Eating With Purpose

  It seems people often wonder why they are not getting healthier when they start adding a lot of vitamins, herbal supplements, and even fresh raw food to their diet. "I'm eating all this healthy stuff! Why am I still not healthy?"
  It's not what you're eating,
  it's what you're not eating.
Let me offer a bit of perspective. I think every mother realizes that a few infrequent sweet treats are not going to make her children fat or rot all their teeth. We need to realize that the reverse is also true. Eating a healthy treat every now and then is not going to make you healthy and cure all your illnesses. Neither will taking vitamins, herbal supplements, green smoothies, or eating the latest fad superfood, or counting calories, or balancing pH, or juicing, etc, etc, etc. There is no magic pill or food that will ever make you healthy. PERIOD.

Health does not come in a pill. Health  is a LIFESTYLE.
It's great that you are eating healthy food some of the time. Thats's a good start, and you're on the right track. The problem is you are not eating healthy food ALL the time. We have been trained to eat for pleasure, not health, and as a result, our only intention when we eat is to experience taste sensation and fill our belly. How often do you grab food and think, "is this what my body needs right now?" Or do we really think, "oh, that sounds yummy!"
Every time you eat processed, de-germed, over cooked, chemically preserved sugar, starch, and fat, you are filling your stomach and body with empty calories, allergens, and even poisonous chemicals. That is a big enough problem, but that's not the only problem. The bigger problem is that each time you eat junk, you did NOT eat food rich in nutrients. And now that your belly is full, you are not Going to eat anything nutritious until you feel hungry again... And then what? Will you eat nutrition? Or more junk and a pill to fix it?
Your body NEEDS healthy, vitamin rich food EVERY time you feel hungry. Every time you replace nutritious food with something to "tide you over" or "kill the munchies", you starve your body and weaken its immunity and ability to repair itself TWICE. Once to "tide you over" and again when your body really needed the nutrition and now can't have it. You might even be hungry but you can't eat because you are still full of fluff! Have you ever had that happen? Have you ever eaten a large meal and felt stuffed, but still felt hungry? Not really satisfied? Still craving something, but you just can't quite put your finger on it? Sometimes you keep eating, even though you are full. I can tell you what your body is asking for- vitamins!! Real nutrients!
You can eat box after box of crackers, mac-n-cheese, cereal, pasta, and you will be completely stuffed while totally starving. Generally, if it comes in a package, it is nutritionally worthless. You might as well eat the box. At least in the case of cardboard you'd get a little fiber out of it.

Learn to read the FRONT of the label, the part with all the important information. The BACK of the label is the part with the big pictures and advertising hype. And when you read the front of the label, the part that tells you what's IN this thing you are about to eat- again, pay close attention to what is NOT in it. So this thing contains 30% of the daily recommendation of calcium. That sounds nice. But does this calcium come with magnesium, zinc, vitamin C, and vitamin D to allow your body to absorb that calcium? You can add all the calcium you want to a bowl of cereal and still not absorb a bit of it. And chemically created "nutrients" without all the natural phytochemicals that buffer, enhance, and aid in digestion and absorption, can be treated by your body as foreign material and even in many cases cause allergic reaction!
Food does not grow in a box. Food grows in the earth. You pick it, and then you eat it. If you don't eat it, something soon will! Bugs, mold, bacteria.... But wait. What about the stuff in the box? Why doesn't anything eat it while it is sitting there on the shelf? Because it CAN'T. Think about it. If something is preserved well enough to keep a cockroach from digesting it....how the heck are we supposed to?
I know boxes are easy and convenient, and preparing a healthy dinner is hard.
Wait.... Really?

How hard can it be to put some raw nuts, grapes, spinach, and carrots on a plate? Isn't that easier than boiling water and dumping a box of goo in it and waiting and draining it and mixing it with some other slimy goo and then splatting that on a plate?
Well there's no variety or flavor in raw food.... Really? I beg to differ! Sadly we have been lied to! Now I must agree that a tomato or peach from your local grocer is not likely to have a heap of flavor. This is where the lifestyle change really comes in. Consider this a challenge to reach to your primitive hunting and gathering instincts. Real food is out there. You just have to know where to look. Farmers markets are a great place to start. Also try ethnic markets and try new fruits and veggies you may not have seen before. Find out what it is and google to see how to prepare or eat it.
Grow you own food. It's really not that hard. The key is to make healthy soil. More on that in another post. You can grow food in the desert if you have a way to water. You can grow food in the winter if you have a greenhouse. You can grow enough food for yourself and the whole neighborhood in your backyard! Lots of urban homesteaders are doing it!
Eat your weeds! Plants grow all around us and MOST of them are edible food packed with nutrition. There are lots of books out there on the subject to help you get started.
The key to life is health. The key to health is life! To live a life of health, we must consume food that is ALIVE and bursting with vitamins and nutrition. You cannot put LIFE in a pill. It simply cannot be done. In order to gain life, you have to put life into your body. The ONLY way to do that is by eating fresh, raw, living food right off God's table, i.e. the ground under your feet. The variety is endless. The flavors; sweet, spicy, savory, mild, hot, fresh, calming, invigorating... The colors; a complete rainbow and treat for the eyes as well as the tummy.
"Eat to live. Don't live to eat." --Dinotopia 

Real food.
Real nutrition.
Simple.
Period.