You Are What You

Dear Tori,

If there was ONE THING that you could do to keep and improve your physical, mental and emotional health, it’s cutting out fast food and eating more food cooked at home. Not only is Fast Food terrible for you, it’s also MORE EXPENSIVE then buying and cooking your own food. As a young person with an entire life ahead of her, learning to cook is one of the most important things you can do to help keep yourself healthy, save on expenses and learn to become independent and ready to take on the world.

It’s also A LOT easier then people think!

Just a few days ago, I made a roast with steamed carrots, string beans and corn on the cobb that fed the 6 people I had over to my house for the evening, with leftovers to spare.. at a total cost of about $15!! That beats fast food hands down and all of it is 100 times healthier then anything you can get at fast food.

Consider taking cooking classes or experimenting from Youtube videos. It’s something that will always come in handy and will allow you to have much much more options for the type of foods (healthier) you put in your body to keep it healthy and the fat off. I wish I had learned this when I was in high school before I went out into the world.

Now, while we are talking about food..

I’m sure by now you have heard the saying, "You are what you eat". Sometimes we take these sayings for granted and not really heed the message it’s delivering. Well, while a lot of people say this just because they heard it from someone else and it sounds cool, this is a time when it is absolutely true and should not be ignored.

While our body seems to "just work" no matter what we put into it, that’s not really the case. For example, with a car, if you put in bad gas or bad oil in it, the car will not function how it’s designed to. Sure, it may sputter down the road and get you to where you need to get, but smoke is spewing from the tail pipe, it’s sluggish and doesn’t run as fast as it should and makes a great deal of terrible noises.. and eventually will stop working long before it’s supposed to. Now, if you where driving the car and it was the only car you had ever driven, you may not realize that it’s not handling, responding, feeling or working as well as it should be. This is the same for your body. What you eat to fuel your body has everything to do with how your body operates and feels. This is because it’s true that the food we eat is the material we give our bodies to use to rebuild and regenerate it’s cells, which is what our bodies really are, when it comes right down to it. So, if you give your body crap to use to regenerate itself, guess what it makes.. Makes sense so far, right?

So, the million dollar question is, "What is good food for my body and what should I avoid?".

Here’s a few easy to remember rules:

What’s made by nature is the best.
What’s made by or changed by man is the worst.

An example of both are:

Made by nature - Vegetables, fruits, meats in their natural states. Of course, you want to COOK the meat, but the trick to rememebr here is not to cook it TOO MUCH! Medium rare is about as much as you want to cook meat before it becomes harder for your stomach to digest and process into nutrients. I would also include diary in this, if you can eat it.. I know you have had problems in the past with intolerance to dairy. The reason these are good is because our bodies evolved through eating these things. Way back even to when we were apes and before, our ancestors ate vegetables and fruits they pickup off bushes and trees.. later as we developed into more of what our bodies are now, we continued to eat the same things and also meats from game they killed. So our body’s processes for breaking down foods into elements it can use for nutrition were developed specifically for these foods in the natural state they are in. NOT as a hamburger.. have you heard of someone finding in the deep jungle of the amazon a hamburger tree lately?

Or what about the car example.. if a car was made to use gas to run.. would you put in something else? How well would you expect it to run if you did? Same thing with our body. This just doesn’t mean you should eat orange pop tarts because it has "orange" in it. It means you should eat an actual orange because your body knows exactly how to digest a whole orange into the proper nutrients exactly how your body needs them, but our body really has no freakin clue to how process a pop tart.

So, it’s better to eat an orange than it is to eat an orange pop tart.

It’s funny how we, as people, tend to sometimes forget that we are creatures of nature as well. So, it makes sense that we would eat what is made by nature.

You can also experiment and see for yourself how you feel after you eat certain foods. Notice, after eating, how you feel. Does you stomach feel bloated and full of gas? That's a sign that your stomach is having a harder time digesting what's in it properly. After a while, you'll start training yourself to be more sensitive to how you feel after eating and you can start guiding yourself to foods that make you feel energized. You should never feel tired after eating.

So, the more natural the food, the better for your body. Got it?