Start with the Basics

Did your New Year’s resolution include “eating healthier”?  But what does that really mean?  Does it mean giving up all of the foods you love?  Does it mean never enjoying eating again, because anything that’s good for you can’t possibly be tasty too?  I know for a long time I thought if it was healthy it pretty much had to taste like cardboard.  In my opinion, healthy eating has two components.  First, it’s made from real stuff.  Real food means things that our great-grandmothers would recognize. Very little that I buy is packaged.  I am looking around my kitchen as I write, and literally the only thing in a box is tea.  Yes, this means cooking, rather than just microwaving.  But most of my meals are simple and take less than half an hour to prepare. The second important component of healthy diet is that it makes me feel good, not just in the moment, but in the long term too.  There are a few things that everyone should avoid (like processed foods and empty calorie sugar) but each body is different.  It takes some trial and error to find out exactly what the right balance is for you.  OK, if I can’t base my diet on sugar and white flour,
what can I eat?! When I was a kid, we heard a lot about balanced meals.  A good meal had some protein, some carbs, some fat, and some fruit or vegetables.   I actually think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb.  You can adjust each element up and down as you need.  Here are a couple of other simple rules to try get a wide variety of nutrient dense foods that create happy healthy bodies and souls. 

Ideally, every meal should include:

• Something raw and/or lacto-fermented 
• Something green (kale, watercress, mixed greens)
• Something orange, red, blue or purple (berries, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, tomatoes)
• Plenty of fats from clean sources like egg yolks from pastured chickens, butter from grassfed cows, and lard from pastured pigs.

Every day should include:

• Bone broth or gelatin
  
• Coconut oil
  

I’ll go more into each of these in the future.  Remember to keep it simple, and let me know how it’s going.