When you eat the wrong foods for your body, or are dealing with high levels of stress, or are trying to recover from an injury, you’ll always be a little inflamed. These anti-inflammatory diet rules can help guide better choices.
Inflammation in your body isn’t good. It’s often connected with the health of your joints. In my experience when people clean up their diet while working with me they always get better results, but starting to change your food habits can feel complicated and even overwhelming.
There a lot of different approaches to what you should eat. We have books and information within the practice to help people making healthier choices. But my suggestion for the simplest way to just get started is to consider these 3 anti-inflammatory diet rules:
Avoid products containing ingredients that you wouldn’t keep in your pantry.
Long food ingredients that you don’t recognize? Xanthan, gum, cellulose, calcium propionate? If you wouldn’t cook with them yourself, why let others use these ingredients? Why let them make a food product for you? The chemistry set created by food scientists is primarily designed to extend shelf life and make old food look and taste fresher and more appealing than it truly is. Start reading labels and if you can’t understand what the words mean, don’t put the item in your cart.
Avoid foods that have some form of sugar or sweetener listed among the top three ingredients.
Labels list ingredients by weight. Any product that is more sugar than other ingredients has too much sugar. Complicating matters even more is that there are now over 40 types of sugar used in process food, including barley, malt, brown rice syrup, cane juice, corn sweetener, dextrose, fructose, fruit, juice, concentrate glucose, be sugar to name just a few. Sugar is sugar, and it’s not good for you. The more you can cut it out the better.
Avoid health products that make health claims .
I’ve always thought it’s a bit ironic for a product to carry a health claim on their packaging. The very fact the food is packaged already shows its not amongst the healthiest choices. Straight up, if it’s in a package it’s likely to be processed rather than whole food.
Shop the perimeter of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
Processed food products dominate the centre aisles of the store while the fresh food line the walls because they need refrigeration. If you stick to shopping the outer walls, you’ll likely have a better chance of real food in your shopping cart. Better yet, with the warmer months upon us – hit up one of the local farmer’s markets!
Making good food choices doesn’t have to be complicated, just start with these simple rules and experiment with new foods as much as you can. Before you know it, you may find yourself with a new palate and curiosity to keep learning!
