By: Susan Maria Leach
Original article http://www.wlslifestyles.com/articles/wls-lifestyles-spring-2010/wls-lifestyles-spring-2010-feature-articles/20100519706/how-to-get-your-vitamins-eat-them-.php
Excerpts from article…
In his book, Eat This and Live, Don Colbert, MD, doesn't pull any punches in his plea for us to recognize the seriousness of the consequences of eating processed foods.
Living foods – fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds, and nuts – exist in a raw or close to raw state and are beautifully packaged in divinely created wrappers called skins and peels. Living foods look robust, healthy, and alive. They have not been bleached, refined, or chemically enhanced and preserved. Living foods are plucked, harvested, and squeezed – not processed, packaged, and put on a shelf. Living foods are recognizable as food.
Dead foods are the opposite. They have been altered in every imaginable way to make them last as long as possible and be as addictive as possible. That usually means the manufacturer adds considerable amounts of sugar and man-made fats that involve taking various oils and heating them to dangerously high temperatures so that the nutrients die and become reborn as something completely different – a deadly, sludgy substance that is toxic to our bodies.
Life breeds life. Death breeds death. When you eat living foods, they flow into your system in their natural state. Dead foods hit your body like a foreign intruder. Chemicals, including preservatives, food additives, and bleaching agents, place a strain on the liver. Toxic man-made fats begin to form in your cell membranes, they become stored as fat in your body and form plaque in your arteries. Your body does its best to harvest the tiny traces of good from these deadly foods, but in the end you are undernourished, overfed, and overweight.
Every day we all make important decisions to eat either healthy living foods or unhealthy dead foods! Nothing fuels our body as effectively as beautiful whole foods. Plants and real foods have hundreds of compounds that may provide us with benefits we don't even know of. I know long-term post-ops that have severe nutrient deficiencies who won't touch a sweet potato, because they believe it has too many carbohydrates. They cannot grasp that the nutrition is crucial for their well-being. If a single tomato and four saltines have the same number of carbs – eat the tomato - it sweeps amazing micronutrients into your body and those few carbs are worth sacrificing.
I rely on vitamin C from broccoli, red bell pepper, Brussels sprouts, and ripe papaya; vitamin E from chilled unsweetened almond milk, unsweetened peanut butter, and sunflower seeds; beta carotene flows into my body from carrots and sweet potato; my folate and B6 are from garbanzo beans, black beans, and lentils; my B12 levels are boosted by my love of wild salmon, organic beef, and farm raised trout filets.
After this awakening, I now look at every bite as an opportunity to fuel my body for a healthy future. I finally have the balance and perspective in this journey that I have lacked for so long. Have an apple, some carrots or sweet potato – EAT your vitamins!
Susan Maria Leach is the author of Before & After – Living & Eating Well After Weight Loss Surgery (HarperCollins Publishers 2007), both a memoir and a cookbook – an intimate account of Leach's own transformation, as well as a guide for those who have undergone or are considering the procedure. As Susan Maria has learned in the more than nine years since her own RNY procedure, weight loss surgery is not an event with a finish line or a goal weight – it is the beginning of a new way of life. She maintains a loss of almost half of her heaviest body weight. Susan Maria owns BariatricEating.com and BE, Inc., which has both warehouses and an onsite store in Pompano Beach, Florida – and is an officer for the corporate council of the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery.
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