Supplements are just the icing — not the cake!

I’ve interacted with a lot of people at different stages of their pursuit for better health.

The journey usually begins with people taking a multivitamin and mineral to fill in their nutritional gaps - or trying natural remedies to allay their negative symptoms, in leu of toxic pharmaceutical drugs.

While these are great first steps on the path, they are only compensatory strategies, because what we really need to embody health is deep nourishment and soul nurturing.

Being that we are human, we are designed to embody a natural ‘dieta’ - a diet, lifestyle and way of living that is natural to us. Just like the animals, we suffer health issues when we are removed from our natural diet, habits and habitat.

It is not possible to realize our natural state of health, if we eat processed foods with artificial ingredients and live out of tune with nature.

Health is our natural state, but we must align more with nature, if we want to align more with health.

Over the years, what I’ve seen happening in the “health world” is that people “try” this and that, but often forget to put the real foundational things in place.

We’ve got cupboards full of jars and bags of superfoods, baskets and bins full of supplements, weekly vitamin injections etc. - none of which can compensate for poor quality food ingredients and meals that are nutritionally imbalanced.

We’ve got puritans who never drink a drop of alcohol or coffee, avoid animal foods, never eat sweets and who cleanse themselves to the point of depletion - only to end up with poor digestion and “sensitive” to everything.

What's missing is seasonal eating, macronutrient balance and the hardiness of ancestral animal foods that keep us resilient and strong - especially in cold weather.

Then we have the therapeutic diets. They rightfully restrict allergens, inflammatory foods etc. but the problem is that we are told that we should avoid a certain food or food group forever - but 'avoidance' isn't healing.

Healing requires inner work, deep nutrition, gut healing strategies and a slow reintroduction path, so that in time, we can eat everything that is natural again, in moderation without symptoms. This is possible when the inflammation comes down, the nutrients come up and our enzyme systems finally get the fuel they need to break down food and run the body properly. Without this deep mind, emotion, body and soul level healing, the inflammation continues, while the list of allergens continues to grow, until there is nothing left to eat.

Then we’ve got the fitness focused people who target macros (namely protein), but forget about the quality of the ingredients that go into their meals. They are depleted of micros (vitamins, minerals and essential fats) because of refined ingredients and toxic due to additives, pesticides etc.

Too often we believe we are eating “healthy” because we avoid cholesterol, fat and salt (which is not really actually healthy), and have less concern for the true culprits of inflammation: stress, sugar, margarine and vegetable oils etc.

It’s really not anyone’s fault. We’ve all been sold lies and half truths about health and nutrition. Even many health practitioners aren't that far ahead of their clients and patients, when it comes to truly embodying a natural diet and lifestyle.

While we may not all want to get back to the land, there are ways that we can all reconnect to nature, and to more of what’s natural for us. The first place to start is with what we allow into our body and what we do not. It all begins in the kitchen, because that’s where we have the most power to make changes in our health.

Here are the most common mistakes I find that people make:

1. buying a whole bunch of supplements instead of eating balanced meals

2. buying designer superfoods, rather than investing in quality pantry staples

3. adding new healthy stuff, but not getting rid of “the processed crap”

4. eating too many ‘cleansing foods’ (plants) vs not enough ‘building foods' (animal)

5. being fitness focused, but not health conscious

Exercise without a strong nutritional foundation is really hard on the body, because it deepens depletion. This stress on the body causes cortisol to be dysregulated, which leads to inflammation and the subsequent breakdown of tissues like muscle and bone.

Without adequate nutritional resources, we can't recover and rebuild, which turns exercise into a drain on our health.

Nutrition should come first, exercise is second.

Essentially the biggest mistake we make collectively, is saying that our health is a priority, but not wanting to invest time to learn something new, never changing anything foundational and not being willing to do the inner work to explore why our health issues have become chronic.

Food quality is foundational in all this.

There is nothing wrong with special diets, supplements, superfoods, natural remedies, cleansing etc. but the problem is that if the everyday foods on our plate are deficient and/or toxic, then we don’t have a foundation for health that we can build on.

If we are nutritionally deficient, it also becomes difficult to have the resiliency we need to turn inward to do the inner work to heal our soul. The reason why is that nutritional depletion is enough of a chronic stress on its own, that it can lock our nervous system into the stress state where we become stuck in fight, flight, freeze or faun - all of which orients our attention outside of ourselves. As a result we can't relax enough to "look inside" and we can't get into the "rest and digest" healing state. This becomes a cycle of depletion and stress both worsening each other.

Any way you slice it, we must start with what's on our plate to stop the cycle.

The rest of the ‘stuff’ is for helping us elevate into higher health, but they can only work their magic if we have the adequate nutritional resources for our body to be able to respond.

What do I mean when I say “able to respond?”. I mean vitamins and minerals from real whole food which are the catalysts for everything that happens in the body.

When we are low in nutrients, certain functions in the body don’t happen adequately, then we get symptoms which are designed to WARN us before the deficiencies become so deep, that they set the stage for dis-ease. That's why we should never suppress chronic symptoms.

Taking supplements and remedies without a proper food foundation, is like buying a lamp, not pushing the plug all the way in, and yet expecting it to produce light.

The food you put on your plate at every meal is much more powerful than any of the above strategies. In fact, the more we put our focus on what's on our plate at every meal we eat, the less we need the other stuff.

Balanced meals of whole foods, are the foundation that we all need for our health. It is what everything else rests on.

Here’s where to start...