How Does Healthy Eating Impact Health?

What is the role of food in our lives? It is difficult to underestimate its central position, as human beings see food not only as the mean to feed the body but also as a way to change emotional and even social status. Starting from the time we are born, food becomes closely connected to our emotions. A crying infant gets a mother’s breast or a bottle to calm down. Nearly every celebration, whether it is wedding, birthday, graduation or some holiday, promotes the cult of food. As the result, we are constantly replacing our bad emotions with food in order to feel better. At the same time, advertising tells us that women should stay thin and men beefing up in order to be sexually appealing and loved. So there is no wonder why people have such mixed feelings about food and sometimes have to experience such extremes as cravings, dieting, stuffing, fasting, gorging, starving, etc.

It is a vicious cycle. We eat to influence our emotions, to feel better and to relieve stress and, as the result, create extra problems. We are facing to weight problems that make us feel unattractive, disappointed and stressed. We allow some eating disorders such as anorexy and bulimy to appear. What is more, we put ourselves at risk for the development of a number of diseases, including arthritis, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. So instead of becoming happier and healthier, the outcome of emotional eating is exactly the opposite.

In order to avoid situations when food literally ruins your life, it is important to have a clear understanding of how exactly it influences your health, not only physical but mental, social and intellectual as well.

How Does Healthy Eating Impact Our Physical Health?

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The food we eat provides the body with information and materials that determine its functioning. Depending on the information, the body responds with functioning properly or develops some diseases. In other words, the food you eat is either healing you or killing you.

The materials your body gets from the food are nutrients such as protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins, and minerals. The information can be seen as a transformed energy. The thing is that the food you eat contains some life-sustaining energy. In other words, when you eat, your body absorbs the energy of nature that extracts from your food. So your food choices determine the quality of nutrients and kind of information that you bring into your body.

Fresh, whole, live, organic foods feed the body with natural energy and a more complete and balanced set of nutrients than processed foods that contain such elements as chemicals of artificial colors and flavors, preservatives, pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics. It means that conscious, healthy eating, in comparison to emotional one, can help you to turn on healing processes in your body, to become healthier and to make your life more joyous, to fill it with energy and love.

How Does Healthy Eating Impact Our Mental Health?

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The food we eat also affects mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, such contributions of food are not often discussed and most of us are unaware of them and do not connect our mental health to our food choices. Nevertheless, when you start eating healthier and replace emotional eating with conscious one, you can notice positive changes in your mood. Furthermore, your attitude towards life and yourself changes for better as well.

Healthy foodaffects your body chemistry and can release you from such unbearable mental disorders as depression.For example, whole grains, the same to Prozac – the “feel good” drug of choice in America, increase the level of serotonin in your body. So eating whole grains make you feel better and allow your body to handle stress. Furthermore, such conditions as depression are often caused by the lack of vitamin B, calcium and iron, and all those elements can be extracted from food.

When it comes to spirituality, one of its key aspects is often associated with seeing the body as a temple in which the spirit dwells. In this way, conscious eating always promotes a better attitude towards yourself, your body and your life, increases your spirituality and serves as a mean of integration between your mind, body, and spirit. As the result, you feel ongoing harmony with yourself, your life, the world, and the universe. Also, you promote your awareness about subtle energies stored in your food. So the food you eat can be seen as an element that increases your awareness and becomes its reason at the same time. It is exactly your awareness that becomes the reason for a better understanding of the effect of food on you. What is more, your awareness allows you passionately discover a new world of healthy foods, learn new cooking techniques and enhance the healing energy of food.

How Does Healthy Eating Impact Social Health?

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It is not a secret that healthy eating normalizes your weight, so you can feel more confident and attractive. Furthermore, healthy eating increases your energy and strengthens your mental health, so you can enjoy higher self-esteem. Also, you become more confident socially and, as the result, bring new friendships and romantic connections into your life.

It is worth to mention that healthy eating can also be seen as a kind of social activity. It that way, it can strengthen family ties, as well as add some rituals for connecting with each other to couples and friends.

How Does Healthy Eating Impact Intellectual Health?

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The lack of nutrition needed for adequate body functioning is one of the main reasons why sometimes it is so hard to focus and learn some new information. Furthermore, the same condition often causes headaches, your intellectual performance slows down. All you have to do to increase your intellectual performance and to allow your brain to work at full speed, is to make healthy food choices.  

To sum everything up, we can say that the food you eat influence all the major spheres of your life. So it does not matter what are your reasons to switch your food preferences to healthy ones, the result will definitely surpass all your expectations. Nevertheless, always remember that if you want to enjoy all the advantages of healthy eating, try not to turn it into another diet – it has to become your lifestyle.