Healthy eating - the first steps

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

I tell with a little humor about my first steps towards a healthy diet.

I must say right away that I am a physician, which means that I perceive new information about healthy lifestyles from the point of view of “trust but verify”.

To begin with, I will draw the line between nutritional health and healthy eating. Health food is a special set of foods prepared in a special way, for nutrition during an exacerbation of a certain disease, as well as at the stage of recovery. Healthy eating sets itself the goal of maintaining the body and psyche in the highest possible state of vigor, vitality and self-realization.

The health of the human body depends on nutrition and lifestyle. The way of life depends on the state of the psyche - thoughts, feelings, emotions and incentives. Every modern person is faced with a bad ecology, media zombies, financial and social problems, stress and low-quality, and sometimes harmful, products. Therefore, each of us is forced to maneuver and choose our own recipe for healthy lifestyle. I have been looking for such a recipe for many years, and I want to share with you my successes and failures in this direction.

Once I decided to start with fasting. The "good" thought to starve to get rid of toxins and toxins firmly stuck in my mind. I was starving on honey and water for about three weeks. As a psychotherapist, I will say that any diets and fasting that are carried out without mental preparation are either ineffective or cause significant harm to the body, up to and including disability. My psyche was not ready for fasting. Every day, like Masyanya in a cartoon, I opened the refrigerator and looked longingly at the products.

I got out of hunger incorrectly - I rushed to the pose, where I ate the first, second and third in one sitting. Volvulus, thank God, did not happen. The next week I ate off, and those kilograms that I lost, immediately gained. Now I understand that this fast was just a training of willpower.

What does the term "mental readiness" mean for starvation, diet or the transition to a healthy diet? Firstly, it is a voluntary reading of a variety of literature on healthy lifestyles. Secondly, it is a daily voluntary reflection on the benefits of healthy lifestyle and similar experiences of other people. Thirdly, it is the selection of the concepts of healthy lifestyle that you liked and their voluntary testing on yourself. Fourth, this is an analysis of the positive and negative results obtained, preferably with a sense of humor. Subject to the above factors, a healthy lifestyle will definitely enter your life without mental breakdown and fanaticism.

I started by making a selection of universal and reasonable thoughts on the concept of healthy eating for myself:

- it would be good to give up meat, since meat is the corpses of killed animals. Many years ago, I realized that meat has a negative energy of fear, pain and powerlessness, which negatively affects a person. I have made a ranking of the degree of harmfulness of meat from the lowest to the highest: seafood and fish, poultry, meat of artiodactyls;

- it would be nice to give up alcohol, since it gives artificial relaxation and does not solve the problems that have arisen, and also harms the body with its toxic metabolic products;

- from high-calorie refined foods rich in "fast" carbohydrates - sweets and confectionery;

- from tea, coffee and chocolate; or at least limit their consumption, since they once again tone up the body and remove the necessary fluid from it, that is, they dry out and age;

- from products with dyes and preservatives, as well as from canned food;

- try to withstand at least an hour between the main course and dessert. This idea was born from the assumption that if you mix, say, chicken soup and halva, it will be tasteless. This means that the stomach will not taste good either. This also includes the rule of drinking food as little as possible during meals, so as not to dilute the gastric juice.

There are many types of vegetarianism, for example, partial (with the use of eggs and milk), full, raw food and macrobiotics, which many consider as an extreme form of vegetarianism. In addition, there are diets - nutritional methods aimed at losing weight and getting rid of toxins and toxins. Most diets are completely ineffective, as they are carried out only occasionally and for a short time. Therefore, now I am closer to a constant healthy diet, which, although it does not reduce weight this minute, but leads to vigor and freshness.

After fasting, I switched to a macrobiotic diet according to George Ozawa, according to which the diet should include foods containing Yang energy and a small amount of Yin energy. Yin (unwanted) foods include sugar, alcoholic beverages, tropical fruits, potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, beets, garlic, white bread, eggs, seafood, and canned food. There are seven types of food modes. The first type is similar to our daily food. The transition to the seventh type implies 100% cereal nutrition. The system also advises to minimize fluid intake. Macrobiotics did not suit me, because it was hard and tasteless to chew steamed rice and buckwheat, and I could not refuse potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant. The downside is that different authors of macrobiotics classify Yin and Yang foods differently, so the same product can be attributed to both Yin and Yang.

Next, I tried a raw food diet. Raw vegetables, especially potatoes, zucchini and beets, seemed tasteless to me, and the cereals were hard. Eating only fruit is expensive.

Currently, I absolutely do not eat beef, pork, lamb and horse meat. I became convinced that without this meat I feel much better. With the rejection of him, my psyche changed, although, perhaps, it changed gradually and gradually. I used to watch the violence on TV in cold blood, but now I can't - it shakes, tears flow by themselves and “my heart hurts,” that is, my susceptibility to the suffering of others has increased. I try to follow the above rules of healthy eating, and I feel better and better every day. I emphasize once again that any shift in nutrition must be prepared mentally, that is, ideally, the worldview must change.

Meat eaters say that protein enters the body with meat, but not with plant foods. This is not true. First, there are plants that are very high in protein (like amaranth). Second, why do elephants have enormous muscle mass even though they don't eat meat? Because it is not meat that creates protein and muscle mass in living organisms. Amino acids that break down from food protein during our digestion are then incorporated into muscle proteins. Therefore, muscle mass can be increased on a vegetarian diet, only it must contain essential amino acids. This is not difficult to achieve if you include seafood and milk in your vegetarian menu at least occasionally. Be healthy!