If you look at my previous posts on this site you’ll see that I’ve greatly improved my health partly by moving to raw foods. I find it tempting to “tell” all of you that you should be on a raw food diet also, for the good of your health, but I now realize that is not a good idea. There are plenty of healthy people who are not on a raw food diet so it can’t be the “be all and end all”. A raw food diet obviously isn’t a prerequisite for health. There are plenty of people who have turned their lives around and greatly improved their health with the aid of many different good diets. So what gives?
Good diets?
I met a man recently on a holiday, and he told me that he had very poor health and was badly overweight, but he’d regained his health and lost over 50 pounds just by eliminating wheat products from his diet. He was still eating cooked food and had achieved an outstanding health improvement. It’s impossible to say that this is not a good diet, it’s obviously a good diet for him.
It’s easy to find many people with similar health improvement stories, with a large array of good diets. One of the popular ones these days is the paleo or primal diet – see, for example, Marks Daily Apple and Primal Weight Loss.
You can also look around at healthy populations around the world, and you come across many “good diets” like the Japanese diet and the Mediterranean diet.
There’s really no doubt that there are many good diets that can result in health improvements.
How does health improvement start?
When I think back to the beginning of my own health improvement, I now realize a key step to improvement was the realization that I was worthy of my own care and love. That is, I began to think of myself with self-care and self-love.
To be clear here, I’m using the term “love” in the sense that I deserve my own attention just as much as anybody else. I’m not using it in the sense of unhealthy and unjustifiable belief that everything I do is perfect and better than everyone else. It’s more a “love” of myself because I’m equally as good as everyone else, not because I’m better.
Once I flipped into the mode of wanting to care for myself at a real and deep level, this caused me to evaluate my diet and choose to begin a raw food diet. The change of diet was really just one of the results of the change to a mode of self-care and self-love.
Choosing what to eat
Now, when people ask me what they should eat. I think the best answer is that every person should think deeply about themselves with a real sense of self-care and self-love. This is not easy and might take a long time to achieve. It’s surprising how many people have a sense of self-loathing. Even if it’s not in their conscious mind, it’s in their subconscious (which could even be worse) and the results are the same. They feel like they aren’t worthy, aren’t lovable, are stupid, are fat, are useless, etc. The list is a very long one. With this type of self-loathing, the subconscious can actually use food to sabotage health and prove the self-loathing right.
The first step is to find a way to give yourself your own well deserved self-care and self-love. Really and truly.
Now, in this spirit, you can consider the food options available and decide what truly is the best option for you and your health.
If you make a food choice even though you know that the food is fundamentally bad for you, you’re really demonstrating the opposite of self-care and self-love and it would make sense to expect bad results in terms of health.
If you make a food choice with the motivation of real, deep, honest self-care and self-love, then my guess is that the actual food choice doesn’t matter too much and your bodies reaction to the food will be good because of the good place your mind has found. Your body-mind connection will be working very well. I’m not talking about choosing something because you “like it” even though you know it’s bad and it’s really just satisfying another subconscious demon. It really has to be an act of self-care and self-love.
I’m sure this topic will be quite controversial. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Raw food – one of the good diets
I think a raw food diet is an excellent diet. It has a lot going for it, for those who can manage it. It appears to be one of the best ways to get high amounts of nutrition easily into the body.
The first time I was exposed to raw food diets was when I saw the film Simply Raw : Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days. This was a real eye-opener for me. Recently, in a newsletter from Nick Polizzi of Raw for Thirty, I saw a note from Keith Lyons (one of the filmmakers) where he said;
Part of our healing is always about the relationship we have with ourselves, others, and the relationship we have with LIVE food.
He talks about how the success achieved by the participants in the film was not wholly attributable to the raw food diet, but also to “Love, gratitude, and compassion” they were feeling throughout the process. It’s all very interesting.
Give yourself a little love, gratitude and compassion, choose from the good diets available the one that suits you best and be kind to yourself. The results can only be good.
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