If you take the time to answer and think about these next 6 questions I am going to ask you, it may just change your life.
1. What would you do if you felt full of energy, were pain free, and did not have to think about your health every day?
Something I like to say to my clients: The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken.
Many of these habit changes may seem small in retrospect, but you are working to literally make them a part of who you are. By choosing to eat smarter and put these strategies in place on a consistent basis, you are stacking so many conditions in your favor, that it will make getting great results inevitable and easy!
Truth is, you can feel full of energy, you can be pain free and it doesn't take all your effort, planning and scrutinizing on a daily basis. Small changes, implemented over time are the key to unlocking this abundant and healthy life. Build habits, instead of hobbies until you have the key to optimal health. . .until health is just a part of you and your life!
2. What would it be like if you felt differently about food? What if, instead of feeling like a slave to cravings for sugar or other packaged and artificially flavored foods, you actually wanted the things that were good for you?
When you develop metabolic flexibility, freedom from hunger and sugar dependency, this becomes a reality.
Why do we love sugar and sweets so much? Because they illicit a strong dopamine response. It literally makes us feel all good and fluffy inside. When you eat that gooey cookie, your sweet receptors initiate a reward system. A series of electrical and chemical pathways that lead you to chase down that feeling again! This is why sugar is so addicting. The body and mind physically wants it more!
Interestingly, the brain is hard wired to illicit strong reward systems and dopamine responses from a variety of foods that nourish us. This is an innate mechanism designed to get us the 'good stuff' that we need from a variety of foods. If you eat one meal, over and over, the dopamine response lessens, and that meal will not be as fulfilling, appetizing or "rewarding" to you. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and a variety of delicious nourishing foods, will hard wire you to crave just that!
If we simply remove the sugary, fake-foods, and start to give our body the food that it needs to thrive and be healthy, we can replace this sugar craving/dependency reward system with a reward system that is actually benefiting our health. The body will keep eliciting a positive response to healthy food, as it is being nourished, and will encourage you to keep striving for variety, to fill it's needs and wants.
The longer you spend doing this, the better your reward system becomes for REAL, nourishing and healthy foods, and less so for sugar laden rubbish, that is not serving your health.
Imagine craving a nice coconut curry with vegetables, or some Primal pancakes for breakfast, instead of a sugar-bomb bowl of cereal, or a fast food burger and fries. I know this is a reality because I live it, as do my clients. It just takes a little switch!
Watch this fantastic animation to see how sugar plays into the reward systems of the brain.
3. Think for a minute about what are called the “side effects” of your medication. There actually is no such thing as a “side effect.” There’s the intentional effect of your drug and the unintentional effect. What happens when you experience a negative unintentional effect? You go to the doctor for another med that will treat that symptom, and then that drug will also create its own host of unintentional effects. And on it goes. What if you had no more effects, intentional or unintentional? What if your daily life didn’t have side effects?
This is the way life is supposed to be! Medication is a wonderful thing that saves lives everyday. However, it should not be something that is saving your life, every day!
That should come from the choices that you make. The food that you eat, the lifestyle that you lead. This has always been, and always will be, WAY more powerful than any drug, or any concoction of drug cocktails that your doctor can offer you.
Drugs, by and large do one thing. They supress symptoms. They rarely, if ever, get to the root cause. You have high blood pressure? Here ya go - med to lower it. High cholesterol? Here ya go - take a statin.
These are merely band aids and don't look at root cause. What is the reason for the high blood pressure? The high cholesterol? Well that would take time and investigation. Time that doctors don't have, nor care to give you, when a pill can "fix" that problem. The short sightedness of this is a problem in and of itself, though, as it rarely does fix the problem, it just sticks a temporary cover on the symptom!
4. Imagine if you never had to pay for, or take, another drug again. What if you could alter your life simply by changing the foods you eat? Would that be something you’d be willing to try?
Of course it would be. However, people don't buy this.
Why? Largely due to the fact that we have never really been told or shown the power of lifestyle and food choices. Why work harder to eat better, sleep better, move more, stress less etc, when I can give you a pill that will do all of that for you? We have built this system of quick fixes and doctors will tell you that the drugs they are offering are completely safe and normal, yet we all know this is BS.
Because drugs don’t just suppress symptoms; they also suppress functions. For example; Many people take NSAIDs (ibuprofen), like they're candy. They do so to reduce pain or treat arthritis, for example. While these medications can be effective in relieving pain, they also reduce blood flow to cartilage. Blood carries all the nutrients and immune substances that we need for tissue repair. Ironically, taking NSAIDs chronically can worsen the problem because they actually reduce the tissue’s ability to heal.
5. What is your biggest obstacle to following a dedicated eating and lifestyle protocol? Imagine that we were able to remove that obstacle. Would you be willing to follow this protocol then?
If you answered yes to this question, then just do it.
It may sound simple, or you may say "that is easy for you to say", but the harsh truth is, we hide behind our excuses. We are all guilty of it.
We make up 10 reasons why we can't do something, or make a change, when the 1 reason you can or should make a change is INSURMOUNTABLE, and of the upmost importance.
Some times, we really do need to just rip the band aid off, stop making excuses and start doing. Don't let life be a laundry list of "what ifs".
Your health is only as good as your last meal. It doesn't matter if you've been eating poorly and living poorly for 20 years. All of that can change, right now!
All of your past successes and failures do not mean anything. Because you can choose TODAY to make whatever you want a reality. You can take the reigns!
We just have to get out of our own way. There is no better day to start your journey towards health than right now.
6. You owe it to yourself to take one 30-day period to discover how food is affecting your overall health. What if you uncovered truths about food and your body that changed the way you eat and live? What if, based on that new understanding, you could make choices that restore your own health and energy and remove symptoms? Would that be worth 30 days of experimentation?
Of course it would!!!
This is the most powerful thing a person can do to explore their health. What if your health is suffering SO much and you don't even know it, because you are numb to the feeling?
Being "ok" is not the same thing as being healthy and thriving in life. There are lots of people that are just ok, with being ok. . .they have become used to it...desensitized.
You ever meet someone who was wearing a really strong perfume, that got all up in your nostrils? Chances are, if you stopped and spoke to them for a while, the noticeable smell of the perfume would fade away into the background noise. No longer noticeable. It is very much still there, you just became used to it.
This describes peoples health very much. They are so used to feeling crappy, that they just accept that as normal.
A 30-day dive into your health and how food can make you feel, can often be the only thing you will ever need to do, to understand the power of food choice, and how critical that is to your health and being your BEST you.
If you cannot commit 30 days of your life to try something like that, then you need to look at yourself and ask WHY?! You owe it to yourself to ask this question. You owe it to yourself to seek out truths and find answers.
You OWE it to yourself to want to be better. It is not selfish, it is human.
Your first job, is to be healthy. Don't fail at your first job.
If you would like to schedule a free 30 minute discovery call with me, to learn the answers to these questions and look at how you can get the health you deserve, message me. Or schedule a call at https://www.peakprimalhealth.com/book-online
Yours in Health,
Ste,