Guest Blogger – Romey Ritter – 1000 Messages

Recently, I was standing in line at my local supermarket waiting to pay for my items.  I was looking at all the glossy magazines, noticing they are right next to all the chocolate bars.  I started thinking it’s no wonder people are confused about what to eat and how to live healthy, as they are enticed to reach for a magazine and a chocolate bar on the way out of their local store.

Glossy magazines are plastered with slogans promising you the world when it comes to dieting, “guaranteed, take ten kilos off – tomorrow!” or “celebrity diet secrets” and then of course always something about Oprah and her latest dieting triumph or failure.  The latest fad diet will have a focus and the magazine will contain adverts for exercise equipment, diet pills and the latest scientific breakthrough diet food.

Magazines put out a lot of health information.  Literally thousands of articles are published yearly by magazines.  They are the literal juggernaut of the diet industry, an industry that is worth over ten billion dollars worldwide.  The problem is so much of the information published conflicts and has agenda’s on selling products for their advertisers.

Do we stop to realize there would be little need for a diet industry if people were healthy and made better food choices?  Surely, if the information presented in the magazines was good, by the sheer number of magazine readers, the epidemic of obesity would be solved?  Or at least we should experience a scaling back from epidemic to “high incidence rate” of obesity.  Sadly the opposite is true we have an epidemic and with it comes a whole host of lifestyle diseases that are robbing people of a healthful and happy life.  People are just plain confused about how to make healthy choices.

Conflicting opinions and the latest diet or exercise fad aside, there is just no ignoring the fact that we’ve got to get back to basics.  Stop listening to misinformation and just keep it really simple:

1.  Eat a diet where the bulk of your food is fresh vegetables and fruits

2.  Avoid unnecessary and unsafe chemicals: pesticides, artificial sweeteners and flavors

3.  Eliminating, or at least minimizing processed foods

4.  Ensuring your proteins are from good sources**

5.  Using whole grains-avoid white rice, white breads, pastas, cookies etc

6.  Keep as snacks things like yogurts, raw nuts and seeds, fruit

7.  Eat a good portion of your food raw-uncooked

8.  Drink a lot of water

9.  Simply eat less-smaller portions

10.  Make an effort to get active and stay active for all of your life

**healthy animals in their natural environment, fed their natural diet, e.g. A cow, freely roaming all day eating grass and not treated with hormones or antibiotics.