Making Healthy Food Choices : 6 Tips For Success

I don’t care what your diet is. Making healthy food choices can be difficult.

You could be a vegan, a vegetarian, a raw food vegan, a carnivore or what I like to call a starchaholic or a carbatarion. You could have the best diet in the world or the worst diet known to man, we can all stand to add a few healthy principles to our daily eating routines to become healthier.

In this article I’m going to give you some simple tips to help you take the first step in beginning the journey to whatever diet you’d like to be on. These simple daily practices apply if you’re dealing with diseases or just want to start making some changes but don’t know what to do first.

Let me first put this caveat out there. I realize there might be people with different blood types or different ancestral diets. For example, Eskimos can eat lots of raw meat, Europeans may eat a lot of sea foods and Polynesians may eat lots of fruit.

I’m not trying to tell you what to eat, I’m trying to make whatever food you do eat, just a little healthier.

I’m going to touch a little bit on foods to avoid at the end. Again these tips are designed to hedge against the fact that we sometimes make bad food choices. God knows we don’t make healthy food choices all the time.

Tip #1:  Eat Fermented foods

Start eating more fermented foods. Fermented food contains lots of enzymes, nutrients, minerals, vitamins and most importantly bacteria. Take some time to learn how to make sauerkraut. If you’re lazy, buy some at your local health food store.

80% of your immune system takes place in your gut, the other 20% is comprised of white blood cells, killer t cells etc.

A wild concept…

When we eat, we don’t feed ourselves. We think we do, but we really don’t. We actually feed our “inner garden” or bacteria. Think of yourself like a garden but infolded. Unlike a garden with soil and roots that are in the ground, we have our soil and roots inside of ourselves so we can walk around and be mobile, unlike a plant. Our “roots” are our intestinal villi which line the inner walls of our intestines. That’s how we extract nutrients into our bloodstream.

When we eat, the food is broken down and biologically transmutated in order to feed whatever bacteria we have in our guts. The friendly bacteria is then fed and turns our food into waste material, which is extracted by our villi. The minerals and vitamins are passed through the villi, through the walls of the intestines and into your bloodstream to be distributed to your body accordingly.

The friendly bacteria are very aggressive and won’t stand pathogens, viruses, fungi etc. So the more of this food you eat, the stronger and healthier your immune system will become. Over 3/4 of the average bowel movement is bacteria. If you’re excreting this much “good bacteria” each day, how much of it are you putting back?

Probably not much.

Not only that but stress, sugar, antibiotics and chemicals destroy your good bacteria. Why do you think you’re getting the flu each year?

Some other fermented foods include:

• Sauerkraut
• Miso
• Water Kefir
• Milk Kefir
• Yogurts
• Kombucha

Tip #2: Follow Proper Food Combining Principles

There are many food combining principles out there. I’ve learned from Harvey Diamonds books. His main book is called Fit for Life written in the 80’s and I highly recommend reading it. The basic ideas he promotes are eating fruits alone on an empty stomach. The best time for eating fruit is in the morning. This also coincides with the laws of chronobiotic nutrition.

It’s best to eat starchy foods like, pasta, cereal, grains and pizza alone away from meat. If you want to have pasta for lunch and meat for dinner, that’s great but just make sure they are at least 4 hours apart. The idea behind this is that your body (mainly your pancreas) has to secret specific enzymes in order to help break down each type of food.

When we eat many different types of foods all at once, your body isn’t able to break any one of them down properly so you get fermentation, gas and bloating.

Not only that but because none of the food is properly digested and you don’t get all the nutrients in those foods either.

To add insult to injury, this undigested food ends up storing itself as fat around your body. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with proper food combining and in my experience it works. You have more energy, you feel lighter and lose weight when you food combine properly.

No matter how good or bad the food is, just make sure you try to combine it properly by eating one food at a time.

Remember, your body likes simple.

Tip #3: Have A Salad With Each Meal

The idea behind eating salads with each meal has been around for many years. Salads are very alkaline and help bring in enzymes, minerals and fiber to a meal that might be void of all these things. Think pasta.

Adding an alkaline substance to an acidic low fiber meal will help improve digestion and absorption of key nutrients to help you feel better. If you’re going to eat a bowl of pasta, always add a salad to the meal.

Tip #4: Chew Your Food Properly

Digestion really starts in the mouth. Your saliva contains enzymes that help break down food. Imagine eating a lemon or something really sour or tart. You can feel your salivary glands start to react. There are enzymes in your saliva that warn your stomach which foods are about to be consumed.

Many times we eat food so fast, we don’t chew properly. Not only does this prevent the enzymes from being mixed with the food, but the food isn’t properly broken down by your teeth. This forces your body to create more enzymes by your pancreas along with added pressure on your stomach to create more hydrochloric acids.

Do your body a favor, slow down and chew your food properly.

Tip #5: Take Enzymes With Each Meal

Enzymes are not living. They are proteins that help to break down food. To test whether or not your enzymes are active and powerful, make a bowl of oatmeal and empty a few capsules of enzymes on top of them.

Come back in 5 minutes and you should notice a HUGE difference. If not, switch brands.

Personally I like to take some hydrochloric acid supplements (HCL) made from beets along with enzymes and some probiotics with each meal. I realize that these supplements are fractionated and not optimal but they do help to some degree. If you’re traveling or eating at a restaurant they work great.

They will help to neutralize the assault of food you’re giving to your body at each meal.

Tip #6 Get Into Blended Nutrition

I got into health by juicing. I started juicing in 2003 and still juice on a weekly basis. Each person has their own thing that they like to do. I now think that making one blended drink a day is going to really help improve your life. I enjoy about 2 blended drinks per day.

The idea behind the blended drink is it’s a perfect way to add many different vitamins, superfoods and supplements into one great tasting drink. There are many different ways to make blended smoothies and shakes that I’ll talk about in another article.

If you add in lots of healthy fats into your herbal or medicinal smoothie, you can even have it as a meal replacement. Just get into the habit of making one herbal elixir per day. Get some superfood powders and add whatever you like to it.

Things To Avoid

I don’t really like to “avoid” certain foods. I like to fill up on good foods so I’m not even hungry for bad foods. You can be sure you’re not making healthy food choices by eating these processed foods.

Here is a list of some of the more unhealthy foods you could consume:

• Cooked Oils
• Sugar (dried fruits, high fructose corn syrups etc)
• Dairy (Raw milk, cheese and butter might be good for you)
• Conventional Meat (It’s laced with hormones, antibiotics and chemicals)
• Tap Water (I call it tap liquid, if you can avoid it, do)
• Soy (Highly estrogenic and hybridized and not normally organic. Eat it fermented if possible)
• Wheat (Contains glueten which is hard to digest)
• Corn (Usually it’s genetically modified and very difficult to digest)

Extras

There are obviously many things you can do to improve your health like exercising, detoxing, sweating etc. This article really is meant for someone who is focusing on the food portion (which is only one part of the entire health equation) of their health program. I wanted to give you some practical information to make healthy food choices.

Success is really only the application of a few simple disciplines practiced each day. Food is the #1 tool to help you develop these types of habits and practices.

The idea is not to get you to eat meat, or not eat meat or even to follow any particular diet. You pick the diet that’s right for you, but whatever dietary approach you choose to follow, you can still apply these healthy food choices to your dietary program.

The health strategies here are designed for the worst possible situations. For example, they are perfect to be used when you’re traveling. Let’s say you don’t have access to organic food, or pure water. You don’t have really much to work with. You find yourself at dinner and they’re serving pasta with chicken.

What do you do?

By following the principles on this page, you have the option to simply eat either the pasta or the chicken, with a salad and your enzymes with very little water during your meal and try harder the next day.

Hopefully you can start to make some healthy food choices after reading this article.