Hold the Detox Diet – Get onto Healthy Food this January

Sluggish. Heavy. Bloated. Stressed. Are you using any of these words to describe yourself as the New Year comes in?  While the popular magazines and internet will be promoting detox diets as the cure, January is not a good time to go on a very restrictive diet.

If you live where the weather is cold you need warm nourishing food to keep your immune system in top form. You need to be able to fight off those pesky flu & cold viruses that are around.

According to Chinese traditional medicine and many detox authorities Springtime is the natural time for the body to detox. It makes sense. The weather should be  warmer and the spring vegetables and salad ingredients loaded with nutrients are just beginning to appear in the shops.

Your body has a very sophisticated detox system but a diet of too much sugar, refined foods, ready meals, caffeine, food additives, junk food,  stress, and too little exercise can slow it right down. It needs certain nutrients to function efficiently and processed foods are lacking in them. Over time these food deplete your body of the very nutrients it needs to be healthy.

Getting onto healthy food supplies your body with the nutrients needed to get your metabolism firing and your detox system to function properly. So, do yourself a favor and make a new start this January. Ditch the junk food and get onto healthy food. Food is energy and information for your body. What do I mean by this?

Food is much more than carbohydrate, protein fat, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. It contains information and energy. Food talks to your body and your body talks back. This is scientific reality. Substances in food act a signals in our bodies. They tell your cells what to do. Bad food gives wrong signals but good food gives correct signals.

So what should you eat?

Eat the best quality food you can get. Quality means real, fresh, organic, homemade, locally produced and low in toxins. It will be tasty, full of real flavor, lovingly crafted, and marketed with honesty.

High quality food will give your body the most nutrients. The poorer the quality the food the more you will eat. If it lacks vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, enzymes and other molecules your body senses this and you get a message to eat more food.

Get smart about your health. Get wise about what’s making you sick: toxins and deficiencies.

Here are the foods or anti-nutrients that you must avoid:

Poor quality fats

Become an avid reader of labels. If it says any of the following it means poor quality: hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, cottonseed oil, Olestra, any margarine spread with hydrogenated oil.

Commercially produced supermarket oils are also poor quality. They have been heated and cleaned but the the oil will have been stripped of any goodness.

Poor quality white flour products

Poor quality white flour products include mass produced bread, cookies, muffins, donuts, cakes, pastries, crackers, breakfast cereals, granola bars, and pasta . Modern diets are full of them.

Refined foods such as these have been stripped of their natural vitamin, mineral and nutrient content. They cause a spike in insulin which tells the body to store weight.

Poor quality sugar

Read product labels and avoid fructose corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, white sugar, glucose, any artificial sweetener. These sugars are likely to be lurking in soft drinks, juice drinks, candies, sweets, a lot of snack food, and snack bars.

Sugar of any sort should be kept to a minimum but if you are going to use sugar look for products that contain raw honey, maple syrup, organic sugar like succanat and agave nectar. They cause a much slower rise in blood sugar than refined sugar.

If you want to replace an artificial sweetened try Stevia or Xylitol.

Poor quality meat

Poor quality meat includes all processed meats, commercially produced hot dogs, sausages, packaged cold cuts, all fast food meat, meat that has been intensively reared.

High quality meat is grass fed, hormone free and organically reared. It’s getting much easier to find.

Poor quality dairy

This includes mass produced, non organic, and hormone containing milk, yoghurt, cheese and snack foods made with cheese byproducts.

Look for high quality organic milk, cheese and butter. Eat the whole food, whole yogurt and whole milk.  Get the health benefits of real food.

This is your chance to begin your new level of health. Make your new relationship with food now. When your diet consists of high quality food, full of the nutrients it needs to function optimally, you will begin to detox naturally. Now is the time to make a fresh start and overhaul your health in 2011. Go for it and feel the difference.