Think, Eat, Be Healthy

Tips For Healthy Whole Food Diets Part 1

beets, baby beets, fresh beets, beet greens

Baby beets fresh from pots in the backyard garden. The greens will also be eaten.

I am a true believer in eating a healthy whole food based diet. To me this means nothing more than eating food as nature provides it to us: without a lot of processing that strips away important nutrients and fiber; without added man made chemicals, antibiotics and hormones; without man made chemical pesticides and herbicides; without altered fatty acid profiles because cattle and dairy cows were fed grain instead of grass and without altered genes because some multi-national corporation decided that corn should be resistant to herbicides or that cows and salmon should grow faster. Eating a whole food diet means eating what we evolved to eat and what our digestive systems are designed for. A diet based on whole foods is the surest and fastest way to achieve optimum health for our bodies and minds.

Many seem to think that eating this way takes a lot of time, that it is difficult, that meals won’t taste as good and that it costs a lot more. I want to show everyone that none of these objections needs to be true although all of them can be true. Unless the majority of your meals currently come from fast-food and chain restaurants, I hope to convince you that the switch to a healhty whole food diet can be both easy and painless.

eggs, chicken eggs, fresh eggs, backyard chickens, urban chickens

Fresh eggs from a friend with urban chickens.

Most of my personal meals are designed as one- or two-pan meals. I do not like to wash dishes. Most of the meals I make for myself take 45 minutes to one hour from start to finish. There are other things I would rather be doing than cooking and I can often get a few other short tasks done while a meal finishes simmering on the stove or baking in the oven. I am not a big fan of overly complicated and time consuming recipes. Delicious food can also be simple and fast to prepare. And spending more money than absolutely necessary is far from the top of my list.

In this series of posts I will go into detail about how to plan healthy, nutritious, whole food based meals that don’t take a lot of time. You will learn a few kitchen short-cuts and secrets to simplify food preparation. I will tell you how to minimize dirty dishes by basing most meals around one or two pots and pans. Most of all, I will try to impress upon you why it is so important for health to eat this kind of diet even when it seems a little less than convenient.

carrots, baby carrots, red carrots, white carrots, backyard garden, carrot greens

Baby red and white carrots fresh from the garden.