Welcome to Fitness Minute! With Mary Salama , the newsletter designed to raise your awareness and empower you for change! |
The last three newsletters covered each of the three major macro-nutrient groups: carbohydrate, protein and fat, in detail. This newsletter will give you 5 powerful principles, based on the teaching of Maxine & Charley Cropley, that If you begin to consistently apply to everything you put in your mouth (food and drink), you will begin to have more energy, lose weight and revolutionize the rest of your life!
The 5 Principles of Eating:
- Natural
- Alive
- Simple
- Clean
- Whole
Let's delve deeper into each principle and its application.
Natural: In today's grocery store or restaurant, we are calling a lot of things “food” that aren't food at all. “Food” is naturally occurring, life-giving substances. “Foods” that were not here 300 years ago are most likely not a true food.
While we like to think of cookies, chips, candy, soda and other processed “foods” as “food”, these products are neither naturally occurring nor life-giving. In fact, studies continue to show that regular or excessive consumption of these “dead” products is directly related to life-threatening diseases including obesity, heart disease, high cholesterol and diabetes.
Alive: The more fresh a fruit, vegetable, grain, or protein is, the more power-for-life it will offer you. Fresh, alive foods come to you with their own enzymes or digestive power. You feel energized after you eat these foods because they did not require your own energy to digest them. On the contrary, processed foods are void of enzymes and so they use your limited enzyme reserve to digest them. Thus, leaving you feeling sluggish and low on energy. Food that is alive will make you feel alive! Think freshness and life.
Simple: The more simple your meals the more easily your body will digest the food and provide you with immediate energy. For all you computer buffs, think of each meal you eat as a “file” to be downloaded into your system. Complicated and extra-large files take longer to download, tie up your system so that it is not free to be used to do other things and they can ultimately cause your computer to shut-down. Whether it is a triple-decker sandwich or a typical visit to your favorite Mexican restaurant, our meals today have become so complicated. To add insult to injury, we devour these meals in preposterous quantities. Our flagrant violation of the “simplicity” principle is all too often followed by heart-burn, lethargy and oftentimes complete shutdown after consuming them.
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My personal rule - My meals will be simple enough that within 30 minutes of any meal I should be able to go for a run.
Clean: Keep it clean! Undress that burger: take off the mustard, mayo, ketchup, relish, salt and pepper to discover how much you really like burgers! Or do you? We add so much to our food to make it more “palatable”. Undressing your food is a simple cure for overeating!
Whole: When food is processed it is broken down, some parts are removed and then reconstituted. BUT – the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. For example, take a fine Swiss-made watch, throw it on the floor and crush it to a 100 pieces. While all the pieces of the watch are still there, it is no longer a watch and no longer able to perform its function: to tell time. Processed foods may claim to offer you 100% of this and the “fullness” of that however, while the pieces may all be present, they are in a form that is unrecognized and unusable by your body. Thus, many times, processed foods do not offer you the claimed benefits. Choose to consume foods as close as possible to their whole form.
Give your body foods that it can use to build you up and keep you going by giving you strength and energy. Your body knows exactly what to do with food that is natural, alive, simple, clean and whole.
Remember Adam and Eve? When you are choosing your next meal ask yourself if this is a real food. Then ask yourself if your choice is the simplest, cleanest, least processed way to download this food into your system.
If you can live and eat by these 5 principles you will not need to worry about the next fad diet or exercising yourself to death to burn off your last meal! Remember that your body is the most resilient machine ever created. As a general rule, if you feed it right most of the time, your body will be better capable of dealing with the exceptional times when you choose the not-so-healthy “foods” ;-) You will start looking great and feeling terrific!
Keep it simple. Live well!
Past Newsletters:
July 24 - Learn to Slow Down
July 31 - Get Motivated
August 7 - Fire up your Metabolism!
August 21 - Code Red - Stress Alert
September 4 - 6 Real Ways to De-stress!
September 18 - All Carbs Are Not Created Equal!
October 2, 2006 – Is Your Protein Powerful Or Pitiful? October 16, 2006 – Fat: Fact or Fiction? |
