The way we eat and our lifestyle choices so much affect the quality of our every day lives—that it is essential to continue learning how to take better care of ourselves. There are many things that we can do to support our personal well-being—and eating well or conscious eating is one of them. What I mean by conscious eating is being aware of the things that we are putting into our bodies. It’s important to read the labels on our food products—to know exactly what it is we are eating—and how those things are affecting our bodies. We may sometimes eat just to fill our bellies (so to speak) but if we maintain such habits, those things may eventually cause us harm. As I mentioned in my previous post, food is our medicine; the foods we eat provide the nutrients our bodies need so that our internal organ systems (the nervous system, cardiovascular system, immune system, etc.) function well. Many of the foods we eat lack in the nutrition department; their main goal is taste—not nutrition. If we primarily eat foods such as these, our organ systems will eventually break down. We need to feed our cells….I imagine that we don’t often think like this when we are getting ready to put something into our mouths, but I think it’s a good practice to have.

Kathy Freston, author of QUANTUM WELLNESS: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to Health and Happiness, talks about conscious eating. She states: Sitting down to eat is an elemental part of every day, and what we choose to put on our plate has repercussions not only for our physical well being, but also for our spiritual well being. Conscious eating means simply this: remaining awake and aware of how food gets to our plate–and then choosing what we eat according to our values. To be truly well means having the awareness that your life experience is part of a much larger picture, one that involves the lives of everyone and everything else that inhabits this world. Having this awareness is essential to experiencing a healthy life. And just as we must recognize that our lives are interconnected with all other life on the planet, we must also recognize that our personal mind, body, and spirit health is inextricably linked. Perhaps we are physically fit, but are lacking in spiritual awareness, or very emotionally and psychologically astute but lazy in the way we eat. Because body, mind and spirit all work together to create wellness, we cannot experience the upsurge, the full thrust required for a quantum shift when any of these three areas go unheeded. Freston discusses the importance of leaning into change—why taking small, manageable steps toward the changes we want to achieve have a more profound effect than trying to radically alter any one behavior; the importance of choosing our food with integrity, keeping in mind all aspects of how the food arrives on our table. Freston shares the advantages of giving up meat in favor of a healthy plant-based diet from ethical, dietary, and environmental perspectives, and stresses why conscious eating is essential to one’s health.

The nutrients that are naturally present in our plant-based foods provide everything our bodies need to heal, grow, combat disease, and function optimally. To learn more about the natural healing properties of our every day foods, please visit: http://juicing-for-health.com

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