5 Food Habits That Will Change Your Life

We are what we eat. Banal and trite as it sounds, these words couldn’t be truer. Not just what but when and where and with whom – every aspect of food plays a big role in our overall nourishment. But I also understand that making big shifts in what to eat is difficult, at least at first. So lets start with some baby steps that are easy to incorporate and will drastically change how you feel (and look) in a matter of weeks.

1. Go Organic
   After spraying, injecting, waxing our foods, its time to go back to our roots and consume food grown the way nature intended it – naturally and simply. If you poke around, there will be suppliers and farmers’ markets in your city and in your neighborhood. Ask people, search online – there’s a growing awareness about eating organic so you will find information about it.
2. Eat it Whole
   White flour, white sugar, cookies, white rice – while its great to develop refined tastes, its suicide to consume too many refined foods! Simply put, when foods are processed heavily, they lose their natural nutrients and are called refined foods. Unfortunately, too much of the refined stuff does more damage than harm. So small changes in your choice of ingredients, like  picking red or brown rice instead of white, whole wheat bread instead of the white kind, raw honey, agave nectar or jaggery instead of regular white sugar, will go a long way in keeping you healthy.
3. Eat more Alkaline Foods
   Our diets tend to lean dangerously towards acid-forming foods. Most of our daily health problems from poor digestion to exhaustion can be attributed to a diet that is not alkaline enough. The repercussions aren’t pretty, as I’ve pointed out in a previous post. The post also outlines which foods are more alkaline (fruits, most vegetables like apples, alfa alfa sprouts, almonds, cucumbers, dates. Its a long list of lip-smacking stuff). So check out the resources and even if you can’t stop the acid-forming foods immediately, just start by introducing more alkaline foods in your diet.
4. Eat on Time
   Regulate your meal time and see the benefits almost immediately. Your digestion will improve in just a few days and you’ll also find yourself with more energy. The process of digestion makes heavy demands on the body’s resources. The body programs itself to dispatch these resources to start working on the food that’s coming. Eating off schedule throws the body’s biorhythms off and it ends up needing more resources to do the same job. Also try to you eat dinner at least 3 hours prior to bed-time.
5. Eat Seasonal
   This is probably the most ignored aspect of our diet: eating in harmony with nature. Our body’s constitution and that of the external climate are interlinked and when we eat the foods that nature provides during a particular season, we drastically improve our health.