This saying I put on my website, and I just realised how true it is. If you look around in the food and health world, then there are a lot of self-proclaimed gurus who preach to us, how we have to feed ourselves or what we should better avoid: dairy products in any case, cereal products for sure because of the Gluten, meat and carbohydrates anyway. Fruits and vegetables we should only buy in organic quality because of the pesticides and even tap water makes us sick recently. We also have to take care of cosmetics, detergents and cleaners, clothing, air pollution, cell phone radiation, and a thousand other things in order to not get completely poisoned ... It seems best to retire to an oxygen-powered tent like once Michael Jackson did and to feed ourselves exclusively on light and air..
I'm not saying that's all complete nonsense and we should eat junk food all day hanging out on the couch with our mobile phone. But if all that was actually as extremely bad as it is described, I wonder how we can keep ourselves upright with all the slags and toxins in our bodies.
A healthy middle way seems to be more appropriate here, given that one persons food can be another persons poison. Let’s take the gluten, for example. Just 1% of the population is affected by the disease called celiac disease, where the consumption of gluten-containing products causes serious health problems. These people are well advised to avoid gluten in any case. For all the others there is no reason to avoid it as long as you enjoy it in moderation. A healthy body usually shows us very clearly what it needs or what we should rather keep our fingers off.
Concerning fruits and vegetables for example you can focus on the Clean Fifteen / Dirty Dozen (lists are available on the internet) to know which fruits and vegetables you can buy conventionally and which ones you’d better get in the organic market to protect yourself from pesticides. But even more important is that you eat fruits and vegetables at all. If necessary, you peel it!
The quantity makes the poison and we are all different! That applies to all other things too: one person’s food can be another person’s poison. It’s all about balance!
Many people today focus a lot on nutrition but forget, that we need to be nourished on different levels: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. In other words, what is it, what what feeds us off the plate? I'm talking about relationships, movement or a fulfilling career, which I describe as "Primary Food". (Read more in my seminar "Balance your life - what really nourishes you off the plate") But if I'm busy all day with what I should avoid in the diet and what else I have to respect in order to not get any health consequences, then I don’t have time for sports, relationships or even work because all I'm doing is reading labels or searching the internet for plastic-free clothing. Not to mention that all that creates stress, which in return causes silent inflammation in the body, which will also make us sick in the long run. Have you ever noticed that many so called “nutrition gurus” often do not look very healthy and happy? These are not necessarily the people I would spontaneously go to a party with.
So, more important than the food itself is what you associate with it! A coffee with your best friend, cooking with your family, eating out with friends or having a glass of wine with your loved one - these are all things that nourish your soul. Food is love, enjoyment and “dolce vita”, but it gets lost if you are mostly occupied with studying ingredient lists.
The obsessive desire to eat healthily even has a name: orthorexia. In this disease, the dominating fear of "bad" foods not only leads to actual disease symptoms, but also to the fact that the selection of "healthy" food is getting smaller and smaller, until you literally live on air and light.
You are what you eat, but also what you think, feel and do! If I think and believe that certain foods make me sick, then it will inevitably be like that. We create our world with our thoughts, this has been scientifically proven.
Having that in mind, I’d rather think and believe that I’m going to live a healthy and vibrant life until a hundred, enjoying every day, nourish myself with pleasure, move regularly with joy and without compulsion, be in the nature as much as possible and surround myself with lovely people.
For it is not necessarily the ossified health apostles, who can look forward to a Methuselah-age as a reward for their ascetic existence. The sensual people may also be pleased. And at least they do know with whom they can celebrate their 100th birthday.