Crash diets and detoxes as a means to lose weight have little value. Carefully measured detoxes and fasts can be important for cleansing reasons, but sustainable long term weight loss and increased health can be achieved by eating cleaner and greener, and consciously taking steps to inhabit your body and your life more fully as an ‘ecosystem’ itself.
All living things function in a series of interlocking relationships. It’s up to our conscious, willful participation and choices as to whether those relationships are helpful or harmful. Eating less or no meat, substituting with healthy, whole food based vegan substitutes, or at least eating lower on the food chain, drinking green smoothies, eating the bulk of our meals with lots of fresh (preferably organic) vegetables and whole grains, eating fruit by itself, and drinking a lot of water each day, including 16 ounces with the juice of half a raw lemon each morning upon waking, will recalibrate your system. Eat as much raw organic greens as you want.
Green, raw nutrition is the source of all life and boosts your health vitality and weight stabilization like nothing else. Make all kinds of chopped up salads, and experiment with different homemade dressings using extra virgin olive oil, nutritional yeast for a cheese like flavor, apple cider vinegar or lemons, Braggs Amino acids for soy sauce, cayenne, lemon juice, tahini, cashew butter, and any of hundreds of quick combinations that taste great and feed your health.
Eat lots of greens– can’t stress that enough. Every day, we should eat something raw so we get all the powerful living enzymes, antioxidants and nutrients. We don’t need to cook everything to death.
I mention eating organic and choosing to vote with your dollar when we purchase food, because it allows us to be more consciously part of the overall health of the system in which we live. I spend no more money on food than the average person who buys a lot of processed junk foods and commercially produced. I work with what’s in season and priced well. When I do choose to spend more on clean food, I know I am not spending that money at the doctor or on ‘medicines’.
Get outside! Simply moving that body out in the elements, rain or sun, hot or cold, stimulates and tones your immune system, not to mention digestion, mood, bloodstream and cardiovascular fitness.
The modern food system is sick, greatly pollutes and sickens the Earth, and so often are we. Choosing to get healthy in a deeper, more consciously broad and penetrating approach produces brighter eyes, fresher breath, cleaner organs and bloodstreams, supple body systems, and overall enhanced physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellness, as well as athletic performance. You can have the most exhilarating life by getting healthy and giving back.