Food is medicine
Food is such a powerful tool when it comes to our health. One of my favorite things to do with clients is an elimination diet, a period of time where we remove all the inflammatory foods from the menu.
E V E R Y single time, I watch people come to life. You can't help but feel better when you start to fuel your body well. Nutrient dense, organic foods are so important. Not only are we giving the body what it needs but we are also avoiding the toxic anti-nutrient foods that zap our energy and vitality. Foods like gluten, dairy, sugar and processed foods are out and in come the green vegetables, dietary fats and well sourced protein.
Some would say it's boring to eat so clean all the time. I think it's simple and quick and I love how E V E R Y O N E feels better when they focus on cleaning up their diet, and actually look at what's on the end of their fork.
There are no simple to follow rules when it comes to eating, what one person needs to eat to feel their best can look very different from another person. We are all biologically unique and as such you need to spend some time figuring out what your own body loves and flourishes on and what your body hates to eat. I hear from so many clients ... "well my kids won't eat that or my partner does all the cooking and doesn't like xyz" ... I've heard it all!
But the reality is if you don't spend some extra time now, you will be forced to make time later to be sick or feel unwell. Managing chronic disease, is exhausting, painful, costly and totally avoidable! Read that again... you can avoid chronic degenerative disease, by learning and experimenting with your body to understand how and with what you need to fuel your cells to feel your best and live your best life.
Learning which foods cause inflammation in your body and which foods leave you feeling light and energized is important to know.
But where do you start?
I like to start with the obvious culprit, the 3 most inflammatory foods gluten, dairy and sugar. I recommend 2 week period where you eliminate these 3 foods, this will help you to reset your system, like a system upgrade if you will. This not always easy to do but it is 100% necessary. Once we reduce the inflammatory load in the body it becomes easier and easier to hear and understand what the body has been trying to tell you. Our body is in constant communication with us, but too often we are over-scheduled, over-stressed and over-whelmed to actually hear what is going on.
Eliminating inflammatory foods is like turning down the radio in the car when you are trying to have an important conversation and you are struggling to hear and focus on what is being said.
Every single chronic disease that we are plagued with in Canadian society is inflammatory in nature. Which means that E V E R Y O N E would benefit from minimizing, avoiding or perhaps eliminating the obvious inflammatory foods and also experimenting to find out what are the not so obvious inflammatory culprits that you could be eating regularly.
"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food"
-Hippocrates
It amazes how many people have told me that my doctor said it has nothing to do with my diet. Food is powerful medicine or potent poison. This is the most obvious to me when I can go weeks and months without any pain or stiffness in my joints until I go out for Mexican food and inevitably get some tomato in my system. Without fail the next day my left wrist (the one I broke when I was a kid) is achy and my range of motion is so limited I cannot even do a downward dog! Nightshade vegetables are not my friend, but with experimentation I have learned that tomatoes are a red zone food for me, whereas potatoes (still a part of the nightshade family) is completely fine in small occasional doses. With this information come the ability to choose.
Choose how you feel, choose how you think and choose how you behave.
When we dial in our diet, it creates space to respond to our world and the opportunity to heal.
In health,
Sheena