How to nourish yourself through food

You’ve been told all the rules for years. If you want to eat right, be healthy and lose weight, you just need to watch your calories, right? And of course, stay far away from anything high fat, and probably a vegetable or two from time to time, but really, staying within your calories means healthy. That means that losing weight by eating prepacked meals with the fat removed and calories or points already calculated for you is the perfect way to go.

But wait a minute, if that is true, why isn’t everyone eating that way? Why aren’t those who are eating that way skinny and healthful and glowing?  And why are most of them still overweight, or go back to being overweight within a short period of time? I tried this over and over again, and the big question I wanted to know after eating all those “healthy” things is, why am I still fat? After tons and tons of research, I realized something.

I was fat because I was starving to death.

Wait, what? That seems backwards, right? But think of it like this. Your brain is like a gigantic science experiment. There are all kinds of hormones that regulate everything in the body. When you are lacking in nutrition, signals are sent out begging for more food. Feed me! It especially sends out the signals for salt and fat. However, in this day and age we have no shortage of food, especially the food packed with lots of fat and salt. So you go fill up on lots of chips and other processed, packaged food, and although your belly is now full, you have received little to no nutritional benefit from your food. Nutritionally, your body is still starving, so the brain sends out even more hunger signals, and the cycle repeats itself.

So how do you stop the cycle? It’s simple. Your body is begging for nutrition, so give it what it wants! I was so amazed how little food I need to be full now that I am giving my body the nutrition it was asking for.

So how do you know what to eat? I like to think about my eating habits like a bank account. I can either add money (nutrients) to my bank account, or I can take them out and even go into debt by eating things that either don’t add nutritionally to my body, or that actually harm my body and introduce harmful ingredients.

Here are some examples. First up, blueberries. We go through tons and tons of frozen organic blueberries at our house, love them! Right on the package it made me chuckle to see the warning, “This is not a low calorie food.” I really hope there aren’t people avoiding blueberries because they aren’t a low calorie food, because blueberries are one of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. Eating blueberries every day adds a lot of value to your food bank account. A smoothie in the morning full of lots of fruit, some greens (hooray for kale and spinach!) and some healthy fats to help you metabolize the fat-soluble vitamins is a great way to beef up that nutritional bank account.

On the other hand, starting your day with cereal, like most people do, does next to nothing for your nutritional bank account. Most cereal is made from grains. The really nutritious parts of the grain are also the parts that go bad quickly, so those parts are stripped away to make the cereal more shelf stable. Then they add sugar, salt, and other ingredients to make it taste better. In some cases (more often than not, actually) cereal ends up having more sugar than a candy bar. Most cereal also has a large amount of corn in it, corn that is typically genetically modified. These ingredients are very confusing to your body, and start messing with hormone function and drastically increasing cancer risk.

But wait a minute, most cereal boxes claim to be healthy, don’t they? They have a big list of vitamins listed right there on the box, after all, so that should boost your nutritional bank account. The problem is that the vitamins on the list are fortified into the cereal, not naturally occurring. They are added back in after the fact to appease parents and make them feel better about feeding candy to the kids for breakfast. Vitamins occurring naturally in food are much easier for your body to process. Most of the vitamins in fortified cereals are in forms that your body can’t process, so they just pass right through, not adding a cent to your nutritional bank account.

Just like a regular bank account, if you have been adding lots to it, taking a bit out from time to time is just fine. I had three Oreo cookies after lunch today. We don’t usually have them in the house and this was a rare occasion, but I have my nutritional bank account so full that these cookies aren’t going to affect me that much at all. Three years ago, however, when I lived off processed foods, those Oreo cookies would have just added to the nutritional debt I was putting my body through.

How does your food stand up nutritionally? Does it add to your bank account, or is it taking away? Do you feel betrayed by these “healthy” foods that are low calorie and low fat, but don’t add anything to your bank account? If you have questions about whether what you have been eating is healthy, let me know in the comments, let’s kick some of these stupid “healthy” food myths to the curb and get you nutritionally wealthy!