Why bother eating well?
I get a lot of questions about why I strive to convince others to eat nutritiously if my motivation for clients isn’t weight control. Well the answer is, I care a lot more about what your insides and blood chemistry look like than what your clothing size is. When it comes to your body, whatever it looks like when you are sleeping well, eating a well rounded balanced nutritious diet, moving regularly and taking care of your mental health… that is the size your body is supposed to be. That’s it! So the way you eat should never be a result of trying to make your body fit into a certain shape or aesthetic.
What it should be about is taking care of this magnificent piece of living machinery you’ve been given to navigate life with, because what we eat is more than what we look like. It manifests in how we sleep, feel, our mental health, our resistance to illness and ultimately plays a large role in our potential development for chronic disease.
Many of you may not know that in my late 20’s I cared for and watched my father ultimately pass away from a long battle with lewy body dementia, which was unfortunately exacerbated by a lifetime of choices to ignore nutrition advice and consume large amounts of sugars and inflammatory foods. It left a deep impact on me. As I watched my dad deteriorate for 5 years difficult years I vowed to do everything I could to prevent that ever from ever happening to me and robbing me of meaningful years with my loved ones. Many cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s are now colloquially referred to by the medical community as “type 3 diabetes” due to their close relationship with metabolic dysfunction. Thousands of other people are lost every year to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes that for overwhelming amounts of people could be managed or prevented via nutrition and lifestyle.
People would never think to stop maintaining their car for years, give it contaminated gas and ignore the check engine light then be shocked when the car breaks down after a while. Unfortunately too many people are worried about the car’s paint job and not how the engine is running.
So why do I eat and encourage others to eat well? So you can live the best damn quality of life for as many years as humanly possible in whatever body that looks like.
