A New Year, A New You

If you’re like me, by now you have probably been inundated with emails for detoxes, weight loss gimmicks and fat loss supplements, all discounted to entice you buy.   A new year a new you, right? Get healthy in the New year! Try this for 30 days and lose 20 lbs! You know what I’m talking about.   These ads lure you to believe that if you follow a specific protocol (that is usually impossible to follow) or pop a pill, you will lose weight.  Then when you lose the weight and gain it back, you are left thinking you just didn’t have enough willpower!   Why?  These diets are gimmicks, they are designed this way so the writers can make money time and again because you think it was your fault you failed.  It was NOT your fault, you were tricked into thinking there is one thing that will help, a quick fix.  These gimmicks do not teach you how to eat or even what foods might be better for you.  There are no quick fixes and, we, as a culture, need to move away from this “diet mentality” and really learn about how food affects us individually.   
 
What I want for you in the new year is to learn to change your lifestyle so you never have to think about dieting (or detoxing) again and so you don’t fall for a quick fix.   I want you to change your mindset regarding eating.  I want you to know that there is no one diet plan that is going to work for everyone all the time…at least not for the long term.  I want you to know that there is so much more to being healthy than just losing weight. 
  
Here are four things you can put into place immediately to start you on your new health journey: 
 
  1.Eat whole foods – this does not mean looking at foods that say whole wheat flour.  A whole food is how you find the food in nature.  An apple, celery, kale…these are whole foods. 
  2.Eat organic as much as possible – the pesticides that are sprayed on food are meant to kill insects, they affect humans too but at a much slower rate. 
  3.If you do buy packaged foods – read the ingredient label, it should contain a small list with only things you know. For instance: wheat berries, or dried apples 
  4.Research the ingredients - Can you say the ingredient? Do you know what it is? Is it organic? Is it verified GMO free?  If you can’t pronounce something and don’t know what it is, or is genetically modified, put it back on the shelf! 
 
Making small changes like these can help you now in the New Year and be a catalyst to a lifetime of health as well!