Years ago I was deep in prayer asking God for a better way to eat. I had fought weight problems for years and was just tired of it. The answer that came was this:

Pick it, Eat it!

The answer is the same for you. Raw veggies are the best thing you can put in your mouth. Why raw? Simple. Once food is cooked, canned or frozen, it is no longer alive. Alive for a plant means that it can sprout and the enzymes in the cells are still active. When you eat raw food, chewing breaks up the cell and the plant's enzymes are released to do most of the digesting for you. So the digestion is complete and you absorb all the natural goodness. Why pick it? Because once a food is picked, the healthful goodness begins to decline. Even if you are buying the best quality organic produce, by the time you have brought it home, it has lost a lot of its nutritional value. If you are eating it canned it has almost no nutritional value. The best way to go is an organic home garden.

The easiest way to eat lots of raw veggies is to juice them. Juicing an entire bag of carrots will yield a nice glass of carrot juice, concentrated goodness. You could not eat that many carrots in one sitting because most of the carrot is fiber that the juicer spits out. Yes fiber is our friend and in a perfect world you would eat only raw, but this is not a perfect world so we do the best we can. Another easy way to get your veggies is to drink green drink. This is concentrated veggie juice, although it is not fresh. OK, most green drinks taste like grass, but some are really quite nice. Most people find that once they get in the habit of drinking green drink, they don't want to do without it. So drink up.

The best way to eat is to have several small nutrition packed natural snacks a day instead of the traditional meals. You just have to start thinking about different foods. Fruit, nuts and seeds covered in yogurt is a delicious, filling and nutritious meal. It just is not on your usual list of foods. I keep raw almonds and pecans on my desk to snack on. I am not against meat and cheese; just keep them as unprocessed as you can. It is OK to eat junk food in moderation, but most of us only eat dead processed food. This leads to severe health problems down the road.

Oils go rancid. Man has found that if you hydrogenate them they are more stable. That is how they keep peanut butter such as Jif from having a layer of oil on the top like Smucker's. Hydrogenated oils or trans fats are not something that your body recognizes as food and they cause a host of other problems. Don't put them in your mouth!

MSG (AKA monosodium glutamate, or hydrolyzed vegetable protein) is added to many processed foods. It increases the amount of insulin your body produces and causes you to overeat and is ADDICTIVE. That is right, they are adding things to your food to make you addicted to it. How's that for good business!!!! You can just see God smiling His face upon the creators of this idea waiting for that shocking moment at the locked pearly gates.

Let me give you a very easy rule to eat by:

If God made it, it is probably OK to eat, If man made it, it is probably not OK to eat!

God made: Plants (veggies, fruit, seeds, nuts, roots, mushrooms) and Animals (meat, fish, eggs, dairy) for you to eat. Once man has gotten his hands on any of the above, chances are it is screwed up. Mostly, man will process foods until they no longer contain any nutrition then "enrich" it with fake vitamins. Then you eat an "empty" food. Since your body did not get what it needed, you remain hungry and tend to eat too much. This leads to weight problems. If you eat whole foods full of the nutrition that God gave them, they are satisfying and good for you. You don't overeat because you don't want to.

A major no-no is to eat after 5:00 PM and to make dinner your largest meal. Dinner should be your smallest meal and lunch the medium sized meal. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and should be the largest and most nutritious. Many people are just not hungry in the morning. The main reason you are not hungry is that you are still digesting last night's dinner that was too big and you ate too late. Many people just don't know what to do for breakfast so they eat what the TV advertisements tell them is a complete and healthy breakfast.

I am including my favorite breakfast recipe: Bernice's Berry Best Breakfast. Eggs are also our friends! Pancakes are OK, but don't use store bought "enriched" flour to make them and by all means, do not use a boxed mix. I actually use ground garbanzo beans as my pancake flour. Maple syrup comes from a tree and is not "flavored" manmade junk. Butter comes from a cow and I prefer that all dairy be organic since the toxins the animal consumes tend to be more concentrated in the milk. Sorry, I do not recommend pork products so bacon and sausage are on my hit list, but I'd rather you eat them than empty cereal. At least God made pigs, it is just that the meat is so processed and well pork just does not digest well. If you are worried about eggs and cholesterol, read the article on Cholesterol and eat them anyway!

Everyone complains that they just don't have time to fix breakfast. So here are some suggestions. Make deviled eggs or hard-boiled eggs and just grab and go to work. I've timed it. Bernice's Berry Best Breakfast takes 10 minutes. Pancakes can be made ahead and warmed up in the toaster oven. Cereal is OK, but God did not make instant cereal, He made whole grains. Pour grains into boiling water the let them soak over night and you can heat and eat them in the morning. See breakfast isn't so hard, it just takes planning.

Start looking at the sugar in your life. We have gotten so accustomed to eating very sweet foods that naturally sweet foods just don't seem sweet enough. But stop and look at what you are getting for sweeteners: overprocessed white cane sugar and corn syrup. Can you say hypoglycemia, diabetes and obesity? Try stevia, turbinado sugar and agave nectar for healthy alternatives that taste great. Use caution with the stevia, one teaspoon is the sweetness of a cup of sugar and will have an after taste if you use too much.

No one expects you to change all the eating habits you have had all your life, but if you want to avoid a painfully unhealthy old age it is time to rethink what you are doing. If you put something other than gasoline or gasohol in your car for fuel, it would lead to serious problems very quickly. Well, food is fuel for the body and most of us don't even know what real food is. If you can eat better today then you did yesterday, you have begun.

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