How to Transform Your Life With Your Fork!
Our modern diet is the major cause of our health problems, from heart disease and diabetes to cancers and Alzheimer’s Disease, and most of the other diseases in between. How could this be?
Food has been hijacked by the food industry as the most profitable and legitimate addictive product by developing food cravings, supported by vast advertising and promotional campaigns aimed at the young and old, as well as government agencies that should protect us.
The staple diet of modern man is based predominantly (up to 75 per cent) on highly processed convenience foods that lack essential nutrients and fibre and usually contain high levels of sugar and unhealthy fat, as well as many additives foreign to the human body. We buy these products because they “taste so good” and are convenient in our busy lives. They have been manufactured with great care to ensure they do make us crave their tastes!
How can we return to eating health-promoting foods with such a challenge?
Stage One
- Ask yourself what you think is the unhealthiest food you eat now, then decide to eat less of it.
- Ask yourself what you think is the healthiest food you eat now, then eat more of it.
Stage Two
- Decide why you want to be healthier, then consider whether you could change your diet to achieve that.
Stage Three
Take a lead from the millions of “Blue Zone” people who often live active, healthy lives beyond a hundred years. Their diets can be summarised simply with the acronym “GBOMBS,” which spells out the key ingredients in 95 per cent of their diets.
- G is for as many green vegetables as you can manage.
- B is for every kind of bean you can find, the superfood for our gut microbiomes.
- O is for the whole onion family, from spring onions to garlic.
- M is for mushrooms, the huge group that is neither plant nor animal but has amazing health benefits.
- B is for berries, a wide variety from strawberries to blueberries.
- S is for seeds and nuts, the most densely packed life-supporting nutrients.
Make your meal choices include all of the above whenever possible, and you will be moving towards the world’s healthiest diet: a whole-plant food diet!
Stage Four
Changes to lifetime habits can take time. That’s fine, it’s the direction of change that matters.
Have the serenity to accept what you feel you cannot change in your diet and lifestyle for now, the courage to change what you feel you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Michael Lingard BSc (Econ) D.O.
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Michael Lingard, a regular contributor to Wellbeing Magazine for the past 18 years. A passionate promoter of real health care and would like to see a paradigm shift in modern medicine; from a disease & pathology based system to a health and ethology based system.
