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Sunday night, 9:00pm, I passed out on the couch. There was no waking me. You would have thought I had drank a full bottle of wine, or perhaps a 6-pack of beer…NO, just some homemade peanut brittle!!!
I woke at 10:15pm and was very disoriented and felt sick. I was bloated, had swollen hands, and a slight headache. I went to bed, regretting my indulgence.
Why did I do this to myself? The thought that comes to mind is, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41) My flesh is weak for a few things, one being my homemade peanut brittle. I even had some more last night. Not as much this time, but I did regret it and went to bed not feeling too great.
And wouldn’t you know it, I woke up this morning feeling a bit weird in my throat and a tiny bit stuffy.
You see, sugar weakens our immune system. It seems that the only time I get sick is when I slip and indulge in some sweet treats.
I thank the Lord for things like kombucha and coconut oil. By lunch time I was feeling 100% again. No more sugar for me, for a while.
How many of you are sick and tired every single day? Feeling bloated, groggy, headaches, lacking energy, etc.? This is what the wrong kind of food will do to us. It’s time to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us. Kick the junk and make some healthy changes.
This treat knocked me out because I don’t eat like this often, it really is rare. It’s when we eat like this all the time that we don’t realized it’s the food that is making us sick. Cut back on the sugar, eat good fats, like butter and coconut oil, cook your meal from scratch, and see if you start feeling better.
This is something new I’m doing. I am going to issue a new challenge every month. The challenge will be for 7 days.
This month’s challenge is to cut out High Fructose Corn Syrup. Now this is only for 7 days. You will want to start checking your labels to see what foods have HFCS in them.
Why? Why do we care if there is HFCS in our diets? Isn’t it just sugar? A little sugar does no harm, right?
Well, all sugars are not equal. The closer a food is to how God created it, the better it is for you. Natural sugars contain enzymes, vitamins and minerals. Refined sugars are stripped of all that and rob your body of those things as they’re digested. If we’re going to chart things on a Great-Good-Bad-Worse chart, sugar would be bad, but HFCS is worse. You can’t make this stuff in your home kitchen. It actually takes battery acid to make and is reported to contain levels of mercury. Read this article on that subject.
Most of the junk food my generation grew up on was loaded with sugar, but the same foods today are loaded with HFCS instead. Could there be a link with this change and the rise in obesity rates?
So check your labels. I challenge you to cut this one ingredient out for just 7 days. Let me know if you have questions. Get creative. Remember, I didn’t say you had to cut out all sugar. If there is a food that you like that contains HFCS, make it from scratch with sugar instead.
I will report back here at the end of the 7 days and let you know what I’ve had to cut out. (Yes, I’m sure I’m ingesting some HFCS, too!) See you then!
I think our society thinks that being healthy is a balancing act, that there are a tiny set of scales in the body. They think that you keep these scales balanced by doing and eating healthy things, even though you eat unhealthy things also. Hey, I know none of us eat a perfect diet! If you eat something unhealthy, you just have to do a bit more exercise to burn it off. If you want that dessert, you better have a salad with your meal. If you drink some soda, you should have some water to balance it out. This thinking is wrong and if you stay with me, I will tell you why.
I have to think that this originated, in part, from our parents and grandparents saying, “You have to eat all your dinner if you want dessert!” Also, the exercise era has given people a little latitude with what they can afford to eat and stay trim (and staying trim, in our society, carries the appearance of health; not always true, folks).
The thing that we need to get into our heads is that it’s not all about fat, good or bad, or calories. I said it before and I will say it again, the food we eat affects us on a cellular level. I will show two prime examples here, although there are more. First let’s talk about trans fat, it’s not just a bad fat that will clog your arteries and cause heart problems (if that isn’t bad enough), it will actually become a part of your very cells! Every cell in your body has a cell wall, made primarily of fat. When you ingest trans fatty acids, they become part of that cell wall. For nursing mothers, trans fat replaces some of the healthy, vital fat that your baby needs, so the baby’s cell walls are also being made up of trans fat!
According to Tom Valentine, author of Facts on Fats and Oils1, “When this man-made molecule of fatty acid, called trans fatty acid, gets into cell membrane construction our cells cannot function optimally – we cannot ward off viruses as well”, and, “this degeneration of the cell membrane is cumulative as we continue to eat these trans fats every day – it doesn’t improve over time, or simply vanish, it slowly gets worse and worse.”
My second example is sugar – it’s not just extra calories, it will rob your body of minerals, weaken your immune system, put you on the insulin roller coaster (which we talked about before), stress and fatigue your adrenal glands, and feed harmful yeast and bacteria in your digestive system (causing a host of problems that I will talk about later). These are not things you can jog off! This is why you won’t hear me talk about calories here. It is all about WHAT we are eating, not necessarily HOW MUCH.
I was talking to my husband about this the other night and he always comes up with the best analogies. He said, “How does your car do if you add some water in with the gasoline?” We all know, it’s won’t run well at all, even if there is just a LITTLE bit of water added. Our bodies are the same, a little bit of bad is still bad and our bodies won’t run optimally on food that man has adulterated. My point is not to convince you into changing eating habits by making you feel guilty, but rather, I don’t want you to be deceived. I want you to be well informed and make informed choices!
I’m asking you to renew your mind in this area, make a paradigm shift. Just because exercise doesn’t counteract these junk food woes, doesn’t mean we stop exercising. It means we work on cutting out the junk food. Your sole source of trans fats is packaged food. Don’t buy margarine or ANY butter substitute (if it’s not butter, it was made by man), don’t use shortening in your baking, don’t buy pre-made pie crust – make your own with butter. Practically every peanut butter on the store shelf2 contains trans fat; unfortunately you can’t trust the labels to give you full disclosure. Look for PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED OIL on the ingredient listing, if it is there, DON’T buy the item. This is listed on so many foods that most of us don’t realize. When I mention trans fats, most people say, “I don’t use margarine, I only use butter.” That is FANTASTIC, but trans fats are in peanut butter, chips, crackers, graham crackers, pre-made pie crusts, all canned dough, like crescent roll dough and pizza crust; cookies, snack cakes, candy, candy bars, some breads, frozen French fries, fish sticks, pizza, chicken nuggets, burritos, pot pies, cake mixes, Bisquick, canned frosting, and flour tortillas to name a few. This is one of the reasons why these items ended up on the bottom rung above fast food on my ladder.
I think I’ve hammered away at the trans fat issue, let’s get back to sugar. We can drastically limit our sugar intake by cutting out packaged food, also. Trans fat is an item you don’t ever want, but sugar is something I know we will all eat from time to time. A good friend of mine uses a word that fits well here – deliberate. We must be deliberate in everything, raising our children, spending money, even how we eat. I will deliberately eat a dessert now and then, but I try VERY hard NOT to allow sugar into my diet that I don’t deliberately want! The two ways we are deceived into unknowingly eating sugar are through deceptive marketing and ignorance. Many foods are marketed as healthy, but contain lots of sugar, such as breakfast cereals, sweetened yogurt, granola bars, fruit snacks (these are just candy, folks), fruit roll-ups, many juices, smoothies, and vitamin waters. This is where those imaginary tiny scales come in again. I think most people are aware that these foods contain sugar, but they believe the vitamins, whole grain fiber, or beneficial bacteria in that item balance it out. I will say it again – we must shift our thinking away from this balancing act. Remember the car running with water in the tank. Now for ignorance, there are a lot of items that contain sugar as a flavor enhancer, but are not dessert, so we don’t really think we are eating sugar. Things we all use, like ketchup, salad dressing, pickles, dip, Miracle Whip, salsa, and more. This is where label reading will help you out. Sugar is easy to pick out of ingredient listings, but also be aware of sugar’s other names – high fructose corn syrup and anything ending in –ose, dextrose, glucose, sucrose, etc.
So be informed, be deliberate, do what you can do and don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can somehow balance the junk food with something like veggies or exercise. Take you babysteps and move toward the whole food that God created that fuels your body the most effectively!
1 Quoted from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
2 You can find natural peanut butter. I buy Smucker’s; it only contains peanuts and salt.
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