Fantastic Points On How To Conquer Overeating

From time to time, we’re all guilty of overeating. Well, all of that food might have been yummy going down, but it’s something you’re going to eventually pay for, in more ways than one.

When you binge in this fashion it means that you will invariably not chew your food properly — and remember that it should be liquefied before swallowing — as large chunks of food will simply be difficult for your G.I. tract to cope with. It’s not recommended that anyone should eat like this, certainly not on a regular basis. But, we are human after all.

In the event that you splurge on a meal which is particularly heavy, toxic material should be eliminated as quickly as possible. A colon cleanse represents the fastest and easiest way to do this. To many of you, this may sound like too much, but after many years of looking at the incredible, positive impact that good nutrition has on your body as opposed to all those bad choices, I want you to consider your ultimate power to change these bad habits and to move towards holistic nutrition and a healthier way of living.

Fasting goes hand in hand with exercising regularly and eating the right food – food that has a high nutritional value and that is rich in antioxidants. When you consume foods that are rich in antioxidants, many of those cell damaging processes are slowed. If you don’t slow cellular damage, it can lead to premature aging and the spread of diseases and cancers.

Information regarding the connection between diet, health, and aging is nothing new. It bears repeating, however, especially for those that are overweight and all of us need to hear this message, over and again.

After looking at this for a long time, I am sure that the only way to ensure a healthy and long life is to eat the right kind of foods, pay attention to holistic nutrition guidelines and to cut out all those harmful foods that we typically ingest, daily. This doesn’t mean I want you to starve yourself, but you need to know that the quantity of food many of us are consuming is overloading our systems; and some of the food we’re eating is making us sick, and can even, eventually, kill us.

We have known for centuries about holistic nutrition and the need to adopt a good and healthy dietary lifestyle. However, life is very hectic these days and it’s easy to opt for fast food, to dine out often and forget what we are causing our bodies to ingest. To put it to you in a friendly way, always nourish your body with the right food types and take time to cleanse, heal and rest through the use of fasting procedures.

Fasting is certainly not a new way to care for the body, and I was fascinated to discover that even Socrates and Plato fasted to “attain mental and physical efficiency.”

The second century Greek philosopher and physiologist Galen agreed. Pythagoras, well known as a mathematician and philosopher, fasted for up to a month at a time. We are told that one of the original founders of medicine, Paracelsus, observed that “fasting is the greatest remedy.” And, Hippocrates, the original “Father of Medicine,” often prescribed fasting for his patients.

In fact, the Hippocrates Health Institute, which has been a leader in the field of natural and complementary health care since the mid – 1950s, endorses the practice of fasting one day each week. Don’t you agree that these are some impressive words of wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers over the ages?

Inspirational Pointers On Achieving Health Through An Attitude Of Change

Think for a moment about all the factors that affect your health and what is the first thing that comes to your mind? You might think it’s what you eat, but it’s not! Actually, your attitude is 50% responsible for your total health. Therefore, if you fix your attitude, you’re halfway there.

The equation for good health is as follows, according to the Hippocrates Health Institute:

Attitude – 50%: This is the most important component when seeking great health. Critical self-talk, stress and other negative distractions will impair our physical, mental and emotional functioning.

Food – 25%: You must take a holistic nutrition approach and select a balanced diet for optimal health. An unhealthy diet has both immediate and long-term consequences that range from unpleasant and inconvenient to serious and life-threatening.

Exercise – 25%: Exercise helps all of our body’s systems run more smoothly. It also delivers an emotional lift due to the release of endorphins. A sedentary lifestyle gradually takes away the ability to perform physical tasks, and also increases the risk of serious illness and disease.

You have to put unrealistic ideals behind you to establish a positive mental attitude. In life, we expect certain things of ourselves. Often, these expectations are unrealistic. How often have we referred to what the “perfect” person should be, in our image dominated world and determined that we are far from being this person, sadly?

Even though we know that perfection really isn’t achievable, on a deep subconscious level, we still expect ourselves to be perfect. Why is it that we find it so difficult to celebrate our strengths and accept our weaknesses? In place of this, we often get addicted to foods such as sugar and then endure a battle of our inner and outer beings, with harsh criticisms flying back and forth. We begin a downward spiral by berating ourselves for being overweight and for being unable to eat normally. There is hope, however. You can be at peace with who you are, adopt sensible holistic nutrition concepts into your life, overturn any addiction to sugar and balance your weight correctly.

To begin, accept yourself as you are, right now! Yes, even if you’re overweight, you have sugar cravings, and your diet isn’t exactly healthy. Do you know something? Yes, you are human and none of us are perfect. You need to do this before you can start your quest for a healthier body and mind, so feel compassionate and empathetic, right now.

When you’re able to fully accept the person you are today, then you will notice how the pressure that you have carried with you for so long will start to lift. Accept “you” for who you are and you will be able to bring on board some good habits that will enable you to become the healthier person that you know you can be.

Next, surrender to the passage of time! The next step on your journey is to develop patience. As much as we all want a quick fix to our problems, remember this: the solutions that require the most effort and time to apply will often yield the greatest rewards. These days, holistic nutrition can make so much of a difference in your life and with persistence, you can go on to achieve your greatest dreams.

Inspiring Suggestions On Ways To Change Unhealthy Eating Habits

If you think about it, as your habits took years to develop, you must allocate the same amount of time as you try and establish a new skill. The founder of the Preventative Medical Center of Marin, California, Dr. Elson Haas, establishes that you need “greater attentiveness and willingness to deal openly with emotions and other adversities, that may block your way to healing.”

Experts who may help you include a holistic nutrition specialist and a trained health professional and you should look for a support group or program that specializes in food addiction. They will help you to develop coping skills that are not based on food, essentially interventions that will stop your reliance on emotional eating and allow you to live a balanced, physically and emotionally healthy lifestyle. From a holistic nutrition perspective, it’s also helpful to look at what the food is actually giving you, which you might be able to get somewhere else.

Some people say that if you crave sugar, you are lacking something sweet in your life. Cravings often signal something that we really want, as part of our lives. When you eat the food you crave, what happens? If, for example, when you consume sugar, do you feel at peace, euphoric or warm? In what area of your life are these emotions missing? What could you be doing that would allow you to experience them without food?

Whether you are an emotional eater or a nail-biter, you’re not alone. We endure a range of unhealthy habits, some of which are relatively benign, but others threaten our well-being and health. The truth is that anytime that you are a slave to a habit; it is holding you back from your true potential and interfering with your success. But here’s the thing: You can choose to change them! Don’t let these bad habits overwhelm and ruin your life and opt to make new decisions right now, kicking your reliance on sugar, for example, and building yourself a better future.

You can develop life-enhancing habits that revolve around your desire for health, happiness, financial independence and success. So many people endure very unhealthy habits because they haven’t connected them with mental skills. It takes a lot of mental effort to replace an old habit with a new one, just as learning a new physical skill requires practice and repetition.

Before we take action, we always follows a thought, even though many of our thoughts are so ingrained within our subconscious mind that we take action intuitively. And that’s where the mental practice begins. When we can stop in the moment and become aware of what we are about to do, we can think about whether or not we want to do it. We can make a healthier choice.

As soon as you’re able to make a conscious observation that your old habits are holding you back and not helping you achieve your goals, you can select the new habits that you need to change things. And it doesn’t matter where you are in your life. Whether you are a college freshman or a retiree starting a new career is irrelevant. You’re never too old or too young to make the change to holistic nutrition and to improve the overall quality of your life.

Helpful Tips On Changing Your Life Through A Sensible Diet

In truth, we all know how important it is to change our diets, avoiding white flour, processed oils, dairy and sugar and to adopt a holistic nutrition standpoint. This list of products is very bad for us, causes disease and aging and it is amazing to see how people recover from chronic diseases by eliminating them. These elements promote inflammation and can really do a number on arteries and tissue throughout your body.

Make no mistake about it, sugar and flour are deadly and can ruin your life. In an average year, 160 pounds of sugar and 200 pounds of white flour find their way into our bodies and our children are exposed to them from an early age. They build up an addiction resulting in lifelong health problems and elevated blood sugar levels. With elevated blood sugar, free radicals swarm around our body, causing inflammation and starting disease. What we consider to be a “staple” diet is littered with these poisons — for example cakes, bread, breakfast cereals, candy, soft drinks, pasta — the list goes on.

Milk products are also hazardous to our health these days as modern cow herds are fed with tainted grain, altering the proportion of fatty acids contained. Imbalance is caused when Omega-3 fats are stripped out. One out of every two of us is actually allergic to dairy without even knowing it!

Our dietary position gets worse, as our intake of fats and oils contains excessive omega-6 fatty acids. Adverse reactions continue to take place within our bodies, triggering chronic inflammation. If we were to consume these elements in an equal way then we would be able to live in harmony as we once did, but unfortunately we ingest as much as 30 times as much Omega-6, as we do Omega-3.

If you notice depression, you can make a dietary change by improving the oil quality used. How about making your own salad dressing? Use extra virgin olive oil or flax seed oil. Heated oils such as soy, safflower and canola can all cause inflammation.

The problems go on — grain fed beef, farmed fish and poultry all have excessive Omega-6 contents. Altogether, these add up to a huge excess of inflammatory compounds. Due to this inflammation, disease is rampant and we have to be able to replace our poor choices with healthy oils and fats.

We have paid less and less attention to holistic nutrition over the last couple of generations and as a consequence we are setting ourselves up for serious issues going forward.

The nutrients we need – which we would receive in abundance from a holistic nutrition diet, are removed from processed foods — basically anything that comes in a box, can or a jar. In place, we add preservatives, artificial flavors and colors, or toxins, making our bodies work extremely hard to try and detoxify and causing a serious problem if we try and lose weight. There are even more elements added to foods to cause additional weight gain. You will find dangerous trans fats, neurotoxins such as aspartame and high fructose corn syrup in processed foods.

Chemicals proliferate in our food system as we try and maintain a more functional distribution and production system. It’s not very nice to think of all the insecticides, fungicides, larvacides and pesticides that find their way into our systems. Chemicals proliferate in our foods, which are high in calories, but low in nutrients. Little wonder that we feel lethargic, overweight and drained all the time.

A Variety Of Critical Pointers For Clarifying Your Normal Day

Isn’t today’s frantic pace of living incredible? How does a normal day work out for you? Are you working umpteen hours a day while also tending to the needs of yourself and your family? Don’t you agree that we work too hard? You know that we also play hard at the same time. It’s unfortunate that as we try and get the most out of our daily lives, we tend to overlook important elements, such as our health.

We enjoy life to the fullest, we eat rich foods, and we drink and smoke. We tend to overindulge, drive our bodies to the limit, and then wonder why we get sick. After we run our bodies down, we expect doctors to miraculously “fix” us—usually with medication. We have become a society addicted to pills and medications to make us happy, make us thin, and alleviate stress.

What happened to the concept of caring for ourselves and our bodies with holistic nutrition? The truth is that most of us have grown lazy when it comes to taking care of our bodies. Our diets are very poor, we avoid exercising like the plague and we don’t put much effort into preparing healthy diets and planning to lose weight. Does this sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

So that we can try and achieve the benefits of wellness and good health, holistic nutrition is very important to enable the reintroduction of balance. This will require a good deal of hard work! Everything that we eat will need to be considered and we will have to exercise on a regular basis. Doctors aren’t miracle workers—they never have been and never will be. And, frankly, as much as we might depend on them, there are some things they just can’t fix.

After a long time dedicated to poor diet and maintenance, your body is crying out for a change. It’s not surprising that you are feeling exhausted and for one reason or another always feel under the weather and tired. Now is the time to really think about detoxification as this will limit and neutralize toxins that have built up in your organs. Isn’t it incredible to think that your organs perform such a great job every day and your liver, colon, kidneys, skin, lungs and lymph nodes all do amazingly well, and somehow manage to keep you going!

It appears that our self-cleaning operation is starting to wear out, due to our self-inflicted efforts, and exposure to poor environmental conditions and a bad lifestyle.

Many experts agree that, from time to time we need to make adjustments and cannot rely on our amazing bodily functions to detoxify our systems by themselves. If you are unfortunate enough to suffer from a chronic immune deficiency disease, such as fatigue, cancer or diabetes, detoxification may be of particular help. Within our daily diets, saturated fats, animal protein, drugs like alcohol and caffeine and other chemicals are all too familiar. Our internal system was not designed to be able to accommodate all of this toxic matter. Even if you stick to a relatively healthy diet based around the concept of holistic nutrition, cleansing from time to time can really help to boost your immune system and deter those environmental toxins that can harbor viruses, parasites and bacteria.

Superb Points On Why You Should Choose A Vegetarian Lifestyle

If you understand the concept of holistic nutrition, you would listen as I encourage you to eat a diet based around vegetarian/live food choices. That means staying away from animal protein if at all possible. But, if you want to keep meat in your diet, try to do it in the healthiest way possible. For example, when it comes to eating beef, my strong recommendation is to look for “grass fed” or “organic” beef, only. It makes a world of difference to your body because beef that you purchase in the grocery stores, even corn-fed beef, is filled with antibiotics and growth hormones.

If you read the article “What About Grass Fed Beef?,” written by John Robbins, a top expert on the interrelation between health, diet and environment, you will see that almost all commercially available beef in the USA is “feedlot,” as this is a much more profitable way to approach the raising of cattle.

By feeding animals corn, growth hormones and protein supplements, they will gain weight a lot faster. This is why you will see most animals in feedlots, consuming grain rather than being allowed to eat grass while roaming in pastures, their usual approach. The animals must be fed antibiotics, simply because their digestive system is damaged and immune systems weakened as they eat this type of grain. It’s not a humane way to treat cattle and is just the tip of the iceberg on what these animals must physically endure by being kept in feed lots and being fed a corn diet.

Grass-fed beef is better for our systems than corn-fed beef because it is lower in artery-clogging saturated fats and provides more omega-3 fats. So, if you must eat beef, please keep it to a minimum and look for the label that says “organic” and “grass-fed.” This will ensure that even the grass that the animals graze on has not been treated with synthetic fertilizers or herbicides.

Let’s turn to chemical balance and what this entails. It’s called “pH.” To put it simply, the definition of pH is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen irons in the bloodstream. The lower your pH, the stronger the acid content, or acidity, of your body. The higher your pH, the stronger the alkaline content, or alkalinity, of your body. Normally, your pH balance would be around seven. So, testing your pH will give you a better idea whether your body is more acidic or alkaline. All you need to know is that “too alkaline or too acidic” will lead to health issues and problems and is bad for your body.

Turning to holistic nutrition, you should ensure that you use the 80/20 rule and maintain a bodily balance. At every meal, fill your plate with at least 80% alkaline forming foods like vegetables, and 20% acid forming foods like meats and white pasta. You can also look at it this way: 80% of your food should be in raw form, while 20% of it should be cooked.

If you like the idea of a holistic nutrition lifestyle, turn to the consumption of foods that are rich in minerals and vitamins — fruits, vegetables, tubers such as ginger root, sweet potatoes, parsnips and so on. Add to that baby greens and sprouts. You could also consider alfalfa, radishes, lentils, onions and mung beans. Finally, load up with plenty of salad greens, bok choy, mustard greens, spinach, collard greens and lettuces.

Fantastic Suggestions For Losing Weight Fast And Getting In Shape

First, start your morning with freshly squeezed lemon in warm water. Through a process of detoxification, this helps to clean the liver. Additionally, this cleanses the stomach, promotes a bowel movement and is active in the production of bile.

We think that the stomach is the major organ when it comes to the processing and breaking down of fats, but we are wrong, as the liver and gallbladder are far more important. You must consider the importance of these organs if you are trying to lose weight and not put too much effort into your program unless you are sure that they are clean and working correctly.

Unfortunately, society is to blame when it comes to a generation of unhealthy habits that we pick up from childhood. Those children who are overweight are stuck with those unfortunate habits throughout their life, but for generations now we have failed to notice that poor gallbladder and liver conditions are contributory to the problem.

It’s very sad to see an obese child and unless we intervene at an appropriate time, this problem will continue throughout his or her life. It’s inconceivable that we do not seek to teach these children the importance of a correct diet, daily exercise, an approach to holistic nutrition and how important it is to clean and detoxify the body regularly. If your liver and gallbladder are clogged or not functioning, then your healthy diet and regular exercise regime may not be enough. You must pay particular attention to what comes out of your body as well as what you put in there. It’s essential to understand that holistic nutrition is the answer to this ever-growing problem.

Every day, new diets seem to pop up as part of a growing industry within Western society. People regularly start and fail on these diets and cannot lose weight because they simply don’t understand the fundamentals of holistic nutrition. They would be surprised to find that they may have toxic buildup in the liver and gallbladder. Unless you understand how these organs work and how essential they are to regulate our weight, problems will remain.

I can explain:

The liver, the largest internal organ that we possess is connected to the small intestine. The liver produces a secretion which is known as bile, used to break down digestive fats into smaller portions so that they are absorbed by the small intestine, along with associated vitamins.

The liver has an important function in this respect and develops its bile from a combination of molecules such as cholesterol, bilirubin, phospholipids, bile acids and also electrolytes. In popular belief, the liver is there just to remove the alcoholic chemicals and other toxins from our systems.

Just as any other machine will start to fail if not maintained properly, the efficiency of our organs will diminish after years of damage. If they’re not able to break down fats efficiently anymore, weight gain will be automatic and we won’t be able to do anything about this.

Of even more importance, if stones start to accumulate they will make the damage worse.

The gallbladder is essentially a storage location. We find this organ just beneath the liver, in the upper part of the abdomen and it is shaped something like a kidney bean. The gallbladder is connected to the liver by the hepatic duct, allowing the gallbladder to store the produced bile.

Bile helps the lipase enzymes digest fats.

Digestive bile breaks down fats and toxins, allowing the intestines to move these materials through the tract in an ongoing process of elimination. The bile starts off what is known as a peristaltic action, with the end result being a bowel movement. Without this bile, therefore, toxins and other debris would falter within the intestines and start building up elsewhere, promoting weight gain and even constipation. Fat soluble vitamins, A and E, for example, are released by the bile, together with fatty acid.

Crucial Guidelines On The All To Real Dangers Of Sugar

There was a time, thousands of years in the past, when holistic nutrition was standard, with sugar only available from honey or fruits and no indication that human technology would one day seek to refine sugar from beets or sugar cane into a sweetener.

Unfortunately, our bodies were not built to process refined sugar—it is alien to our systems. The author of “Never Be Fat Again,” Raymond Francis, DSc, MSc, RNC, observes that “feeding refined sugar to a human body is similar to burning high-octane aircraft fuel in an automobile engine. Impressive amounts of energy, but after a while, you damage the engine.”

And that is exactly what has happened to us. We have “damaged our engines.” Diseases are much in evidence as we have accelerated our sugar consumption over the decades.

While our bodies are trying desperately to somehow process these useless refined sugars, they are forced to deplete important vitamins and minerals that would otherwise be keeping us balanced, healthy and functioning properly. This disruption of the body’s balanced state (called homeostasis) causes all sorts of serious, life-threatening, preventable conditions such as cancer, heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

When our body is trying to deal with this sugar, it re-directs some vitamins that would ordinarily help us to digest food. Without those minerals, we don’t digest our food properly, which means we don’t get the nutrients from any healthy food we ARE eating. Food allergies start to spring up as a consequence of improper digestion. Food allergies cause serious physical, emotional and cognitive problems, as well as decreased immunity. In truth, digestion is just one of the badly affected bodily functions that are impacted when we consume sugar. And just look at all of the problems that causes!

Consumption of sugar leads to a process known as reactive hypoglycemia, triggering the dramatic peaks and troughs in blood sugar levels, which in turn creates a new cycle of craving for more sweets. Almost unbelievably, sugar intake can lead to amnesia, hallucinations, trembling and violent outbursts, not dissimilar to the effects of addictive drugs. You could almost imagine mental illness.

The calories in sugar are considered empty calories because they contain no vitamins or minerals. It is no wonder that people who eat mainly sugary foods feel so sluggish and heavy all the time. We also know that consuming too much sugar leads to fat build-up in the belly, hips, buttocks and breasts.

If you are not familiar with holistic nutrition, you won’t be aware that once these areas are full of fat deposits, your liver will start distributing the fat around vital organs, such as the kidneys or heart. Not only can this lead to high blood pressure, it can also result in damage to your brain function. Even in the short term, your brain is affected by sugar. In fact, you’ll likely feel the effects right away. When the “low” arrives, sugar affects the brain and makes you feel sleepy. You will have trouble doing simple calculations and will also start to forget things.

The next time you have a craving for cookies or ice cream or doughnuts, imagine the chaos you are about to set in motion inside your body. Are you really willing to take on the prospect of heart disease, kidney stones, cancer, stroke, yeast infections, diabetes, arthritis, allergies or headaches? How about it? Do you still want that slice of chocolate cream pie – or are you ready to give holistic nutrition a chance, and change your life forever.

Great Considerations On Juice Fasting And Your Wellness Regimen

If you restrict your morning menu to liquids only, you will be doing a lot to help your body repair its natural cycles. If you like to have breakfast every morning, by sticking to juices only you can still maintain this habit. Juices are also easily transportable and are a great way to ease your kids or spouse into more healthy living habits.

Fasting on juices, or drinking vegetable juices regularly is not hard, and it has tremendous health benefits, if you do it right. This means choosing the best and HEALTHIEST method of cleansing your body of the buildup of toxins that have accumulated over days, weeks, months, and, for some of us, even years! For example, how about drinking mostly vegetable juice for breakfast every morning and fasting once a week with these vegetable juices, introducing a great and healthy way to keep your body strong and fresh.

A light morning meal centered around holistic nutrition will leave you feeling energized and ready to begin the day. Juices and fruits are perfect for breakfast, since they are high in nutrients yet low in calories and easy to digest. Not to be compared with fried bacon and eggs! You should also consider that your stomach will be empty when you wake up in the morning and this is a good time to perform a cleanse with fresh vegetable juice. You will not have to worry about constipation anymore with this form of holistic nutrition.

I want to tell you how easy it is to take on board the concept of holistic nutrition and transform your life. We’ll start by asking a few simple questions: What’s in your wellness regimen? Do I include enough aerobic exercise? Do I get enough rest? How about meditation? Do I eat nutritious food? Ideally, your regimen should include on top of this juice fasting to cleanse and revitalize the body.

Picture in your mind those fresh juices flowing through your digestive tract and imagine this vitality as it begins your body cleansing. Think of these juices as a powerful river that is filling your body with essential vitamins, antioxidants, and other nutrients while, at the same time, removing mucus forming foods from your diet.

Mucus forming foods? What’s that? Simply put, they’re acid forming foods that diminish the vitality of the body and make it harder for the body to heal. Some of the foods that have higher acidic content include dairy items like butter, cottage cheese and milk. Not surprisingly, this list also includes fish, poultry and meats. If you haven’t already made the connection, they’re foods you likely buy at the grocery store every week and consume as part of your regular diet.

When you fast with juice, you get rid of the buildup of messy mucus in your system that takes place when you consume acidic foods — it sounds graphic and upsetting, but that’s the way it is. It also cleanses the body of chemicals, toxins, and other harmful materials that you consume, inhale, or otherwise absorb through your environment. At the same time, the healing properties of the fresh juices revitalize and rejuvenate the body.

Get ready to tune up your body from the inside out by juice fasting. Your internal systems and organs will thank you for this and you will aid in weight loss, make your skin look much more vibrant and it will leave you with more energy too. There are many other health benefits to be enjoyed, as well.

Great Points On How To Conquer Overeating

Overeating is something we’ve probably all been guilty of doing at one time or another. Well, all of that food might have been yummy going down, but it’s something you’re going to eventually pay for, in more ways than one.

This kind of splurging or binging also causes people to not chew their food properly—until liquefied—which results in swallowing large chunks of food that strain the GI tract. It’s not recommended that anyone should eat like this, certainly not on a regular basis. However, as human beings we all tend to do things that we shouldn’t.

So, if you find that you’ve splurged on a heavy meal, it’s a good idea to expel this toxic material as soon as possible. The fastest and easiest way to accomplish this is through a colon cleanse. To many of you, this may sound like too much, but after many years of looking at the incredible, positive impact that good nutrition has on your body as opposed to all those bad choices, I want you to consider your ultimate power to change these bad habits and to move towards holistic nutrition and a healthier way of living.

Fasting goes hand in hand with exercising regularly and eating the right food – food that has a high nutritional value and that is rich in antioxidants. The good news is that food rich in antioxidant properties can help slow the harmful processes that cause cellular damage in the body. Cellular damage can lead to cancer and diseases, as well as speed the aging process.

Information regarding the connection between diet, health, and aging is nothing new. It bears repeating, however, especially for those that are overweight and all of us need to hear this message, over and again.

I’ve come to the realization that the only method to ensure a long and healthy life is to consume the right kinds of foods by carefully following holistic nutrition guidelines, and to curtail the amount of food most of us ingest on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean I want you to starve yourself, but you need to know that the quantity of food many of us are consuming is overloading our systems; and some of the food we’re eating is making us sick, and can even, eventually, kill us.

We have known for centuries about holistic nutrition and the need to adopt a good and healthy dietary lifestyle. But in this fast paced, hectic world we live in, where it’s easier to dine out or grab a bite on the run, we sometimes forget what we’re shoveling into our mouths. So, this is just a friendly reminder to nourish your body with the right types of food and to give your body time to cleanse, heal, and rest, which you can do through fasting.

Fasting is certainly not a new way to care for the body, and I was fascinated to discover that even Socrates and Plato fasted to “attain mental and physical efficiency.”

So did Galen, the 2nd century Greek philosopher and physiologist. Mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras would fast for up to a month. We are told that one of the original founders of medicine, Paracelsus, observed that “fasting is the greatest remedy.” Even the great Hippocrates, “father of medicine,” regularly prescribed fasting to his patients.

In fact, the Hippocrates Health Institute, which has been a leader in the field of natural and complementary health care since the mid – 1950s, endorses the practice of fasting one day each week. Pretty impressive words of wisdom from some of the world’s greatest thinkers, wouldn’t you say?