‘Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.’
Hippocrates
Human nature is to be happy, peaceful, and healthy.
Living a healthy lifestyle will not only help you with tackling smaller health issues, for example, having nicer skin or minimizing fatigue, but can also fight against bigger diseases including diabetes or cancer.
Our body is a natural wonder because it has the wonderful capacity to heal itself, if we indentify the things that are causing our health problems and stop doing these harmful things. But, healing your body through appropriate diet will not bring you immediate results. It is a long-term process of constant improvement.
Healing the body
To shift your life toward a healthy direction, you should start with, for example, eating healthy, reducing stress, exercising more, quitting smoking, finding new friends, attending support groups, getting more vitamins. Believe me, you are going to live longer, feel better and lose weight.
People think that once you have a heart disease, it can only get worse. But, with healthy diet, in many cases it could get better and better, and much more quickly. Huge differences can occur without drugs, without surgery. And the more you change your diet into healthier, the better you will be, the bigger the change, the bigger and faster the benefits, with the old people improving as much as the young ones.
If your diet contains lots of high fat meals, you will very often feel sleepy because your blood flow is less. If you are on a low-fat diet, your blood flow will go up and you will feel livelier. In many states in the US more than 25% of people are obese. It is crazy! And people are obese because they eat more unhealthy products like French fries, pizza and fried chickens instead of nutritious food.
In order to lose weight, you should either burn more calories by exercising or eat fewer calories; and to eat fewer calories you need to either eat less food or change the type of food you eat.
To start healing through diet, you should eat less ‘bad carbohydrates’. Bad carbohydrates are things like sugar, white flour, white rice, alcohol. The calories which come from these products will be converted into fat. You should not stop eating carbohydrates completely because your body needs them to provide energy for muscles and fuel for the central nervous system. Instead, you should eat ‘good carbohydrates’. Good carbohydrates are things like fruits, vegetables, whole wheat flour, brown rice, which are rich in fiber that fills you up before you get too many calories and before your blood sugar rises quickly.
Every time you eliminate something bad from your daily diet, add something healthy.
Eat good fats (Omega-3 fatty acids) instead of ‘bad fats’. Bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids found in processed foodand saturated fats found in meat. A few grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50% to 80%. Fish oil also helps to reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast, prostate and colon cancer.
All in all, healthy diet should be low in fat, low in the bad carbohydrates, high in the good carbohydrates and contain enough of good fats. This kind of diet will help you lose weight, feel better and you are going to gain health in the long-term.
Healing the mind
But, eating healthy is only a part of a successful process of healing through diet. The rest is about healing through having a positive mind.
People who are lonely and depressed are many times more likely to get sick and die early than people who are positive. And why people are depressed nowadays? Because the modern lifestyle very often makes people feel worse than others by not owning as many cool products or achieving less. In my opinion, corporations which blindly encourage people to buy more products (especially producers of luxury products) should be partially blamed for growing depression around the world.
The good thing about depression is that it can be treated through friendship, altruism and compassion. Patients who are surrounded by the loved ones or attend support groups to meet with other people who understand the disease, get better and live longer. Positive emotions and a sense of connection and community are really healing.
Wellness matters so much to our daily lives that it cannot be underestimated. Human body has the amazing ability to heal through appropriate diet over time, so does our brain and soul. It is a pity that we talk so little about that in our daily lives.
