We all make mistakes when it comes to our diet. Yes, none of us (including myself) is excluded. I mention regularly how important it is to read the labels, but truthfully we can all make assumptions about our food. Damn those earthy looking labels!
This past week during my many wonderful but long hours of health counseling I began thinking about some advice I often give about how important it is to tricky your metabolism by eating some less healthy foods. Ordinarily, I would say unhealthy food, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. By less healthy foods, I of course mean free of chemicals, preservatives, dyes, anything unnatural. That is very important, both for your own records of health info, but also for the sake of this story. I realized that it had been a long time since I had taken myself up on this advice. So, I asked someone I was working with to run and purchase some TERRA chips. You know the kind, all the root veggies fried up in some sunflower oil with a little salt. So, I’m not talking about Doritos or Oreos here. Just some fried veggies. Ok, a lot of fried veggies. She picked up a couple flavored bags of these guys that had some sort of Mediterranean spices and they were tasty, I admit it. So about a full bag later… I told you, I was tricking my metabolism. I was really pulling the wool over its eyes. April fools, metabolism. In any case, by the time I got home I was already feeling pretty sniffly and generally not my usual perky self. Immediately, I of course thought about the only addition to my diet I had made that day and I asked my son to read me the ingredients. There was all sorts of things I don’t normally allow in my diet like garlic powder, onion powder and this was the big one, olive oil flavor! No more Mediterranean blend! I was shocked and immediately began my hot water with lemon cleansing drink and didn’t stop until the next evening. I knew I needed to get that junk out of me.
But see the moral of the story is this… Don’t beat yourself up if you trip up on your diet. Don’t feel too bad, because you see, if I make mistakes, everyone must. I don’t say that because I’m less prone to mistakes than anyone, but because so much of my time and attention is really placed around my diet.
The second moral of the story is this… Trick your body now and then with some all natural ice cream, some sugar or some trans fats. You don’t want your metabolism to get lazy on you just because you eat foods that make its job easy! Throw it a curve ball now and then, just maybe less of a curve ball than a full bag of artificial ingredients.
