Why choose REAL FOOD??

Eating real food doesn’t have to be hard. Most people try to put a label on it and say they are eating Paleo or ancestral when they start to eat “real food”. Eating real food doesn’t mean you have to go “Paleo” or “Whole 30”. Now, I know this is easier said than done. Some of you may be asking yourself, “What is real food? I didn’t know there was food that wasn’t real?” I am here to help you learn what real food is. I also am here to encourage you that if you don’t currently eat this way, it is OK. If you want to eat this way, I hope to help you learn how. I hope to help you realize that this is the healthiest thing you can do, but I also hope to encourage you that you can start small. I hope to help you realize that you can find what works for your life currently, and move towards eating real food more times than not.

I want to share a little bit of my journey with you so that you can understand where I am coming from. Growing up, I did not eat healthy. We ate a standard American diet and I never really thought about what I was eating. I thought that if it was “food” sold in the store, then it was fine to eat. I would say that my main source of food were from things that came out of a box or bag created in a factory somewhere. I ate granola bars or cereal for breakfast and had chips as a snack when I got home from school. For dinner, it was either fast food, packaged dinners or I packed a PB&J sandwich to take to dance practice. I honestly didn’t think much of it. Now, I knew that mozzarella sticks from Sonic (yum) probably weren’t the healthiest thing in the world, but I didn’t know to what extent I could be damaging my body. I didn’t know all of the nutrients I was missing and how important they were for me. Through college it was still the same. I gained a ton of weight in college because of all the processed junk and soft drinks I consumed. I didn’t even realize I had gained weight until I had graduated and looked back at a picture and was SHOCKED. Even though I was working out and going to dance practice, the food I was consuming was making me unhealthy. I was in school for NUTRITION and still was not being taught how to eat real food and how to practically apply that in my life. In school to become a dietitian, it is all about the science. I spent years learning how digestion works at the molecular level. You take a million science classes and finally by senior year you kind of start to talk about nutrition in real life and what it might look like to work with clients. But it is very brief. Okay enough rant about my schooling.

I graduated with my degree in Dietetics and Nutrition Fitness and Health. After college I really got into reading and listening to nutrition articles and podcasts. I wanted to seek out for myself what it really means to feed your body nutrition. When I looked at that picture, it started my journey and motivation to figure out my health. It wasn’t like I was overweight or anything, but I just didn’t look healthy. I didn’t look like myself. I looked swollen. I also had terrible headaches and migraines. I had stomach pains. I was sick ALL THE TIME. I was tired of feeling that way.

I came across a podcast created by Registered Dietitians called the Ancestral RD’s. I HIGHLY recommend listening to this. This is really what helped me to learn about real food and real nutrition. I had never heard of RD’s that promoted Paleo, because usually RD’s bash the Paleo lifestyle and in school we are taught that it is a “Fad Diet”. As I kept listening, I learned that these women really knew what they were talking about and had evidence to back up what they were saying. I looked into eating Paleo and decided to start this lifestyle (I am not promoting this diet in any way,this is just what I did at the time). I did this because after much research I figured that eating fruit, vegetables, meat, and nuts couldn’t hurt me. After one year, holy moly did I see results. I lost about 12 pounds, my migraines completely went away, and I rarely got sick. I felt and looked so much better.

We live in America and are probably going to eat things that aren’t “real” 100% of the time. It’s okay. No need to feel guilty. Every person is different and some of us may need to be all or nothing at first and others may need to take smaller steps to get there. We can’t strive for perfection or even strive for what we see someone else doing. But what we can do is think of things that may be beneficial to our health that might work for us individually. Maybe you decide that you are going to stop eating a candy bar in the afternoon and replace it with an apple. That might be all you can do for now. And that is a great step toward eating real food. I hope to give you the tools to incorporate real food into your life when our world is full of fake food. 

If you want to learn what I am talking about when I say “real food”, click here. I wanted to give you a background into how and why I recommend this: it’s because I have experienced it and seen it in work in real life. It just makes sense to me. Eating food that has come from the earth that God created for our bodies makes sense to me. I hope it will for you too. 

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