Resolve to Eat Healthier
By Gordon Rosenberg
(in collaboration with Debby Rosenberg)
This is a resolution for anyone who wants to eat healthier and take permanent steps to improve their diet. I have changed my diet substantially over the past 30 years and want to share what I’ve learned. My wife and I are largely raw foodists, buy nearly all organic including dairy, eat a diet which combines super food smoothies, veggie juice blends, sprouts and wheat grass grown by us, salads, kefir, and home-prepared organic soups, and very little meat.
When you eat healthier and pay attention to what goes into your body, you will notice quick changes in your energy level and how you feel in general, and ultimately your overall health improves. So here’s the challenge for those who choose to accept it: “I resolve to eat healthier this year.”
There are many levels to healthy eating, some fairly easy to incorporate into a lifestyle and diet, and others which take a fair amount of research and planning. Whichever level you wish to attain, changing your food intake will require a dedicated commitment to yourself. This need for commitment and planning is likely why so many people in my part of the world at least are overweight, unhealthy, and generally surviving on an extremely low-quality diet. But I think you can do better than mere survival eating, so I’m providing a list of suggestions to get you started.
Start Where You Are
Researching any of the ideas on this list can help you immensely. I recommend you get started by choosing the things you think you can do first, then work up to the bigger steps. Let me say for those whose diet is based on meat, it really is possible to eat another way. There are many incredible choices of meatless diets today and lots of available information-offering plenty of necessary nutrition without negative side effects that can come from a dead-food diet. Vegetarians don’t have to survive on berries and nuts!
Yet vegetarian or raw food diets may be a far off dream for many. I recommend you begin where you are and make changes that seem possible for now. Then set out to learn about other options–there’s no one right way to follow this list.
Suggestions for Healthier Eating
- Explore more nutritious food options, such as organic vegetables, fruits, juicing, sprouting, kefir, cultured vegetables, healthy supplements and super food items, and lots of healthy water.
- Learn to cook and prepare healthy foods for yourself, reduce your dependence on fast food/restaurants and all convenience foods.
- Consider more raw food–raw food is live food with intact enzymes which are important for digestion, while cooked foods are enzymatically dead and usually much lower in vitamins, minerals, water and other important nutrients.
- Eliminate or at least substantially reduce your intake of such non-healthy items as sodas, doughnuts and pastries, chips, sugar/high fructose corn syrup/sweeteners, fried food, white flour items, and all gmo products.
- Be a more conscious consumer: It starts at the grocery store, don’t shop when you’re hungry, educate yourself, read labels and know what they’re saying, buy organic whenever possible, spend more time in the produce section and less in the convenience food aisles.
- Use more self-control at the eating table, eat slower, stop when you’re three-quarters full instead of stuffed, eat smaller amounts more often rather than large meals.
- If you eat meat and/or dairy, look for such things as organic, free range, no hormones or antibiotics, and certified humane raised and handled.
Basically, it’s important to learn to eat for nutrition rather than desire. Much of our food intake in the United States at least is for the wrong reasons, such as social occasions, to fulfill addictions and desires, or simply to stuff ourselves out of habit. Learn to give your body what it really needs and it will take you to a new world of healthy eating and nutrition. This is a great resolution for this or any year!
