A Taste for Health
Junk Food Junkie to Healthy Food Aficionado
Did you know? If you put junk food in a 100-calorie pack, it’s still junk food! If you’re living on bad fats, bad sugars, and bad carbs, your health will continue to deteriorate until you are one of those sick, crotchety old people you can’t stand to be around…if you don’t die first.
You CAN make the changes in your diet that will slow down or even stop that deterioration, improve your health and well-being, and make you a much happier person. You can grow to be a loved and respected elder in your family and community, with people clamoring to spend quality time in your presence!
Mary Sahs, ND can help you:
- Reduce your dependence on chemical-laden, health-destroying foods and discover the joy of the fresh flavors of real food.
- Make a step-by-step transformation to a healthier relationship with food.
- Save time and money on meals while improving your physical and mental health.
- Discover the damage junk food causes in the human body.
- Release yourself from old food dislikes and learn to truly enjoy healthy foods.
- Learn to plan ahead for healthy dining.
- Navigate the grocery aisles with confidence.
- Cook the food you’ll love to eat.
- Get hands-on cooking lessons in your own kitchen.
- Review and reorganize your kitchen with an eye toward health.
- Find ways to make healthy substitutions that work.
- Use herbs and spices to add flavor and therapeutic benefits.
Do you admit you’re a junk food junkie? Have you thought your health might improve if you stopped eating so much fat, sugar, and chemical additives? Has your doctor told you to lose weight, but neglected to support you in the effort? Do you wake up each morning full of energy and enthusiasm? Do you hop out of bed and saunter jauntily to the bathroom to start your day? Or do you have to check first to see if you ache too much to rush into sitting up?
Our mission here at A Taste for Health is to help people get and stay healthy by changing their diet from dependence on junk foods to true enjoyment of healthy, nourishing real foods that promote health, well-being, and weight management.
Over the years I’ve studied to become a naturopath and continuing today, I have noticed ever-increasing media attention on the poor diet of the American people, and the resultant increase in every kind of disease and affliction. From Type 2 Diabetes to ADHD, heart disease to cancer, joint degeneration to digestive problems, mood disorders to erectile dysfunction, humans seem to be suffering more preventable illnesses than ever. This may, however, be an illusion created by the number of television commercials devoted to providing billions of dollars worth of drugs designed to mask the symptoms of these illnesses enough so that we don’t actually have to cure them, but I don’t think so.
It’s really not “news” that eating a healthier diet makes you a healthier person, and that eating junk food leaves you weak and malnourished with no ammunition for your immune system to work with.
Naturopaths generally agree that about 80% of illness comes directly from what’s going through your digestive system, and more to the point, what’s not going through your digestive system. But, if it’s trying to get through your digestive system, successfully or not, it’s because you put it in your mouth! What happens after that, determines the state of your health. If you feed yourself junk food, refined sugars and flours, trans-fats, and other manufactured “foods” and food additives, your body simply doesn’t know how to process those, and it’s either deposited as fat, expelled, or worse yet, circulated throughout your body obstructing the normal functioning of your cells.
Is being a healthy person really that simple? You only have to change what you eat? Well, not quite. What we eat determines most of our state of health, but the rest is determined by breathing fresh, clean air, drinking fresh, clean water, moving our bodies to maximize our strength, flexibility, and endurance, resting when necessary and sleeping soundly at night, and spending some time basking in real sunshine. And much of our mental health is determined by our relationship to the rest of the world.
The best first step toward a healthy old age is to commit to giving our body what it needs in order to thrive. That would include high-quality, nutrient-dense foods such as low-fat proteins, fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds.