Dietary Habits
Eating Too Many Processed & Fast Foods
This is one of the most common problems in our society! Eating whole foods rather than what’s easiest to grab off the shelf requires some habit change, but trust me, it is worth it if you truly want to feel and look your best.
Eating too many processed foods is also a factor in the development of food sensitivities and allergies.
Leaky Gut Caused by GMO’s, Food Sensitivities/Allergies
When your gut is doing its job properly, it acts as a tightly woven net that keeps anything that might damage your system OUT. Leaky gut is exactly what it sounds like! When you have leaky gut, your digestive system is TOO permeable and lets unhealthy things through.
Food sensitivities and allergies are a huge sign that you likely have leaky gut. Proteins likes gluten, bacteria and undigested food particles—even toxic waste—can pass through and cause negative reactions. A poor diet of inflammatory foods like bad fats, sugar and toxins is one cause of leaky gut.
Eating These 3 Inflammatory Foods: Bad Fats, Sugar, Toxins
What I consider bad fats are man-made fats like hydrogenated oils, margarine and trans fats. These types of fast wreak havoc on your digestive system. Replace these with unmodified, naturally occurring fats like coconut oil, olive oil, grass-fed butter, and avocado oil.
Refined sugar spikes your glucose, insulin and leptin. When insulin and leptin are elevated for a long time, this leads to insulin and leptin resistance. If these hormones become resistant, they can’t communicate properly to your cells so they can function normally! This leads to fat loss resistance. I recommend replacing refined sugar with raw honey or natural stevia.
Toxins make their way to the cell, attach themselves to the cell membrane, and cause inflammation. Then like sugar, they reduce your hormones’ ability to communicate with the cell. It’s time to closely evaluate what you’re eating! You may be feeding your body toxins every day.
- Pesticides: these can end up being sprayed onto your food, or applied to the soil in which it grows. Glyphosate is an especially pesky pesticide as it’s one of the most used pesticides in the world. Glyphosate is an herbicide and has been found in processed foods. This is especially troublesome because it is a nasty hormone disruptor!
- Growth Inhibitors are usually used with root vegetables, and they work to slow the rate of eyes that tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes grow while being held in storage warehouses for months at a time before hitting the markets. These compounds have been found to penetrate the outer skin!
To reduce toxins in your bloodstream due to the foods you ingest, always buy organic when you can.
Next week we’ll talk about HORMONES and how they, when they’re out of whack, can make you feel foggy, fat, and fatigued.