Think about your Health

Each day begins with the opportunity to inch our way forward into better health, both physically and emotionally.  You or I may have had a yesterday where nothing we perceived went exactly the way we had planned, especially our food choices.  Don’t dwell on yesterday! Our focus must be on today.  More importantly, we must focus on what health means to each of us.  Without this being a priority, we will give into temptations; we will give into the fatigue and stress of the day, and allow ourselves to make food choices that are directly opposite to the health we ultimately want to achieve. What do I mean by this?  We all know sugars, fructose, and a lot of the simple carbohydrates (that are so tempting) are highly inflammatory; they raise insulin, store fat and lead to a lot of the chronic diseases we are seeing today.  Occasionally, sure, we want to enjoy a treat.  Having an influx of a lot of carbohydrates, however, is simply setting up the body for more and more weight gain, and worse, inflammation, and the development of just about any medical problem you want to avoid. If you and I can look at certain foods and realize that the ingestion of them over a long period of time is going to lead to accumulation of fat, high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary disease and so on, possibly we might learn to make different choices.  As much as those chips or cookies might seem tempting while you are watching TV, think about the effect of these on your own biochemistry.  None of us would ingest a drug that we know causes these side effects, so why would we ingest a food that does this? Now, I make this sound simple, knowing the food industry has engineered and marketed these foods to look healthy, and taste good, but we must fight back.  We will often say that ‘we don’t have will power’.  I must agree, as I sit here trying to keep my hands busy and away from the potato chips in the cupboard. What do I do?  I visualize those chips being broken down into simple sugars in my intestines and my insulin spiking and taking those sugars over to my liver and converting the glucose to fat.  Not a healthy thing at all. Focus on your health.  That is step number one, and the most important step.  If all of us can, at the very least, stop the snacking (invariably carbohydrates whether sweet of salty), we have made a major gain in improving our health, with the side benefit of weight loss! You determine your health; don’t be deflected by friends or family to eat things that have a negative impact.  Learn to say “no”. Keep on trying, keep on working on finding what works for you.  You can do it!  Just never give up trying. Dr. Doug