Diet
Starting at the bottom, diet is at the base because what you eat--and more importantly--what you don't eat play a fundamental role in your health. We often spend a substantial part of our day deciding what to eat and in the actual process of eating.
What we ingest is key to our survival and is something most of us do at least three times a day.
The most impactful way to improve your diet is to remove the unhealthiest foods. Below in rough order of harmfulness:
Sugar
All process and fried foods
Wheat and grains
Dairy
Alcohol - all kinds.
Also, avoid beans, which are high in lectins, and include the peanut and cashew variety of nuts. (more on this Diet section)
And replace these with more vegetables (seasonal fruits, in moderation), healthy fats, and pastured raised (not cage free) eggs and meats, and seafood (lower on the food chain better as to reduce exposure to heavy metals). This is essentially the ever-popular Paleo diet but would caveat that Paleo can often refer to an over reliance on meat, whereas. The optimal diet should prioritize calories from vegetables and healthy fats. and deprioritize animal protein. (Eating tons bacon and meats every day is not the path to optimal health). I want to highlight again the importance of what you DO NOT eat. People (and I was one of them) often believe that it was okay to have a pint of ice cream if you had worked out that day or you had a green juice, as it would offset the negative impacts of the ice cream. Unfortunately, your body doesn't work as linearly as that, and you would have been much better off avoided the ice cream altogether, no matter the narrative you may tell yourself. As I jokingly tell my clients, if 60% of your diet is vegetables and 40% is French fries, that is not a healthy diet just because you eat healthy the "majority" of the time.
A diet of real food, including a lot of vegetables, healthy fats and protein will automatically change your gut biome if you had previously been eating the Standard American Diet (SAD). That said, gut health is of the utmost importance to recovery and optimal health. See the Gut Health section.
What we ingest is key to our survival and is something most of us do at least three times a day.
The most impactful way to improve your diet is to remove the unhealthiest foods. Below in rough order of harmfulness:
Sugar
All process and fried foods
Wheat and grains
Dairy
Alcohol - all kinds.
Also, avoid beans, which are high in lectins, and include the peanut and cashew variety of nuts. (more on this Diet section)
And replace these with more vegetables (seasonal fruits, in moderation), healthy fats, and pastured raised (not cage free) eggs and meats, and seafood (lower on the food chain better as to reduce exposure to heavy metals). This is essentially the ever-popular Paleo diet but would caveat that Paleo can often refer to an over reliance on meat, whereas. The optimal diet should prioritize calories from vegetables and healthy fats. and deprioritize animal protein. (Eating tons bacon and meats every day is not the path to optimal health). I want to highlight again the importance of what you DO NOT eat. People (and I was one of them) often believe that it was okay to have a pint of ice cream if you had worked out that day or you had a green juice, as it would offset the negative impacts of the ice cream. Unfortunately, your body doesn't work as linearly as that, and you would have been much better off avoided the ice cream altogether, no matter the narrative you may tell yourself. As I jokingly tell my clients, if 60% of your diet is vegetables and 40% is French fries, that is not a healthy diet just because you eat healthy the "majority" of the time.
A diet of real food, including a lot of vegetables, healthy fats and protein will automatically change your gut biome if you had previously been eating the Standard American Diet (SAD). That said, gut health is of the utmost importance to recovery and optimal health. See the Gut Health section.