photo credit: arugatse

Have you ever seen a picture of your blood plasma after you’ve eaten a meal from McDonald’s or Burger King? It’s not a pretty picture. It looks thick and cloudy. Fast foods are loaded with fat and sodium. They use white bread and rolls, which means they’ve used white processed flour, with very few nutrients in them.

And how do you feel after a Big Mac and french fries? You need a nap, don’t you? All that fat will drag you down and make you feel sluggish.

Changing your eating habits is hard, but the health benefits are huge. You eliminate those high fat, processed, high-sodium foods. You eat more raw fruits and vegetables. You drink water. And the results of eating this way are increased energy, less need for sleep. Processed foods, with their high fat content are hard to digest. They take an enormous amount of the body’s energy to consume. When your body’s energy isn’t used up digesting all that fat, it’s available for YOU – for work, play, love, exercise – in other words, for LIFE.

These aren’t drastic concepts. You don’t have to make drastic changes in your lifestyle. But take a good look at what you consume without even thinking about it. We reach for the potato chips, or stop at McDonald’s or Taco Bell when we’re hungry and we want something in a hurry.

It’s much easier these days to have snacks on hand so you don’t have to stop at a fast food place when you’re hungry. If you’re on the road a lot, and get hungry, pick up a bag of vegetables or apple slices at a grocery store. Yes, it’s easier to drive up to Wendy’s, but taking a few extra minutes, not to mention a few extra steps, will be well worth it in energy and vitality.

Try this, just for the heck of it. Once you’ve started incorporating raw foods into your food plans, keep adding them in and reducing the number of cooked and processed foods from your diet. Especially things like fast food, chips, cookies and snacks.

After you’ve done that for awhile, have a junk food day. If you really miss your junk food, or think you do, then plan for it. Make it truly memorable and junk-worthy.

If I were the gambling type, I’d be willing to bet a LOT of money that mid-way through your junk food day, you’ll stop.

Once you’ve started incorporating raw foods into your diet, and getting most of your nutrition from them, and stayed with it for at least a week, junk food is just not going to have the same appeal to you. Because now you’re thinking about what you’re putting into your body. And if you really think about what junk food does to your body, all of a sudden it doesn’t look so good.

Not to mention how bad you’ll feel putting all that garbage into your body.

photo credit: Sandy Austin

Eating raw fruits and vegetables isn’t the new fad diet, or the new South Beach Diet. Believe it or not, humans have been eating this way long before they were eating processed junk foods. We didn’t have access to most types of foods. We were scavengers, picking fruits and eating vegetables were a delicacy. Nuts were also eaten for protein. It was either that or starve. Humans ate these fruits as is, no additives, no cooking.

Today, we have access to every type of food we want at our fingertips. Supermarkets are packed with a huge variety of foods. You can order even more online. You would think that since we have come this far, we would be super human. So healthy we would be living 500 years!

Not so, unfortunately.

In fact, in some ways we actually have worse health now. Some of us are developing cancers at an early age. Some of us are dying of heart disease or obesity. We are not eating correctly. We are stuffing our face with hydrogenated oils, fake products, high sodium and sugary foods. It is simply disgusting. We are gaining weight at an alarming rate and looking horribly. It shows in the skin, sags of fat, sluggish attitude, depressed look, lack of sexual drive, etc.

What people need to realize is that eating fat free or sugar free foods isn’t going to help. It isn’t going to help if you stuff your face with snack wells instead of Oreo’s. What will help is to completely change what you eat. Remember, you are what you eat, so eat the right things and it will show in your body, mind and spirit.