Diet has the word 'Die' in it.

December 21, 2019 / Ashley Romanchuk

The phenomenon of the way society has become so obsessed with what they eat and yet we live in the very same society that is so unhealthy! It’s crazy to me. People are obsessed and it’s the obsessiveness that is half of the battle! Your worry about your weight can cause you to gain weight, or hold on to your weight. Have you ever heard the saying: Where the mind goes, energy flows?

Yes this is totally on the spectrum of Mind-Body Medicine and you bet I believe in it. Thoroughly.

What is going on in your mind is half of the toxicity behind food, the feelings you have, the thoughts you think. These are a big deal. Did you know that your Nervous System (capitalized because it is such a big deal) does not decipher between the reality of a thought and if something actually happened in reality? All it does is get the message and responds.

This happens with the way you think of yourself, if you are healthy. If you look in the mirror and think your fat. If you eat a food and feel guilty about it. Your Nervous System takes it all in and responds.

So when anyone who comes and talks to me about their diet, I first direct them just like I am directing you here... After I tell them that Diet has the word ‘die’ in it. And it’s no way to be.

For the sake of this, I am going to change the word “Diet” to ‘Healthy Food Plan for the sake of moving away from this word I have grown to despise, let alone for our Nervous System not to hear the word ‘die’ when we are talking about food. I can’t stand that I see young girls thinking they are fat and worried about their ‘diet’ in our society. I see 8 year old little girls thinking they are fat and can’t eat something because of their ‘diet’. What North America has done to women (and men) around body ideals and food is just totally sick behaviour, and everyone suffers because of it.

What I firstly coach is getting away from this whole mindset.

How I healed myself from this is I firstly stopped buying those ridiculously stupid magazines in the checkout isle. Not only are they full of garbage and pollution in so many ways, they’ll even cost you an extra 5$. I stopped reading up in the ‘health’ magazines about this, that and the other and I just moved away from all the propaganda around food and body image. I stopped hanging out with women and men that I realized I wasn’t healthy around and these were individuals that were simply less healthy than me. I found that I was simply less healthy by being around them, Especially the women that were clearly obsessed with themselves: the ones that were always talking about weight, mentioning other women’s bodies, complaining about their own, obsessed with calories - I had to protect myself from these kinds of people. You can be healthy in your own mind and very easily with hanging out with someone like this, start thinking about how many calories was in that and yada, yada, yada. If you want to get healthy, you must protect yourself first. Move away from items, people and places that are not the best for you. It’s just that simple.

Beyond this, here is my education on the matter and after reading this, if you wish for more help, make an appointment as it is truly very individualistic and lots of people also need some proper counselling and coaching alongside their years of poor eating habits, eating choices and terrible mental chatter.

A comprehensive Healthy Food Plan is truly individualistic, we are all different and that is a truth. I do believe that ethnicity affects what you should eat, you have thousands of years of biocellular memory data. I do also believe your blood type is a general indicator of what foods are better for you than others but I believe in these things with a loose frame. I have learned that anything too rigid is just as unhealthy and yet rigidity and discipline is also required. Everything in life is a fine balance and real health is about always maintaining this balance. I definitely follow some very basic nutritional knowledge however I do not and will not go to the fads. No way. If you really want my personal opinion on all those “diets” - I think most of them are totally out of balance, are not for longevity and will make you sick. That is my opinion: I think they are toxic behaviour.

To me, all they really do is create a distorted reality that eventually results in mismanagement and subtle anxiety around health, food, nutrition and weight management. Diets (the way most North American people think about them) are unstable: once the trend is gone, it will be over and forgotten about.

I really believe if you LISTEN to yourself, your ancient wisdom within, without all the garbage mind-chatter and worrisome warped ways you wouldn’t have a weight problem in the first place and this is my primary goal in teaching you how to go about this. How to be kind to yourself and how to truly create health so that it is a life time situation and not a trendy phenomena that will be history within a few months (with most likely an unhealthy rebound in the cycle of your body, your health and your self-esteem.)

So, back to it all:

A comprehensive Health Food Plan is changeable upon each person, each situation and throughout different days, months and times in life. The best generality I have come up with to teach my main recommendations to everyone is this:

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Beauty and inner and outer health comes from choosing healthy, clean and full-of-life foods! We all learned in grade-school how energy moves up from the food chain and how the food we eat gives us the life energy that originally comes from the sun. When you choose healthy beautiful (organic) foods, the sun will start shining through you! You will radiate, there is no doubt in my mind. Choose fresh fruits and vegetables, eat healthy proteins and if you eat meat, be conscious of where your meat is coming from. Antibiotics in meat mean antibiotics in you. Animals that lived a horrible life were probably severally depressed. How do you think that might make you feel? How about the animals that were killed not in a good way? That means they have a lot of stress hormones and chemicals full of fear that were travelling into their tissues…do you not think you would incorporate that into yourself too? This is very old wisdom, I just understand it well and I wish you would understand this too.
CONNECT WITH YOUR FOOD
This is almost unheard of today but your food does come from somewhere, obviously…and it does contain the nutrients and energy from that place. Take a minute to look at your plate with wander, say a thank you, think of where your food came from to be on your plate. Sit down to eat and just be with your food, Do not be doing a bunch of different things at once, or talking too much to someone else. Pay attention to your food! This does several things. Firstly, it slows you down, allows your body to change over into the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS) also called ‘rest and digest’ and allows your body to start secreting gastric juices. Smell your food, look at it. This is called the ‘Cephalic Phase of Digestion’ and is a very important phase that most of North America misses out on these days. Why is everyone so quick all the time? It’s terrible. At the same time you are doing this, you are becoming very present. This does a wonders for both your digestive system, your nervous system and the health of your brain. Thirdly, in doing this, you might awaken a true sense of gratitude in yourself, an awe, an amazement of how lucky you are , every day. This also does wanders because what it does over time is it will literally make you a more grateful and happy person. Truly. Finally, this allows you to really sit for a minute and in connecting to your food, lets you connect more with yourself. What on your plate do you really want to eat? Are you actually not interested in some food you put on there? Have you noticed perhaps that some of those foods don’t benefit you? Are all those ‘foods’ really food? Are they nutritious and beneficial? Sitting and connecting to your food and doing this every day will do wanders for you. It will take you much farther than fad diets. Digestion by the way, only happens when we are in the PSNS (the ‘rest and digest’ part of the Central Nervous System). When you get your digestion working properly, your entire being changes and eating becomes an amazingly wonderful experience that brings you genuine happiness! A properly functioning digestive systems means that you have harvested a true hunger every time you eat: you do not eat just to eat, you eat because you are hungry and excited to eat the nourishing food, and you have learned to eat the best foods for yourself and created healthy dynamics with food. Sitting down to eat and the taste of food actually can be one of the greatest joys of this world and it should be! It is a tragedy that so many people are so far away from this state. Food, when health is abundant, illicits enormous happiness and fulfillment, I can not underline that statement enough; this is known as The Mind-Gut Connection. A healthy connection with food brings you a very healthy state of mind, alongside a genuine happy demeanour.
ASK YOURSELF: IS THIS “FOOD” FOOD?
How do you define food? Do you need some more eduction on the subject? That is totally possible and I am happy to be of support to that. But let’s start with this. How do you define food? Have you even ever thought about it?
My opinion for the best way is whole foods, found from the natural produce isle in the store is food. Healthy organic fruits and vegetables, and meats (for some) is food.
The way I would define it is anything that comes in a box, a package or a can -to me- is no longer food. It’s too processed. To me, I think of that as chemicals.
If you can’t understand the ingredients, I would not be eating it. Preservatives are chemicals so if you are eating preservatives in “foods” you are ingesting these things..Do you really think your living cells want to be ‘preserved’ too? I highly doubt it. Another great thought is if you can’t really understand what it is, let’s give the wild example of a ‘sour soother’, does that make it a good idea to eat? I wouldn’t be eating it. That’s for sure.
CHOOSE ORGANIC
I was coached on this within my first week of sitting in school for Naturopathic Medicine: Eat Organic. If you want to be healthier start by minimizing the chemicals you are exposing your body to and if you haven’t noticed the pictures of the way people dress to spray the non-organic foods with chemicals then please go ahead and look into it. There’s something very wrong with chemicals being sprayed on the food people are consuming. I can guarantee you can somehow allocate your money to eating more organic. Yes, it’s definitely more expensive but you have way better quality and please believe me when I say that when you clear out the toxins from the food you have been eating and go organic, including meats, you will definitely be able to taste the toxins in non-organic foods on the rare chances you eat them. For sure.
On this same note of Organic, choose non-genetically modified foods which are now being labelled and marketed as ‘bio-fortified’. Organic typically means that the food is non-GMO anyways but keep this in your mind too.
I have in the past few years started growing my own food in the summer and planting only Heirloom Seeds. This food is more amazing than any food I have found anywhere so if you get to the place where you can master all this and want to go farther, start buying Heirloom foods that have been growing organically- from good, awakened farmers. They are rare. Most likely you will have to start to learn to grow your own food but oh my goodness is it ever the most rewarding thing I have ever done. There is so much magic in the Garden! It truly takes a few seasons and some genuine work and investment to get it going but I can not tell you how rewarding it is to start to grow food and how much better Organically grown Heirloom Fruits and Vegetables are! I do not know what people that don’t garden do all Summer!
Finally, if you want to go further: learn the traditional foods of your area. Find the old apple trees, they have good apples (and they are not sprayed). Pick the wild berries and vegetables that are natural to the area you are living. This area of knowledge is kept quite secretive. I have learned a lot of the natural ways of harvesting food and medicines from spending most of my time with the First Nations. This is the real, real heirloom and organic diet and you bet it is healthy.
EAT PROTEIN WITH MOST MEALS
This helps stabilize blood sugar and creates a longer sensation of satiety. Protein is definitely not only in the form of animal protein (meats, eggs, dairy), other forms are chickpeas and other lentils, nuts and seeds, and food combining is especially important if you are vegetarian or vegan.
EAT REAL SUGAR
I mean it. If you want something sweet, choose fruit but if you want something sweeter, like you want to really indulge and that is just what your body is craving, I definitely urge you to follow it but I urge it this way: choose a pop with real cane sugar in it. Do not eat sugar substitutes. Aspartame, Sweet & Low and all the countless other sweetners are chemicals. I don’t even like Stevia, which is apparently a natural compound, I don’t buy it. If your body is craving sugar, it wants calories fast and guess what: your body is the smartest of all of us. It’s telling you exactly what it needs and when you choose a sugar substitute. you really mess with your body. You basically confuse your body by telling your body, via your taste, that you have consumed something with high calories because sugar-substitutes are especially sweet. This gustatory (taste) message then sends a message to your brain that you just consumed sugar (but not really because your body is highly intelligent and knows it just consumed a chemical) but the taste is saying ‘hey, pump out the insulin because you have some simple carbohydrates coming into your blood stream soon’ so the body revs up and insulin starts to release, but then there is no caloric input. So your body releases all this insulin in preparation for the sugar and there’s nothing there. This wrecks havoc on your body, which eventually turns your nervous system onto stress mode and the cravings come back full force. Just believe me when I say: Listen to what your body is telling you and simplify it with grounded sense: if you want sugar, eat some real sugar. The same goes for fat. My job is to coach you into the healthy ways to listen to this, to make healthy choices and then to keep following the healthier path to higher and better levels of choice. It is in some ways about retraining your body, mind and your nervous system alongside your taste buds and habitual patterns but mostly it is about coaching how to loose all the garbage knowledge this sick society has taught you about food and how to eat. Everything else is actually fairly simple after the retraining of what is actually healthy with respect to food and nutrition (and listening to your body) as your body is truly very intelligent. Gaining control over your digestive tract and truly creating health in the forms of food and food choices is a great endeavour which can definitely be done with the right knowledge and coaching.
Choose REAL sugar: this includes fruits, especially berries, alongside, berry sugar, cane sugar, honey, molasses.
DRINK WATER
Water is needed for health, plain and simple. A general rule for a women is 1.5 L of water every day, minimum. 2 L for a man. That’s minimum, I say increase those by at least half a litre and you’d probably do better if you increased it by a litre if you have spent most of your life dehydrated. Add some fresh organic lemon if you have a tough time drinking water. If you drink tap water, leave it out in a pitcher for 24 hours before drinking it so that the chlorine evaporates. I personally drink spring water and I have made a mission to go to a spring and fill glass jars once a week since I was a child. I dislike tap water personally. Have you heard of Dr. Imoto’s work around the memory of water? It’s fascinating if you have not. I believe it is true! Send your water a beautiful message as you drink it and watch your cellular levels transform.
Did you know water is the main solvent of every chemical process in the body? That water is needed for digestion, and for the proper absorption of nutrients? When you are dehydrated, your body is suffering in many ways!
Did you know that when the body is dehydrated it also often sends out the messages that it is hungry? Being dehydrated can actually be a culprit behind weight problems, alongside many other things, including fatigue, poor digestion and via a long a convoluted understanding of pathophysiology, also anxiety and depression.
Another layer to this, that you may progress to is to minimize juice, pop, coffee and alcohol. Just drink good healthy water, ideally spring water but at least leave the water out so the chemicals the city put into the tap water can evaporate. It is crazy how aware of everything we have to be these days to have good health.
INCLUDE FATTY FISH OR SUPPLEMENT WITH HIGH-GRADE OMEGA 3’S:
Fatty fish are considered: salmon (yep, try to eat the skin) Mackaral, Herring, lake Trout, Tuna, Sardines and/or a high end Omega 3 supplement should cost you about $30 a month. I do not love fish so I do both. I eat salmon 2-3 times a month and take my Fish Oils every morning.
This is probably the most important piece of advice I learned in Naturopathic Medical School.
I was already healthy when I started to attend it but holy, when I started to take my Omega 3’s everyday, my health peaked. I have never looked back. I take 2-4 capsules of Omega 3’s every single day and I have done this since 2009.
Omega 3 Fatty Acids are also found in walnuts, marine phytoplankton, hemp and flax. High quality Omega 3’s are required for our body to not be in an inflammatory state which means less oxidative stress which means a slowing down of the aging process. Beyond this, Omega 3’s are required for a healthy brain, a healthy cardiovascular system and healthy hormones. They will do wanders for your skin, your heart, your liver. These minimize the risks of thromboembolic states (stroke) while also support brain health including minimizing depression and anxieties. They support your digestion, your sleep and your well being. I don’t believe in taking many supplements but I definitely believe in taking my Omega 3’s, every day!
WASH YOUR HANDS, YOUR FOOD AND YOUR PREP AREA:
I have a habit that I wash my hands every time I come home, even if I only went to a yoga class. I use natural soaps in my home. Perhaps it’s a bit different being a Doctor but I think it’s just a really good habit everyone should form. I definitely wash my hands before meal prep, even if I had been at home, even if I had just washed them ten minutes earlier, I always wash my hands before meal prep.
I rinse my vegetables and my fruits, and if I cook meat, I rinse the meat too, just with plain water.
I believe in using bleach in the kitchen and the bathroom, once a week.
I can’t tell you how many people I have counselled that were healthy people seemingly and yet they were not well and couldn’t figure it out. They had gone to Doctor after Doctor and when I came into their kitchens and saw the state of their DISH RAGS, I was aghast. I suppose it is just something that not everybody thinks about and it’s an important lesson: you can buy healthy organic food and eat very well but still be sick from the state of kitchen, home or in many cases, your dish rags. Unhealthy and improperly cleaned kitchens and rags can, believe it or not, make your digestive system sick. If you have old dish rags, toss them out, get new ones and start fresh with the following advice:
Change your kitchen rag daily but make sure that it dries out properly while it waits for the laundry. Make a laundry pile ONLY for dish rag and towels and at the end of the week, soak them all in a little bit of bleach water and wash them alone. Do not wash them with other clothes -ever. The amount of bacteria on your mouth and from food means they are on those rags. Bleach goes into luke warm water only, you do not want it to be too hot or it will evaporate the bleach and that is useless. Put the bowl with the rags outside for 20 minutes so that you don’t have to breath in the bleach water. Put the rags into the washing machine by themselves. Kitchen towels and rags stay in the kitchen only, do not ever be using them in other places of the house. Clean your counter tops and sink out with bleach once a week and make sure your home is aired out with the doors and windows open while you do this. Make sure your sink and taps are cleaned properly every week. If you have a cat, I hope you clean your counters every day with a bit of bleach. If your cat uses a litter box, clean it out every day too. The level of cleanliness of that litter box is literally the level of cleanliness all over your house. It’s a big deal. I do not believe in any of those spray bleach products because you inhale that spray. The only chemical I use in my home is a little it of liquid chlorox bleach and I dilute it into water, wear gloves and minimize the extent of it in the house by making sure windows and doors are open. Airing out the space is key. The state of your kitchen sink tells me a lot about your health and literally decides the health of your digestive system. It is very important to pay attention.
EAT A SMALL SNACK BETWEEN BREAKFAST AND LUNCH AND BETWEEN LUNCH AND DINNER:
An apple with some nut butter at these times will do you wanders. Bananas are a good option. Oranges are easy. Almonds, Walnuts or Pistachios are also perfect and so easy to keep in all the places until you have formed better habits about eating. They fit in small bags into pockets, purses, drawers and somewhere near your driving wheel. Change it up, don’t get bored!
MAKE SURE YOU EAT HEALTHY FIBER, EVERY DAY:
It is old school knowledge and it is important for your digestive system and the health of your colon: Apples, Celery, Chickpeas, Nuts, Legumes, Beans. If you do well with wheat, always choose whole grains: rye bread with some nut butter is an amazing snack. Multigrain toast is also delicious (with real grass-fed organic butter -yum!). Adding some flaxseeds to your apple increases fiber intake, if you want to put it in high fat and unsweetened yoghurt - that sounds like a great idea to me! Bran muffins are another great idea if you do well with gluten, as is couscous, bulgur and barley. If you do not do well with gluten: quinoa, oats, buckwheat, brown Rice and amaranth are choices to support your fiber intake. Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, various forms of squash, yam and spinach are some high fiber vegetables. Even adding chia seeds to your (spring) water with some fresh squeezed (organic) lemon is an easy change to make that provides an abundance of health over time.
CHOOSE HEALTHY FATS!
Healthy fat is needed in the body. It keeps you full and satisfied, and is required for healthy hormones, healthy cells and a healthy nervous system. Fat actually combats obesity and allows proper digestion and metabolism to occur, alongside the proper absorption of vitamins and minerals. Add (organic is best) nuts to your diet: almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts. Add avocado! Eat Butter! Oh my god the benefits of butter. Butter makes the world go ‘round as far as I am concerned :) . Use Extra Virgin Olive Oil in your salad dressings. Cook with Grapeseed Oil, Sesame Oil or Coconut Oil.
EAT A WIDE VARIETY OF FOODS WITH LOTS OF BRIGHT COLOURS:
A healthy variety of good quality foods will give your body the nutrition, minerals and vitamins it needs for optimal functioning. Alongside this, the bright colours inherent in many fruits and vegetables are typically related to their antioxidant potential which means that they go and ‘scavenge’ the reactive oxidative species (ROS) in your body that are a biproduct of the simple fact of living. Reactive Oxidative Species and free radicals cause your body to age so eating bright fruits and vegetables helps slow the aging process alongside minimizing the inflammatory process. My favourite potatoes by the way are these dark purple “Russet” potatoes and they are the most beautiful potato I have ever seen. The dark pigment found in these potatoes, alongside blue berries, saskatoon berries, raspberries, black berries and black rice are called ‘anthocyanins’ and this is one of the most potent antioxidants which is highly beneficial to the capillaries and blood vessels, the brains and the health of the eyes. Another very potent antioxidant is Green Tea which has the constituent epigallocatechingalate (EGCG) is amongst one greatest ways to minimize the aging process. I highly recommend adding a cup of (organic) green tea to the diet in the early morning or early lunch time, even swapping it with your regular cup of coffee. Green Tea has a lot of hype for a reason. An amazingly worth while trick to remember: once your (organic) green tea bag is done seeping for you tea, blot it on your face which adds these antioxidants directly to the skin of your face and once done doing that, then also squeeze it into your hands and let it dry. I do this every day and my skin is very supple and soft and people think I am 10-15 years younger than I am! It is a fun way to notice the difference in your skin because then you will understand the power of these foods within your digestive tract too, which is very similar, just on the inside. :)
REMOVE “WHITE” (bleached) FOODS
Eat whole grains, brown or wild rice, colourful potatoes, quinoa, barley. Basically choose unmodified carbohydrates. We all need carbohydrates so I am not going to tell you to not eat them, just make healthy choices of how and which ones to eat. If you want to eat potato chips by the way, go ahead, I eat them all the time but buy the healthy brands as they do not contain MSG. They are definitely more expensive (the brand ‘Kettle Chips’ for example)… you will be able to tell which ones are the healthier brands as they are definitely more expensive and might be down the healthier isle of the food store. By the way, don’t consume MSG, it is basically the same composition as the street drug called PCP or Angel’s Dust and it is simply very bad for you but that’s a whole other article.
EAT FERMENTED FOODS REGULARLY
I eat a fermented food every day and I notice when I do not. Healthy options are kimchi, sauerkraut, miso, kombucha and properly fermented soy sauces. These are a good investment and as you become more comfortable with this lifestyle, these become easy foods to learn to ferment yourself. They are very important and all ancient cultures knew the importance of maintaining a healthy gut biome. Our bacterial flora are the fate of us. I do not state that lightly. Such fate that I will write an entire article of their importance and how the overuse of antibiotics has caused such a gravity in the state of many peoples gastrointestinal health and resultant mental-emotional and immunological health. Please see my article: Your Inner Biome: The Microbiota and Your Health.

Good Blessings on your journey. Helping support people through Healthy Food Plans and Healthy Life Choices is a total joy for me so please do not hesitate to ever ask for help or support or to ask any questions. There is no judgement here and I understand the process, truly.

In Health,

-Dr. Ashley Kristina

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