Day 2 of healthy AF week brings you a simple way to remove the processed foods and garbage from your diet.

The biggest tip I can give in this department is to ADD. Add in the good. Before you start to take away the bad, ADD in the good.

Example. Every night you eat a cookie for dessert. From now on eat your cookie; but, add in apple slices or a bowl of berries. You start to create the habit of eating fruit, fiber and a ton of nutrients with your cookie. Eventually you’ll be able to increase the fruit and minimize the cookie. You wont even miss it in the end.

The same goes for veggies at dinner. Instead of removing your starchy carbohydrate and slab of meat, add in your veggies. Start with a small serving of veggies at every lunch and dinner. Just a couple bites. Slowly increase until 1/2 your plate is fruits and veggies and 1/4 lean meats and 1/4 complex carbohydrate.

When you are told you cant have something the first thing our minds want is to HAVE IT! So instead, allow yourself to have it and just add in the good stuff. Easy peasy.

The next helpful tip I can give is to slowly exchange the cheap, unhealthy, made with crap products for better ones.

I have kids right, so an easy example is mac n cheese. It’s easy and cheap to grab the kraft box with food die and pesticide ridden noodles. So a first step isn’t to cut out boxed mac n cheese, it is to buy the organic Annie’s mac n cheese. Eventually leading to better quality home made mac n cheese (really isn’t that hard to make) made with organic noodles and cheese.

Before we start cutting things out take the step to find a healthier version. I follow the @foodbabe and she is an excellent source to show you what products are carrying hidden nasties.

“Let food by thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

Hippocrates

My final thought on taking the first steps to better nutrition is to shop organic. The pesticides in our foods, I believe, are killing our gut microbiome (70% of our immune system lives here). They are filling our bodies with chemicals that we are not naturally made to break down and if we do we are left with fragments of chemicals floating around unable to be processed.

It can be expensive to buy all organic. So follow the EWG Dirty Dozen^TM . This list will give you the top 12 foods you should buy organic. They are the dirtiest, most filled with pesticides. Again by removing these chemicals we are limiting the free radicals floating around in our bodies that if not dealt with lead to disease.

With these easy simple steps you can kick start your disease free life. Small steps add up to create giant leaps. Start small and watch the changes compound.

By taking one small step after another you’re moving toward a life where you thrive.

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