Do You Eat Poison or Medicine? Find Out

Do you eat as healthy as you should? If not, you are increasing nervous system dysregulation with a knife and fork. Food is medicine if it fortifies brain and body; food is poison if it weakens brain and body.

Whether you are raw vegan, vegan, vegetarian, Primal, Pegan, Mediterranean or keto, amongst others, the idea is the same: choose healthy food from the earth over unhealthy, processed food.

Food As Poison

If you’re like most, you likely eat primarily the processed, refined, chemical laden, fatty, salty, sugary food of the Standard American Diet (SAD), like hamburgers, pizza, nachos, cakes, cookies, doughnuts, candy, chips, and fried foods. If so, you are depleting your system of the nutrients it needs for body and brain to function at its best. Such depletion makes you sick, fat, tired, achy, spacey, prone to mental health issues, and shortens your life.

Food As Medicine

In contrast to the Standard American Diet, eating organic fruits and vegetables from the earth, or from animals that eat from the earth provides your body with the essential vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, essential fatty acids, fiber and more needed for excellent physical and mental health, vitality, and longevity—and for the least number of calories.

Practices To Achieve Brain Healthy Eating

Choose Foods Wisely: Eat fruit and vegetables fresh; organic; in season; local.

Avoid High Allergen Food: Gluten, soy, pasteurized dairy, corn, peanuts are all difficult to digest, even if you are not sensitive or allergic.

Stay Hydrated: Drink water instead of sugary drinks like sodas, diet or energy drinks, or fruit juices.

Drink purified water. Try to drink distilled or purified water whenever possible, with added minerals. Most commercial bottled water is not pure enough to be healthy.

Get Your Omega 3’s: Eat ocean-caught salmon and ocean caught sardines, or take an Omega 3 supplement. Include in your diet a blue/green algae supplement, like chlorella and spirulina. Algae is where fish get their omega 3s.

Take Enzymes. Take digestive enzymes with meals to help digest food, along with systemic enzymes before meals.

Don’t Eat on the Run. To digest your food well, you must be in a calm state. Sit down to eat and take time to relax. If you are in flight/fight, the SNS will be activated and digestion suppressed.

Eat Organic:

Chemicals such as synthetic fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides are widely used in conventional agriculture. Organic food contains fewer pesticides.

Organic food is fresher because it doesn’t contain preservatives to make it last longer.

Organically raised animals are NOT given antibiotics, growth hormones, or fed animal byproducts.

Organic meat and milk can be richer in certain nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids.

Organic food is GMO-free.

Shop Wisely:

Don’t shop when hungry. If you do, you’re more likely to grab that bag of Cheetos to fill your tummy.

Shop with a list and stick to it. If not, you might be tempted to buy bad food.

Avoid center aisles. Most of what is in the center aisles is processed and unhealthy.

Read labels: Watch out for foods that contain ingredients like “whole wheat,” high fructose corn syrup, flavorings, trans fats (disguised hydrogenated oils), sodium nitrite, or excitotoxins, such as, aspartame and monosodium glutamate.

Eat the Rainbow: To get the most nutrition from your food, fill your plate with the “rainbow:” yellow, orange, red, green, blue, purple, and even white fruits and vegetables. Plants contain different pigments that give them their color. Different-colored plants have higher levels of specific nutrients and health benefits.

Start your day with a green smoothie. Some suggested fruits and veggies: coconut water, spinach, cucumber, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, avocado, bananas.

Enjoy a large, colorful salad with an array of colorful veggies: green lettuce, yellow carrots, white onion, yellow or red peppers, red tomatoes, purple cabbage. Eat them for lunch or dinner. Shoot for at least one salad per day.

Have fruit for dessert: blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, cantaloupe, mango, watermelon.

Make vegetables the main dish, like the Chinese do, and add beans, grains, meat, fish, or chicken.

When shopping, fill your shopping cart with a variety of fruit and vegetable colors.

Choose the deepest colors: purple kale over purple kale; red potatoes over white potatoes; red onions over white onions; romaine lettuce for iceberg lettuce; red peppers over yellow peppers; purple rather than green cabbage for coleslaw.

Don't peel foods like apples or peaches, as the colorful skin is a rich source of phytonutrients.

Breaking Free From Unhealthy Eating Habits

Now that you’ve gotten the guidelines for healthy eating, you’re ready to break free from unhealthy eating to better nervous system regulation.

It might be challenging. Fatty, sugary, salty food is comfort food. People who are depressed crave chocolate cheesecake, not carrots. Nor are cravings likely to go away overnight.

Here are some tips to help you make the transition to a new, healthier you:

Start slowly. Add in the healthy stuff gradually. Concentrate on making a few changes a week. Give yourself time to adjust to a cleansing lifestyle. A rule of thumb – it takes twenty-one days to break a habit. When these new eating habits become integrated into your daily meals, add a few more weekly changes. In no time, some of the unhealthy choices will be crowded out.

Plan Your Meals: Plan what you eat and cook more often. If you don’t have the food that you need on hand, you are more likely to turn to processed, quick food.

Practice Food Replacement: Change meals you already enjoy by making healthy swaps. As it might take your taste buds awhile to get used to the new tastes, try swapping with every other meal, or every third meal until your taste buds adjust and you go, “Hmmm. Coconut ice cream is delicious!”

Here are some sample swaps to get you started:

Replace wheat pasta with rice or quinoa pasta.

Replace milk ice cream with coconut or almond ice cream.

Replace cheese from pasteurized cow’s milk with cashew cheese, or goat cheese.

Replace pizza wheat crust with cauliflower crust.

Make your own pizza sauce with fresh tomatoes, tomato puree, and natural sugar like stevia or Monks’s fruit.

Make your own salad dressing with extra virgin, unrefined olive oil in place of vegetable oils.

Replace Diet Coke with tea, kombucha, or diluted fruit juice.

Replace potato chips with veggie chips made with olive or avocado oil.

Steam or bake veggies in place of frying.

Replace cow’s milk cream cheese with cashew cream cheese.

Replace milk with almond milk, coconut water, rice milk, coconut milk.

Replace ketchup with salsa, or cooked fresh tomatoes.

Swap French fries for roasted sweet potatoes fries.

Replace baked goods made with wheat flower with almond or coconut flour.