I am trying my best to get back towards a vegan diet. A few years ago, I did an all vegan diet for a whole week. I felt 10 years younger! It made a HUGE difference in the way I felt, my mental alertness, my sleeping, no joint pain or stiffness, my flexibility improved drastically. But it is so hard to stick to that diet, especially when everyone around you is eating meat and 
eggs and ice cream and all kinds of treats and goodies and things that smell so good. :(But since my daughter wants to eat healthier now too, we have been trying to do better. But it's HARD. Especially when you let yourself get hungry, then you can't think clearly and you follow instinct to the old fatty foods you're used to. .... *thinks*.... We need to plan better and be prepared with healthy foods when hunger hits.
I think that eliminating all the processed foods and all animal products and as much cooked food as possible from our diet (I have those in order of importance) is the way to go.
'Processed food' includes most anything in a box or can. Refined sugar is the #1 thing to avoid at all costs! This stuff is POISON!
I highly recommend the movie (documentary) Super-size Me. I had been wanting to watch it for some time and we just watched it the other night. It really drives home just how bad a high sugar/ fat diet can be. Not only the making-you-fat part, but what it does to your liver, your mood, your mind, ...it's impressive.
We live in a processed world.
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Sandwich meat- chopped, pressed, water added, and then preserved with sodium nitrate.http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/
"During the cooking process, nitrites combine with amines naturally present in meat to form carcinogenic N-nitroso compounds. It is also suspected that nitrites can combine with amines in the human stomach to form N-nitroso compounds. These compounds are known carcinogens and have been associated with cancer of the oral cavity, urinary bladder, esophagus, stomach and brain."
--Boxed cereals- good luck finding a cereal that does not contain BHT
http://www.sweetpoison.com/
"added to oil-containing foods to prevent oxidation and retard rancidity. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, consider BHA to be possibly carcinogenic to humans, and the State of California has listed it as a carcinogen. Some studies show the same cancer causing possibilities for BHT"
http://www.sixwise.com/
http://biorganic.ifrance.com/
--Nuts- healthy right? Wrong! Nuts from the store are cooked, usually way over-cooked and loaded with added unhealthy heavy processed and overheated oils. Olive oil, nut oils, sunflower and safflower oils, and other natural food oils start out as healthy, but once they are heated they become carcinogenic health nightmares! The oils break down and are no longer food but become poison!!The answer- RAW nuts.
Garbage in- disease out.
Healthy, real food in- healthy, strong body out.
To put it in a nut shell, it's really quite simple.WHOLE. RAW. REAL.
It's so obvious it's ridiculous, but so difficult it makes you wonder just how brainwashed we all really are. Why is it easier and less expensive to eat a hamburger than it is to eat an apple? WHY?!?! ...and is it really?
It is obvious. So obvious in fact that if you really look at the reality of the situation, why not skip the boxes and eat the food that looks like food!
