Strategy 4: Eat Healthy Food

Hi everyone! I’m Carol Diane and THIS is Happiness Reclaimed. You were born for the pursuit of happiness which means rising toward your potential mentally, physically, and spiritually, living a life of love with deep meaning and purpose. We’re leaving behind the  emotional stress, bad health, and empty spirituality of today, to practice powerful life strategies in a mind-body-spirit approach to wellness. It’s time to reclaim your life. Let’s go.

Today we’re covering Powerful Strategy #4. Eat Healthy Food.  And yes, I’m still talking instant change, not just with those three marvelous communication techniques I just covered, but also right here. Instant change starting at the biochemical level. So try to visualize that, and realize the power you have to create change.   

As always, please check with your doctor before making any change.

And if you’ve listened to any of my other podcasts, you know that everything I say is for educational purposes only and at no time am I telling you what to do in a specific situation. As a uniquely genetic, biological, and biochemical organism, only you can decide exactly what’s right for you. Your participation in any way with the Happiness Reclaimed organization signifies your understanding of, and agreement with, these terms.

So yes, we are now in the Body section of the Mind Body Spirit approach to wellness. In other words, physical health, but the way you eat can also impact your emotional health and spiritual health, and those improvements in turn have a positive impact on all your relationships and your career and your dreams and goals. I can’t take time to prove all that to you, but do feel free to start listening to scientists so that you can, like me, feel amazed by this newer and exciting scientific understanding of how the mind, body, and spirit are amazingly interconnected. 

Or it’s also perfectly fine if you just get busy developing good habits, and reap the rewards without worrying about all that study of scientific detail. Either way is fine.  

In my opinion, whatever interests you and motivates you is what you would want to pursue. Play it smart according to your own individual personality and time schedule. Do what works for you.

In addition to our unique physiology, a discussion about human nutrition also becomes complicated because the research studies and all the opinions out there are often contradictory. It truly is frustrating when you’re just trying to get to the truth and figure out what you as an individual should do. As a cancer patient, I understand this frustration very well. All the scary warnings and all the contradictory opinions can just about drive us crazy if we let them, and that’s why I once joked to a naturopath I was consulting, “So I’m down to one thing I can eat—organic Romaine lettuce.” A friend later commented to me, “Yeah, but you also have to worry about the E coli on the  lettuce!” It’s funny and true at the same time, at least occasionally. 

 So how do we keep our sanity and move forward with our particular goals, whatever those might be? 

YOUR goal might be weight loss, or solving irritable bowel, or putting on muscle, or solving autoimmune, or fighting a chronic disease such as cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, dementia, Alzheimer’s, macular degeneration, depression, anxiety, or something else. All of these medical conditions can be affected by the food you eat. There’s just no doubt about that. Anybody who would dispute that needs to check all the latest research and become educated. And to help you with that, I share my favorite Links on my website. 

So while today I cannot offer advice tailored to your particular health concerns, I can simplify things for you and save you a lot of preliminary reading and frustration, and I can help you move more quickly to fine-tuning your own diet plan. 

So what I’m going to do is briefly share with you the bottom line that I have discovered after years of research—a broad-based consensus among scientists that seems to be a middle ground as a good starting place for everyone, rather than perhaps being too extreme in one direction. Not that an extreme diet is always a bad idea! Sometimes that’s very helpful to people for a while. But here we’re thinking more generally and we’re thinking longer term. And if you’re just getting started with improving your diet, then maybe a moderate adjustment is more reasonable and achievable for you anyway. Anything too extreme might be too hard of an adjustment and even a shock to the intestines and the rest of body, possibly causing physical discomfort of some kind. 

If you know my other work, you know I’m all about starting with simple changes. Something doable. Something that gives you success right off the bat. The exact details and the timings are up to you.

But let me first begin by acknowledging that exercise, sleep, stress reduction and toxin avoidance are huge, huge, huge no matter what your goal is. But this podcast is about healthy food. 

So let’s simplify and summarize the cutting edge research on diet by just covering 3 basic freedom strategies.  

Freedom Strategy #1: Eat only whole foods in their original form. Fall in love with the wonderful, colorful produce department at the store or at the farmer’s market. And if you can, have your own garden even if only in some pots on a patio. But no matter how you do it, make produce your main love. Say goodbye and good riddance to processed foods. If man made it, don’t eat it. 

A slight exception to this could be what are called minimally processed foods. What are those? Well, if you take a bunch of fresh tomatoes and chop them and heat them and add salt and turn them into canned tomatoes, with only those tomatoes and salt ingredients, that would be an example of a minimally processed food. Man did not make those tomatoes or the salt in a lab, unless there could be such a thing as GMO tomatoes. And just as an aside, for research on the dangers of GMOs, please see my book Happiness Reclaimed. 

For the sake of convenience, sometimes a minimally processed food like that will be just fine. And in fact, sometimes cooking actually helps release certain nutrients, so it’s not true that raw is always best in every way. Of course, if you need to be on a low salt diet, you can stick with fresh tomatoes, or buy “no salt added” canned tomatoes. 

So what is an example of processed? If you’re looking at some cold cereal, for example, those flakes or shapes look nothing like the original grain plant that grew in the ground, and those cereal pieces probably have sugar added and perhaps other ingredients such as preservatives and food colorings, and who knows what all. Those are processed foods. So go for the unprocessed foods. Most veggie should be eaten raw or lightly steamed, and the root veggies might also be microwaved or baked or boiled. I do not ever recommend frying, as the so-called vegetable oils, which are really industrial seed oils, are now suspected of causing poor health.  

So you have lots and lots of options starting with the veggies.  Maybe to the veggies you’ll add, only AFTER the cooking, a little cold pressed extra virgin olive oil if you can find some that has not been adulterated with vegetable oil.

You could also use grassfed organic butter, plus salt, pepper and other spices if you’d like. Make your feast even more tantalizing by seeing if you can eat every color of the rainbow every single day. So look for red veggies, orange, yellow, green is easy. The blues and purples are a little harder to find but could include eggplant, purple cabbage, maybe purple sweet potatoes if you decide to eat potatoes. 

Now add in the low-glycemic fruits, such as berries, lemons, limes. Maybe kiwi and grapefruit if your doctor is okay with grapefruit. Maybe add cherries, and organic frozen cranberries with no sugar added. Some of the berries will of course give you more of the blue colors.

Before you leave the produce area, maybe grab some cucumbers, winter squash such as butternut or acorn squash, bell peppers of every color, celery, radishes, both the red and the Daikon radish, onions, leeks, garlic, fresh ginger, fresh thyme, oregano, rosemary, parsley, and basil, plus mushrooms.     

Now you can head to the meat department or the farmer’s market for grassfed organic, pasture raised meat and eggs, if you can afford them. If you drop all the processed foods, you’ll have money that you can shift over to purchasing the higher quality meat perhaps. Animal meat should be in its original form, not processed lunch meat or a hot dog or a bratwurst, but in the original form. 

So that’s Freedom Strategy #1—eat unprocessed foods.    

Freedom Strategy #2: Avoid raising your blood sugar and insulin levels too much, so mostly stick with the low-glycemic foods, and have smaller servings of the higher glycemic veggies or fruits. 

You can easily find such food listings of glycemic index or glycemic load on the Internet. I think you’ll learn to love these foods. Your cravings will change. Eventually you’ll find you no longer crave sweet or salty, especially if you can eliminate certain health conditions and nutritional deficiencies. Severely limit or completely cut out foods that are high-glycemic. So depending on your goals and your calorie needs, you might say no to potatoes. You might be careful about how much winter squash you eat. And maybe the same with green peas, and speaking of green peas, that reminds me to say that the pure veggies in the frozen food department are fine too. Just avoid frozen products with added ingredients. 

Depending on your goal, you might also avoid the high glycemic fruits such as banana, pineapple, mango, and grapes. In my opinion, everyone should exercise some self-control in this way, but your LEVEL of strictness will vary according to what your health issue is, and other factors.

Freedom Strategy #3: Eat 100% organic if you can find it and afford it.

If you can’t afford to eat 100% organic don’t stress, just do the best you can, and check the Environmental Working Group’s list of the Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen, so that you know which foods are the most contaminated with pesticides or herbicides. Those are called the Dirty Dozen. At least protect yourself by buying The Dirty Dozen in organic form. The Clean Fifteen are the foods that are probably safer to consume if you don’t buy organic. For that information go to Environmental Working Group, EWG.org.  

So with these three guidelines or freedom strategies, what will your shopping list look like?

In addition to the items I’ve already mentioned, I want to give special emphasis to the following categories:

1. Leafy greens: collard greens, mustard greens, bok choy, turnip greens, kale, Swiss chard, dandelion greens, spinach, and all kinds of lettuce. And you can find other greens as well. For the greens other than lettuce, you could eat a combination of raw and lightly steamed. Steaming can break down plant cell walls and in some cases help you absorb more nutrients. But they say raw may offer more enzymes, so I believe in eating some of both in a given day.

2. Cruciferous veggies, especially broccoli sprouts, regular broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage of various kinds, broccoli raab if you can find it, and even arugula, which is a leafy green, but is in the cruciferous family, and so are the collard greens by the way.

3. Category 3 would be the other miscellaneous veggies already mentioned, plus green beans,  and the root veggies such as turnips and parsnips.  If you have kidney stones, achy joints, or thyroid problems, you might want to avoid both beets and spinach plus nuts due to the incredibly high amount of oxalates, which they say not only help to create kidney stones but can also lodge in the joints and thyroid and cause problems.  I can’t guarantee that theory is correct, but many people limit their beets and spinach for these reasons.    

4. Category #4: In addition to the herbs or spices I already mentioned, you might try some cardamom, celery seed, turmeric powder or fresh root combined with black pepper and a healthy fat such as extra virgin olive oil or organic grassfed butter. Both the fat and the black pepper help the curcumin in the turmeric to be absorbed, they say.

5. Healthy fats—I’ve already mentioned EVOO and organic grassfed butter, and I’d add a cod liver oil made the old-fashioned way if you can find that. Maybe a fatty fish such as wild caught sockeye salmon, sardines or anchovies. And you may wish to add avocado.

6. For me personally, I consider nuts/seeds to be too high in Omega 6 fatty acids, which are pro-inflammatory, except for walnuts which have an Omega 6 to 3 ratio of about 4:1.  Ideally, that’s as high as I want to go because of both cancer and macular degeneration, according to some expert opinion. The experts explain that, while Omega 6 is needed in small amounts, the American diet is incredibly high in Omega 6 and that is pro-inflammatory.   

7. Beans, lentils if your gut can handle them.  Tiny portions, increasing gradually may help your gut adjust to them.

8. Organic, non-GMO soybean in the form of natto or edamame is next, if you’d like to eat soy. Definitely only organic non-GMO soybeans, and natto is fermented so it’s a good source of the all-important vitamin K2 plus some anti-cancer phytochemicals, but others believe soy triggers their autoimmune condition. If you want to try natto, the only good source I’ve found is Rhapsody Natural Foods in Maine. They say they are working on finding a paper cup for the natto that doesn’t include plasticizers or PFAS chemicals.   

9. If you’re hankering for a grain, you might start with a pseudo-grains, organic quinoa or buckwheat. I know a holistic doctor who has said no one should eat wheat grown in the United States. He says that Einkorn flour from Europe is fine. That’s his opinion after doing his own research. I have not researched that at all, but I thought I’d share that tip so that you can read for yourself.

I’ve heard all rice has some level of arsenic. And then of course, any grain with gluten is considered problematic for many people. And it does seem that organic grain is the only way to go, for more reasons than I have time to share. Of course, white flour will jack up your blood sugar and should be avoided for that reason, regardless of whether it’s organic or not.

In this food selection process, you’ll need to decide:

• Just how low-carb do I want to be?
• How much do I want to avoid Omega 6 fatty acids?

But here’s the beauty of the whole foods approach: When you’re eating the healthy whole foods I’ve listed, you can just do that and spare yourself so much  careful analysis if you want to. We all can benefit from simplicity and stress relief.

Finally, here are just a couple important tidbits: 

• ½ oz grassfed liver per day supplies more than the daily need for B12 according to some sources. Those of us who are older may not absorb B12 as well, which only comes from animal products, so it’s not a bad idea to monitor blood levels with a lab test occasionally.
• As you may know from reading my book Happiness Reclaimed, we generally are not very good at converting the plant-based beta carotene to the real vitamin A in our bodies, so here’s one more advantage to that chunk of liver—it could give you the Vitamin A that you need. 

So I promised you a bottom line consensus and there it is: Eat whole unprocessed foods, eat as low-glycemic as you should according to your needs, and eat as much organic as you can. 

That’s it for today. Please like, share and subscribe if you found this helpful. 

If you have any questions at all, please contact me at HappinessReclaimed.com.   I’ll try to answer those questions in a future broadcast. So that’s it for today. Love ya guys.