… and what to do about it!

One of the biggest mistakes you could make regarding your health is to settle for making junk food your primary source of nutrition. I’m not saying you should live purely on totally natural foods that you know for a fact are free of all contamination. It wouldn’t be easy for anyone to do that in the modern world! Possible, certainly, but not easy.

But making no effort to eat a healthy diet is harmful to your health, and potentially dicing with death. A poor diet can lead to a whole range of medical problems, including diabetes, arthritis, digestive disorders, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. And one of the problems with a junk food diet is that it can gradually and fairly quickly become the norm, and you don’t even realise there’s anything particularly bad about your diet.

You might notice you feel bloated a lot of the time. And you might feel lethargic and short on energy. You might even notice that your joints are not as smooth and pain free as they used to be, but you might just put that down to age. You might also notice that your clothes are shrinking … or appear to be! Squeezing into them might alert you to the fact that you’re steadily gaining inches round your midsection… but then, lots of people just put that down to age as well (middle-age spread, isn’t that what they call it?).

But sooner or later you’ll have to face the fact that your poor diet is not just not very healthy, it’s actually a very real health risk. The horde of chemical additives in processed food can have all kinds of negative effects on your health, as, for example, the parents of a hyperactive child could attest. And the ridiculous quantities of sugar in processed foods can play havoc with their glycaemic index. Fats too (particularly saturated fats) can not only be one of the causes of weight gain but can have very serious effects on your cardiovascular system.

Why do we settle for junk food?

So why do we all eat so much of these not-very-healthy fast foods, specially when it’s fairly common knowledge that they can actually cause serious health problems? Well, the companies that produce them are very clever in designing these foods … and yes, they are ‘designed’, in much the same way as any other product whose chemical composition is carefully controlled. And they do all they can to make sure their products are tasty and addictive. And I’m not just using ‘addictive’ as a descriptive word here – I’m being factual. The companies that make these foods do all they can to make their products so desirable that it’s not a stretch to say that you can easily become addicted to them. They even say as much in their advertising! They say things like “have one, you’ve got to have the lot!”, for example. We really should try to notice the truth in what they’re saying … they’re virtually admitting their products are addictive.

And some sources say that as much as 80% of foods available in today’s supermarkets are not really fit for human consumption because they are so heavy in dangerous fats, sugars, and additives of all kinds. So it’s hardly surprising that most people just settle for what’s readily available, instead of searching out the really healthy stuff.

To recap, if you’re starting to become concerned about your diet …

• Processed foods generally are pretty low in nutrition. They simply don’t provide the nutritional benefits of ‘proper’ food.
• They can make you feel full quite fast, so you think you’ve been well fed. Which is a bad thing when you’ve actually had very little proper nutrition. You can feel full, but actually be starving (of proper nutrition, that is).
• Processed foods are often high calorie, so you can gain weight quickly eating them.
• They’re also often high in dangerous additives, as well as salt and sugar.
• And they can (and often do) cause a whole host of medical problems.

What can you do about it?

First, become more aware of what you’re eating. Take a look in your fridge and your kitchen cupboards, and see how much processed food is there. I’m guessing it’s quite a bit! Hint: most of it is hiding in tins, jars, or packets!

Next, notice how much natural food is there. Mmm … Hint: it generally looks like it grew in a field, or lived in a field!

Now, ask yourself: do you want to keep feeding yourself and your family artificial food that wouldn’t even be seen as fit to feed to prisoners, or do you actually care enough to make a few changes?

Assuming you’d rather plump for the second option, here’s a few ideas:

Drink more water

Most of us drink far too little water, and as a result we’re dehydrated, to a greater or lesser degree. Water is essential for life, and more specifically for various bodily processes, such as:

• Maintaining a correct fluid balance
• Helping to digest your food
• Flushing toxins out of the body
• Regulating temperature
• Helping the joints work more smoothly
• Keeping your skin smooth and healthy
• Helping to keep your muscles in good shape (remember, they’re largely composed of water, regardless how hard they might look!).

Drink a glass of water before your meal and you’ll digest it better, and you’ll probably tend to eat less as well.

Add more green vegetables to your diet

Most of us, with diets fairly heavy in junk food, are missing out. Leafy vegetables are bursting with health benefits, such as:

• They’re high in vitamins and minerals
• They contain omega-3 fats
• Some of the minerals, e.g. magnesium and potassium, help keep blood pressure down
• Magnesium also helps you absorb calcium, which is important for your nerves and a healthy immune system.
• They’re high in dietary fibre, which is great for your digestion (and elimination)
• They can reduce the bloated feeling you sometimes get after eating
• They’re high in bone-building minerals, such as calcium, magnesium and silica, so they’re great for building (or rebuilding!) a strong skeletal structure

Cook your meals!

I know, such an old fashioned idea! But don’t rush off, laughing hysterically at the craziness of it all, bear with me a minute. If your only previous venture into the mysterious realm of cooking involved a brief acquaintance with the microwave, this might be of interest to you.

It might even give you the urge to reacquaint yourself with the cooker, and pots and pans! And remember, if you cook your meals yourself you have a pretty good idea what’s in them, right? So if you do try it and it turns out awful, you can’t blame anyone else, but … ah, but you can steadily improve your cooking skills and start turning out some really good stuff! 🙂

Here’s a few advantages of cooking your own meals:

There’s an endless variety of meals you can make. The biggest restriction is your imagination. Instead of being dictated to by the food companies, you can design your own meals, containing exactly what you choose to put in them.

• You can cook things just the way you like them. If you want a steak cooked medium rare, do it that way! If you want a stew or a soup that’s thoroughly cooked, make sure it is, by cooking it longer. Try doing that with a ready meal!
• You can introduce your kids to healthier foods while they’re young, and you know there’s a far better chance of them staying healthy for life.
• You know the nutritional content is high.
• You can ensure that the vitamins and minerals stay in the meal, where they belong.
• You can make sure your meals contain such valuable constituents as onions and garlic (you won’t find much of either in any junk foods!).
• You can add a little cider vinegar to lots of meals, which is another great natural additive.

Prepare your own soups

I know, you might be so used to buying tinned soups you’re not even sure you could make a proper soup. I get it, it’s a dying art! Don’t panic, it’s not that hard. In fact, it’s very easy.

• Prepare your own veg (I’m hazarding a guess lots of your soups will have a selection of veg?). You don’t have to be a trained chef to do this, just practise and you’ll soon be practically expert at it!
• Boil some soup mix (sometimes marketed as broth mix). It’s a mixture of dried peas, barley, lentils, etc, and once it’s been boiled awhile it can be added to your soup to thicken it and make it very tasty, and of course, nutritious.
• Make your own stock. If you’ve eaten chicken, beef, or whatever, boil the leftovers, bones an’ all, and you’ll soon have a lovely stock to add to your soup. Boil an onion with it, and a few sticks of celery. All the goodness will migrate to the stock, and you can throw them out, along with the bones, before using the stock in your soup.
• Add a tin of mixed beans (okay, tinned food, but there’s not a whole lot they can do to adulterate beans – check the tin, chances are it just contains various types of beans and water, and maybe a very few preservatives to save the contents going off).
• You can add a dash of cider vinegar, some garlic, and whatever else takes your fancy.
• You can make enough so that you have plenty to store in the fridge for a few days, as well as for today’s meal.
• With a hand-held blender you can easily mush down a portion of the soup and then add it back to the main batch. That way you can still have whole beans, chunks of veg, etc, in your soup, if that’s the way you like it. Or you can blend the lot (particularly good for the likes of tomato soup and mushroom soup, that kind of thing).
• All the goodness stays in! As long as you don’t keep the pan uncovered all the time it’s cooking, you’re not going to lose any nutritional value. The steam condenses on the lid and runs back into the pot. So it really is packed with goodness!

Like I said, easy! And once you’ve started making your own soups you won’t want to go back to the tinned stuff in a hurry!

Eat healthy snacks

Don’t depend on chocolate based snacks all the time. Remember, one of the problems with these processed foods is that they’re addictive. You know as well as I do that it’s not easy to have just one or two biscuits and leave it at that!

Eat more nuts! Have a handful of nuts if you need a snack. Some of them contain high levels of healthy fats, as well as other goodies. But be aware, they’re pretty high in calories, so don’t go crazy on them.

Eat some fruit! But steer clear of fruit juices! You have to ask yourself if they’re really as good for you as you think. When you look at a glass of apple juice, for example, consider this … if you juiced an apple you’d only get a very small amount of juice, right? So, that glass of apple juice, if it’s pure apple juice, must have the juice of maybe a dozen or more apples. Now, would you eat a dozen or more apples at one go? Hardly likely. So maybe drinking the juice of that many apples isn’t really all that natural … just saying.

Same goes for other fruit juices. And remember, if you bought them in a container in the supermarket they’ve been treated in certain ways, had additives put in with them, ‘benefited’ from the addition of things to make them more tasty, etc, etc. Still think they’re such a good choice?

Stop buying junk!

I know, they’re I go again with the funnies! I can’t help it, they just keep coming! 🙂

Seriously though, if you want to make a difference to your diet, just stop buying junk. Make a list of the things you think you should cut back on, and reduce the amount you buy. Pretty soon the amount of junk in your cupboards will reduce of its own accord. I know you won’t stop buying all tinned food, and all packaged food, and I’m not suggesting that. But cut back, and heavily.

You don’t need to depend so much on processed foods. Don’t worry, you’ll get by!

You might even enjoy your new eating regime. You’ll certainly enjoy knowing
that you and your family are eating a far healthier diet.