Your health transformation starts in the kitchen

Staying healthy or re-gaining your health is certainly a complex, multi-dimensional process.

“One size doesn’t fit all and one change doesn’t solve it all”.

This, however, shouldn’t keep you stuck in ill health or in old habits that only lead to the same results.

“The key to success is getting started”.

Today, I suggest you get started from your kitchen. Your health (and body) transformation starts in the kitchen.

Do you know why?

Because you eat more often than you take medicine or supplements.

Because you are what you eat, digest and absorb. I think food and by extent, the kitchen is the place to start.

Challenge yourself this month to clean up your kitchen.

• REMOVE from your refrigerator, freezer and cabinets all processed foods. {You can make this your month’s goal.}
• REMOVE what’s not serving you and what’s not helping you reach your goals.

“The first step in health transformation is to get rid of what doesn’t serve you”.

If it is not helping you get better, then it only sabotages your healing efforts. Only after you clean up do you bring in the good things.

This works for all areas of your life. You want to get rid of all the bad stuff, so you can make space for everything new and good.

You do not want to have food in your kitchen that “calls your name” and you then have to use your willpower not to eat it. Willpower is an extremely limited force.

My mantra is “Out of sight, out of mind”. If it is not there, you won’t eat it. Let’s say, it makes it easier. You want to have a kitchen that supports your health goals.

Do a total revision and clean up of your entire kitchen.

Today, I am giving you 4 criteria to use when you start the kitchen cleanup. Each week you can set up a goal for each part of your kitchen, so that at the end of the month, your kitchen is rid off all the processed foods.

For example, you can say “This week I am going to go through my cabinets and get rid of snacks that are not supporting my health/weight goal”.

Use the following to help you decide what stays and what goes.

Sugar.

• You want to read the food labels and the ingredients while looking for high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and artificial sweeteners. Keep in mind that sugar comes under many, many names (in fact there are around 61 different names for added sugar in processed foods today). I am not going to go into that right now, but it’s up to you to decide how deep you want to make this cleaning.
• You can go through with a fine comb and take out added sugar in all its forms (e.g brown rice syrup, barley malt, maltose, etc.- those are names for sugar), or you can start by just avoiding cane, beet sugar and HFCS.

Oils.

• The types of fat used in the packaged foods is very important when it comes to your health. Is it vegetable oils like canola, soybean, corn? Those are your inflammatory oils, so if you want to heal your body and you want to control inflammation, I suggest you remove vegetable oils from your diet.
• The other thing you want to look at is the hydrogenated oils. Not only are those vegetable oils (high omega-6 fats), but when hydrogenated, they turn into trans fats which are Metabolic toxins. The labeling law doesn’t require companies to list them, if less than 0.5/serving. However, most packages have more than one serving, so you will end up eating trans fats without even knowing.

(E.g you buy potato chips and per serving they contain 0.4 g of trans fats, hence they are not listed on the label, however, you eat the entire bag, which has 20 servings, so you will consume 8 g of trans fats, while on the label it will show trans fats 0 g.) The way to prevent this is to read the ingredient list and avoid all foods that list hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats.

Artificial coloring, flavors, food preservatives, and words that you can not read or pronounce.

• When you see a word on the ingredients list that you do not recognize as a real food, or you have to have a biochemistry degree to read it, that is another criteria for exclusion and taking it out of your kitchen.

Canned products.

• I highly encourage you to buy food in cans that are BPA free. It is a toxin that the body has a hard time detoxifying. It accumulates in your system and acts an endocrine disruptor. It hinders healing.

Do not overwhelm yourself. Make your goals measurable. In order to get it done you have to plan. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Step 1.

• Set 1 goal per week. {Hint: break it into sections: pantry, cabinets, refrigerator, freezer. That’s roughly 1 month.}

Step 2.

• Make a public declaration: “today I am going to allocate 15 minutes to cleaning out my kitchen”.

Step 3.

• Put it in your calendar and make it a priority. Showing up for your healing work will reduce the number of doctor’s visits you will have in your agenda and it will free up more time for fun activities with your family and friends.

Those are just few tips I have for you to help you get stared with a kitchen makeover, so eat more whole foods and you heal from the inside out.

Where can you go from here? What should you be doing next.

• Download the free resource guide below, go get some real food from your local farmer’s market and make food your medicine.