had. I remember the day, a few months into modifying our food habits, we sat down to enjoy dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant and, for a moment, we thought they had changed the ingredients. It just didn’t taste that good any more…oh, and we felt horrible later, too. The restaurant had not changed their ingredients, our taste buds changed. During that same time we stopped by one of our favorite chain Italian restaurants and my oldest daughter ordered pasta. A few bites into one of her favorite all time dishes (she ordered the same thing every time there), she made a funny face and declared how mushy and blah her pasta was. It had happened. We could no longer eat “non-food”. Chemicals, actually. Genetically engineered food.
Dr. Colbert groups food into two major categories: “living food” and “dead food”. Simple enough, right? Living foods are foods exist in their raw or close to raw state. They are colorful, robust, healthy, and are found in their divinely created wrappers such as peels, skins, and shells. They are plucked, harvested, and squeezed and they are not the ones found in the aisles of the grocery store – they are instead found at local markets, farm stands and the outer ring of the grocery, in the refrigerated sections. Dead foods are those foods which are not really foods at all. They are consumable products that have been highly processed, modified she bleached, refined, preserved, or chemically enhanced. We also quickly learned that living food promotes life and healing and restoration, while dead foods do just the opposite – they are linked to obesity, sickness, disease, degeneration, allergies, and ultimately toward death. Simple? You bet!
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