The right stuff..

Following on from my last post...It's high time we got serious about what we should be eating and why. Apart from what your grandmother told you (well, mine did, anyway) there is plenty of research that backs up the necessity of nourishing our bodies properly in order to give ourselves the best chance of living healthy, well lives. We need to understand that food is medicine and we need to get the right stuff to keep our bodies functional. We talk and talk about functional exercise and functional exercise prescription, but I haven't heard too many people talking about functional eating. And we need to. We need to get back to basics - eating good clean honest food that really serves us on a day to day basis. I mentioned previously that we are, for the most part, designed to hunt and gather, and that means that we're designed to eat a bit of meat (we don't need much) and lots of in-season fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts and legumes. Basically, on an average trip to the supermarket: the less additional labelling and packaging surrounding the food, the better is is for us and the more likely it is that it should be added to the shopping basket - it's real food and is more available because it's what we need to function at our best. There are reasons that Ice-cream trees and French-Fry bushes don't occur naturally (if at all) - sure, it's fun to eat, but not fun for our bodies and if we insist on consuming highly processed substances our bodies will, day by day, year by year, wear down and become diseased unnecessarily.

Try it for yourself: get to know how your body really feels when you eat a nutritious, "alive" diet. Cut highly processed food from your diet for even a few days and notice the difference when you're feeding on fresh fruit and vegetable and nuts with a bit of animal protein thrown in for good measure. Be really strict with cutting sugars (except those from fruit), caffeine, and processed grains (eg. breads and pastas), and if you're really keen to experiment, drop dairy too, as it's commonly known to initiate an inflammatory response along with the aforementioned - Try it for a week or two and see how you feel. Most people report unaccustomed feelings of well being, greater alertness and clarity, higher ability to process information and often weight loss - without feeling hungry.