EAT CLEANLY
If you have not yet heard of eating the rainbow, it’s a concept many naturopathic doctors and nutritionists will talk about as a way of visualizing receiving all the different nutrients your body needs.
What we eat is a very personal decision we all make every day. Some of it is conscious and much of it we find for people is totally unconscious, because they are too busy to pay attention.
Whether you are a leader, designer, or project manager properly equipping yourself with healthy food can make a significant difference in your performance and capacity to problem solve throughout the day.
If your interest is in having a high-performance system then what you'll learn here are the key steps to getting you there.
The goal here is not to shame anyone for their current eating habits, but rather provide critical insight gathered from functional medicine doctors and nutritionists that see the results of poor eating every day and the benefits of healthy eating.
A typical pantry in an American home. Unfortunately most of what is here creates the dis-ease that prevents us from having a high-performance system.
SCIENCE ON THE IMPACT OF DIETARY CHOICES
High carbohydrate diets can create an 89% increased risk for developing dementia.
Refined sugars & grains send your blood sugar, or glucose, soaring. The body kicks into overdrive, producing insulin to help break it down.
Addiction to sugar has been verified with scans of the brain showing the brain has an addiction equal to that of cocaine.
High glycemic foods increase hunger. This means things like sugars, grains, & carbs increase your blood sugar and trick your body into thinking it needs more food to balance out blood sugar levels.
AVOIDING HARMFUL INGREDIENTS
A simple way to eat healthier is to focus on removing known toxins and ingredients that impact your system.
Below is a short list of things to consider eliminating from your diet to see if a number of ailments you may be experiencing— whether it be fatigue, joints inflammation, headaches, irritable bowl syndrome, or something else—could possibly be caused by the food that you were eating.
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Refined Sugar
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Sodium
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Trans fats
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Pesticides
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Excitotoxins
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Antibiotics
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Nitrates
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Preservatives
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GMO’s
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Gluten
Highly processed foods are often full of ingredients that are associated with negative health outcomes.
SOME SUGGESTIONS
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Eat vital foods that don’t have labels at all, like produce & fresh organic meat. The closer to their source the better.
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Avoid items containing 7+ ingredients. When processed food is your only option, avoid ingredients you don’t recognize, & the term “natural flavors.”
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Avoid anything labeled “diet,” “low fat” or “low sugar,” because the substitutes for those sugars & fats are often worse than what they replace.
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Prioritize organic to avoid pesticide residue exposures. See the dirty dozen list from USDA & FDA. To learn more about the Dirty Dozen go to https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty-dozen.php
WRAPPING THINGS UP...
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Remember, if food is energy and if the energy you want to have is to be the most vital, high-performing version of yourself then focus on getting food from your local farmers.
The amount of vitality that a fresh vegetable has coming from your own garden or a nearby organic farm is exponentially higher than the dried cereal you could pour out of a box. That dried cereal, while tasting good and satisfying a craving, has probably been dead for over a year. When you think about how long it took for the wheat to get cut, the grain to get collected, transported to a processing facility, milled, mixed with additives, made into cereal made, packaged, shipped to a store, and the time it was stored before you purchased it from a shelf, you could reasonably say that it's "dead" food. Every day of that journey it loses more of its vitality.
Not only is growing a farm extremely satisfying but you get the most vital food when it’s fresh and still alive.
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So start by focusing on what is simple and most vital: fresh whole foods.
If you can’t buy fresh food then at least try to buy processed food that has minimal ingredients.
