What you eat today has to make your heart beat tomorrow…

… and create new blood, renew your bone marrow, fuel your brain, ease your mind, make your lungs work, support your immune system, heal your skin (including that tattoo you had done yesterday), keep your digestive system working smoothly, lubricate your joints, repair and build your muscles. What will you eat to do all that?”

I wrote this as a note to myself a while ago and it is one of the most popular quotes on my Tumblrblog.

For me it signified a sea change in my thought processes. I had been forced by my condition to stop looking at food and drink as something pleasurable, sociable, guilt-making, fattening, and for most of the time, totally disconnected from my body. Instead I was faced with the realisation that my food was actually slowly but surely poisoning me. It really cannot get worse than that when you are a “foodie”- and I was someone who, while at work each day, went out for breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and or supper and threw in the odd coffee meeting in between. No wonder I put on weight!

Stark reality check!

Now I had to consider that everyday, for better or for worse, I was building my body, actually building my very health or ill health, with what I was putting into myself.

After my diagnosis, I started to review all the diets available. My goodness, but there are so many. My consultant told me I needed a way of eating that was going to support my immune system and give my body the opportunity to become healthy once more. He had suggested that raw plant food was the answer.

I read a lot of books, consulted experts and tried a lot of different ways of eating. I became sicker by the day. I was in despair.

What you eat today…..

Break through! It dawned on me! I started to realise just how disconnected from my body’s requirements I had become. I had to eat to fuel my body.  Derr!

New way of thinking: Food is my body’s fuel. What you eat today provides the essential building blocks for life and health. I owe it to myself to give myself the best chance of being as healthy as possible. A horse builds its body out of the grass it eats. Exactly what do I think I have been using to build my body?

Of course, I always knew this if I thought about it, but I had preferred not to think about it in such a way for a long time. I always considered my diet was on the whole pretty healthy and anyway there was, after all, always tomorrow for worrying about diets!

I researched extensively about food and health and  I quickly and, at the time of course, “reluctantly”came to the conclusion that my consultant was right and a high raw, relatively low fat, vegan diet with a load of leafy greens, veggies and fruit was the most nutrient rich diet I could find.  I read The China Study by Dr T Colin Campbell and things finally made a lot of sense.

Thank you to Thank you also Dr Greger at NutritionFacts.org and Dr Fuhrman.

I started it, made quite a few mistakes and then lo and behold, it finally clicked with me. My health started to change, in a dramatic way, for the better. It is still amazing to me how much difference such a diet can make…

My diet is now a very simple one of fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds and I am continuing to feel better every day.

So that is the story behind why I wrote: “What you eat today…..”