"The Plan"- Nutrition

Let's talk about beginning to live holistically.

I am learning about all of this right along with anyone who is reading my blog, so bare with me if I make a mistake, or misunderstand some aspect of this lifestyle. If you know something I don't, correct me! Believe me, it would be much appreciated.

Yesterday, I gave a bit of background about what holistic living meant to me based on all of the sources I was pulling from, such as Ann Marie, www.holistic-life-living.com, www.holisticwithhumor.com, and even the book I read last week, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne.

Here, I give you a background of healthy living and living holistically from my favorite site that I have found, www.healthy-holistic-living.com

"According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Interestingly enough, health is not simply defined as just the absence of disease. The actual definition of Healthy Living is the steps, actions and strategies one puts in place to achieve optimum health. Healthy Living is about taking responsibility and making smart health choices for today and for the future. Eating right, getting physically fit, emotional wellness, spiritual wellness and prevention are all apart of creating a healthy lifestyle. Since the entire YOU, meaning all aspects of one’s self, must work in harmony to achieve wellness, you need to put balanced energy into each aspect of yourself.

• The body or Physical You requires good nutrition, appropriate weight, beneficial exercise, adequate rest and proper stress management.

• The mind or Emotional You needs self-supportive attitudes, positive thoughts and viewpoints and a positive self-image. You also need to give and receive forgiveness, love and compassion; you need to laugh and experience happiness; you need joyful relationships with yourself and others.

• The Spiritual You requires inner calmness, openness to your creativity, and trust in your inner knowing. And for some it requires having a relationship with a higher power.

We all know when the Physical You is out of balance. Our body tells us right away. We feel fatigue or catch a cold or maybe become chronically ill. But how do we know when the Emotional You or Spiritual You are out of balance? "

That introduction led into the beginnings of a plan that I began to lay down for you yesterday. I answered questions regarding aspects of my life that needed improvement, as well as physical conditions and goals for my life. Using those tools, I will go on to create an entire plan for healthy living while I am in college. This plan will be like my guidebook and my final product for this senior project.

The site asked several questions to create a "Healthy Living Plan." Essentially, it gave a topic, and readers were asked to list out the ways in which they would go about following that particular aspect of the plan. Here are the results of my exercise:

Look for the positive in each situation:
I will think of the methods outlined in The Secret, and when a negative thought comes along, I will consciously change the energy I emit from negative to positive.

Be aware of my thoughts and feelings:
If I am feeling upset, I will examine my thoughts and consciously change the energy I put out. Feelings are a manifestation of your thoughts. In order to change how I feel, I must change how I think. Like attracts like; positive thoughts attract more positivity.

Eat a healthy diet:
I will avoid processed foods and go natural or raw whenever possible. I will not go to the cafeteria too much (which fits in with my meal plan nicely--I only have 12 cafeteria meals per week). I will drink tea and the type of coffee outlined in yesterday's post versus Starbucks or sugary drinks.

Value myself and my creativity:
I already do a pretty good job of those things.

Exercise regularly:
Enroll in group fitness at the gym on campus, because I have found that classes are the best way to stay active and motivated for me personally. Have fitness equipment in my dorm room for when I can't make it to the fitness center.

Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs:
I have too much to lose to even consider messing with those things once I go to school.

Stay open to new ideas:
Force myself to try new things (like salsa dancing or grill club for example), and don't constantly hang out with the same group of people. That is how you find yourself feeling trapped or stuck in a rut.

Get adequate rest:
The key for me will be not trying to do too much. I need to have a concrete plan and allow myself certain nights to go out, and the other nights, stay home and sleep or study. When the lines or rules I set down for myself get wishy-washy, I run into problems, so I need to stay strong and make a commitment to sleeping and me-time.

Express emotions appropriately:
Reflect before responding--whether the reflection time is 5 seconds or 5 days. Never allow thoughts to go directly from my heart to my mouth. My brain needs to process the information before I speak.

Make decisions based on whats best for me:
Get adequate alone time, because for me, being around other people really influences and clouds my views.

Accept change willingly:
Change is my specialty

Respect myself and others:
Make a list of my morals, beliefs, and how I want to be treated by other people so that it is concrete and unchangeable without considerable time to think about what I am doing. Then, apply that list to how I treat others as well.

Practice preventative health care:
Locate the doctors/therapists/nutritionists on the UC campus and get to see them regularly. They are a resource that is meant to be used by the students, and I need to take advantage of their availability.

Now that I have laid out how I plan to go about general aspects of living healthfully, let us get more specific. Today, we will talk about nutrition.

Living Holistically: Nutrition

One thing that has been a bit counter productive about this project is the fact that because I've been exercising so much, I've just kind of allowed myself to eat whatever because I've been really hungry and needed food quickly. Also, when I exercise I kind of adopt a mentality that "I'm burning this off so I can eat whatever" and that is not usually the case. Over the course of this project, I went from eating really healthfully to eating very processed food, candy, less vegetables, and way too much bread and ice cream. There is a noticeable difference in the way my body feels after I eat those things versus when I am conscious of my choices.

I need to start practicing correct eating habits in tandem with exercise to mimic what I should be doing in college.

Today, I would like to work on the idea of holistic nutrition, and making a plan that is right for me to use in college.

I have already suggested the whole notion of "eating raw," but in my case that won't really work very well because I cannot stand raw vegetables. There are really only three categories of things that can safely be eaten raw. These are veggies, fruits, and nuts/seeds. I won't do the vegetables, leaving me with fruits and nuts as my two raw food options. I am shooting for having at least 1 raw element in every meal. This means 4 raw elements total per day. It's not a huge amount, but it's at least a conscious effort to move in a direction of less processed food in favor of things that are natural and as close to straight from the earth as possible.

I also plan to add in a serving of cooked vegetables at lunch and dinner. I will avoid frozen whenever possible, but sometimes that isn't an option. Usually, when I eat with my family, we have vegetables at dinner. But when I eat by myself, it is easy to forget about the veggies because they are extra work to prepare, and let's face it, they don't taste quite as good as a cheeseburger.

Another area that is discussed in articles connected with the holistic living site is about grains. Now, on the one hand, cutting grains seems counter intuitive because the idea of this lifestyle is being well balanced. However, in order to feel whole in one area of your life, sometimes you need to sacrifice small amounts in other areas. Here is a little excerpt from an article on the site about how to eliminate belly fat specifically. It points to grains as the number one cause of stomach fat. I am a firm believer in everything in moderation, but when carbs go wild (as they have been in my recent diet) issues can arise.


"1). Cut or completely eliminate all grains from your diet.

I Know, shock, horror. How can I say such a thing. Easy. This is by far the single most effective method of losing body fat, reducing your waist, flattening your abs, improving digestion, improving well being and energy levels than any other method on this article. In fact if you only do one thing from this article to improve the appearance of your abs would be simply to reduce significantly or totally eliminate grains and white sugar from your diet. They both have similar negative affects on the health of your body and the aesthetics of your waist.

The exact details of the negative biological reactions that take place when you scoff down bread, rice, cake, pasta on a continual basis are to lengthy in explanation for this article. But I ask you to examine the list below of possible symptoms associated with eating grains on a regular basis and see if any apply to you. I believe, just like many health care professionals believe, that grains and sugar are the major contributing factor to most all metabolic conditions i.e diabetes, cancer and syndrome X.

List of grain consumption causing symptoms

1. Cancer

2. Syndrome X (pre-disposition to diabetes, stomach fat accumulation)

3. Acne

4. Weakened immune system

5. Poor digestion

6. Ab distention (paunch belly)

7. Diabetes

8. Depression

9. Lack of energy

10. Asmtha

11. Mood swings

12. Joint pain

13. Poor immune response

14. Increased body fat

15. Bacterial infections

16. Short term memory loss

17. Lowered IQ

I am aware of the government and a majority of health professionals position on this matter. The current food pyramid currently suggest eating 6-11 servings of grains a day. I’m not going to tell you who to listen to but merely ask you to consider the answer to three questions; 1) who is more likely to have your best intentions at heart. Someone who makes money off your being ill, or someone who makes money off you becoming healthier. 2) our grain consumption goes up as our health has declined. 3) and have you been habitually eating the same way for years and has anything changed?

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”~Albert Einstein"

Now, I am not about completely eliminating any food from my diet. That is restriction which is disordered in my own personal opinion. I have no control over what my mother makes for dinner. If there is bread involved, I have to eat it because that is how my house operates. But for other meals, when I am on my own to make decisions, I will consciously try to veer away from grains and instead opt for whole protein (what this article goes on to say is a much better and more filling choice.) Other suggestions to work along with grain elimination are increased sleep, de-stressing (by doing things like spending time with friends and family, meditating, reading, enjoying nature etc.), and exercising regularly. Basically, I can definitely improve on everything but the exerise, because I get plenty of that.

One thing that this site stresses is a healthy food list. This is a great reference for cooking, or simply helping make correct choices in a world of a million foods. The actual list on the site was not my favorite because it wasn't very broad and didn't really take availability into account. The site did however, offer a link to "The 100 Healthiest Foods" at http://www.dwlz.com/HealthyLife/healthy50.html. I LOVE this website. It is extremely broad and breaks down why each food is on the list and what it offers the body. This would be a great reference for me as I go through the cafeteria trying to make choices, or I have to grab a snack on the go.