Is your food your medicine or your poison?

Do you ever feel like your friend can eat anything and appears to feel great and it seems like you can never figure out what food is going to make you sick? 

Or maybe it appears as though your co-worker eats a lot more than you and never gains weight, but you just look at ice cream and you put on 5 pounds? 

It can be hard to make sense of why a diet plan or specific food might be good for someone else but not so good for you. You might be left with questions like what makes me different or why won't my body let me eat the same things?

You are an individual. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to diet, medicine, health, or lifestyle.

For one person a food may act as medicine - reducing inflammation, nourishing the body, and promoting healing. For someone else that same food may be poison and wreak havoc on their gut creating symptoms of digestive upset, brain fog, or making it more difficult to lose weight.

As scientists have unraveled the human genome (your DNA) and continue to learn more every day about the human microbiome (all the microbes that live in your body), we can grow in understanding human individuality. With that increasing knowledge, we must tailor the recommendations for health, diet, and medicine to each individual. Can we always do that perfectly? Not yet, but we will continue to get closer and closer.

How can food be medicine or poison?

I work with individuals to determine what is the best eating plan for them individually that will be healthy for their gut. With resources such as mediator release testing (MRT) we have the ability to evaluate specifically what foods are creating inflammation in the body and leading to symptoms such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic migraines, or chronic joint and muscle aches and pains. Testing makes it easier, but without testing we can predict based on experiences that may have created an inflammatory response in the body that led to symptoms. We can then begin to create a diet that is very specific for that individual and will promote good health.

For example, my client Sara and I worked together and used MRT testing. We found she had a very strong inflammatory response to avocado, a common food in her diet. But we know avocado is a very healthy food – rich in heart healthy monounsaturated fats!  Generally, would I recommend someone cut avocado out of their diet? No. For Sara, is that the recommendation I made? Yes, because Sara had a food sensitivity to avocado. With the temporary removal of avocado and other changes to her diet, she saw an elimination of digestive upset, chronic fatigue, brain fog, and joint aches and pains. For many, avocado may be medicine helping to raise heart health HDL cholesterol, but for Sara right now, they were her poison.

So what is right for you?

If you struggle with low energy, maintaining a healthy weight, having a clear head, a healthy digestive system, healthy cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure, your body is telling you that something isn’t working properly. This comes back to the question...is the food you eat your medicine or is it your poison? This means you will need to start searching for what diet is best for you.

I encourage everyone to be their own advocate. No one can know your body like you. Listen to your body. What may be good for your friend, family, colleague – may be exactly what isn’t working for you. Take the poisons out of your diet and add more of the foods that are medicine.

If you are struggling to determine why your health isn’t optimal, contact Lynda to make sense of what is the optimal diet for you. Or start today and join my 7-day detox to get a jump start on a nourishing diet, learn what foods make you feel great and which foods are holding you back.