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Surprisingly enough, you hear about a low inflammatory diet quite frequently now. It’s not complicated. In fact, it’s so simple that in our processed food world ironically, it’s confusing.
There are so many diets on the market. Watching TV in January makes me crazy because of all the diet gimmicks and programs that are advertised after the holidays when many of us have eaten too much of the wrong foods, and we’ve gained excess weight. The question I always have is, if you subscribe to a diet, what happens when you have lost the weight by eating the food you’ve purchased from the “XYZ” diet company and then you go off their program and stop eating their food? The answer is that most of the time you will gain back the weight you lost. Often you will gain back even more weight than you lost. This feeds into the yo-yo dieting that so many people experience during their weight loss struggles.
I think it makes sense to learn how to eat to support your long term health and your healthy weight instead of trying diet after diet. This means you learn to eat so you stay well, so you help your body find its own perfect weight and provide your body the nutrients it needs to be free of disease or to heal itself of disease. The optimum goal is to learn to eat to stave off chronic diseases associated with aging so you enjoy health and vitality until the very last days of your time here. I would rather see people spend money wisely on healthy food than on a diet program that will ultimately take their money and let them down.
Your body is a perfect machine. If you give it the fuel it needs, it will treat you well. If you give it what approximates gasoline with water in it, you will never enjoy a smooth ride no matter what diet plans you try or what supplements you take.
While I don’t believe in diets, the closest thing to a low inflammatory way of eating that I have found is the Mediterranean diet. A low inflammatory diet consists of food — real whole food. What do I mean by whole food? It’s simple: unprocessed fruits and vegetables for the major portion of what you eat. If you eat meat, look for pasture raised meat and poultry and wild caught fish. Whole unprocessed grains can also be on the menu. What a low inflammatory diet is not is fast food and food that has been so processed it’s unrecognizable; food that’s devoid of its original nutritional value. Real whole food is not food that has had all the fat removed, which removes most of the flavor and then has been “flavored up” with massive amounts of salt and sugar.
Please remember to check your food labels on your no-fat and low-fat “foods” for the amount of salt and sugar if you doubt me.
Again…it’s simple.
This article was originally published on my site at http://thinstronghealthy.com/low-inflammatory-diet/
Helping You Achieve Major Wellness in Your Life!
Cheryl A Major, CNWC
Cheryl A Major lives in Westford and is a Certified Nutrition and Wellness Consultant. Her TV show, Thin Strong Healthy, airs on WestfordCat and is an offshoot of her blog http://ThinStrongHealthy.com Cheryl offers ongoing information and personal health coaching to help you feel better and be healthier. Follow Cheryl on Twitter @CherylAMajor. She is also a full time residential Realtor with Coldwell Banker with more than 25 years experience.
