Take a Step Back as a Step Toward Real Health :: Holistic Healing

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Take a Step Back as a Step Toward Real Health

We’ve come to a place in our modern-day society, where the next step towards true health should be a step back. We need to take a good look at where we are, understand how we got here, and decide where we are headed.

Many of us are overweight, unhealthy, diabetic, cancerous, sick, and tired. We got here by way of so-called convenience and progress. The giant food manufacturers made it easy for us to progress toward disease and death. The US Surgeon General’s landmark 1988 Report on Nutrition and Health states that up to 71 per cent of deaths are related to diet.

None of us wants to be fat or sick or tired. Yet a recent Ipsos-Reid poll shows that 23 per cent of Canadians do not care what they eat and say they “eat whatever I feel like eating.” Forty-one per cent of us claim to eat healthy “most of the time,” yet it’s likely that 41 per cent of us do not even know what “eating healthy” is.

We are so dangerously disconnected from our food supply, that we simply do not see it for what it is and what it should be doing. Convenience food is not convenient when inconvenient death and disease are the results. We need to take a step back and remember that food is our fuel and our nourishment. With good food we encourage longevity and improve how we look, feel, act, perform, react, and even how well our brains function.

Every thing we eat and drink affects us in some way. A step back will allow us to look at the big picture, which includes the small cells that make us who we are. Food is meant to nourish every one of the millions of cells in our bodies, building good blood, providing energy, and allowing smooth, efficient processes and functions.

The big picture reveals that modern-day practices are often not designed with nourishment in mind. Nourishment does not come in a box, with a long list of ingredients on the side. While processed foods have become “normal” in our society, they are far from normal to our bodies. Processed oils, flours, sugar, and preservatives wreak havoc inside the body. It is not normal or healthy to eat foods that do not contain the nutrition required for their own digestion, never mind to nourish our precious organs. Processed foods rob us of vitamins and minerals, cause sugar imbalances, bone loss, fatigue, headaches, unstable emotions, obesity, and disease.

If we step back we remember that food is not manufactured-it is grown. Good food cannot be sprayed with toxic chemicals, engineered in a lab, or served with a shake and fries. Real, good food is grown and prepared with nutrition in mind. The authors of the book Real Food for a Change (Random House of Canada, 1999) say, “Real food is for people who want to find health at the kitchen table, not on the operating table.”

The decisions we make each day concerning our food will determine where we’re headed with our health. By taking a step back, we can move forward to a conscious relationship with our food-a simple, yet powerful, step toward true health.

Former editor of alive journal and Canadaâ€™s Healthy Living Guide, Sandra Tonn is a freelance natural health writer and editor, holistic nutrition consultant and natural health speaker in Vancouver, BC. E-mail: sandra_tonn@telus.net.

Source: alive #253, November 2003

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