Have you ever noticed as you get older the more and more Prevention magazine cover headlines actually apply to you? It’s as if you woke up one day and traded “Must have shoes for spring” with “get rid of wrinkles with this common vegetable.” That said, there’s a lot of hype even around health and wellness as we’re goggling anti-aging diet at 2:30 in the morning when we can’t fall back to sleep. While we know more about the body and food’s effect on it than we ever have before, the basics ares till true, we really are what we eat. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fully ring home until something happens and we’re forced to make amends.
This happens for several reasons.
When we’re young, we unconsciously take for granted our body’s ability heal itself from the damage we do to it by what we think, what we feel (as in stress), and of course what we eat. I think back to all the years of staying up late dancing, having a great time with my friends, and all the diet sodas I drank. Not to mention all the times I put my body into shock with all the fad diets I tried. Now, I’m having to do major repair and the first line of defense is through the food I eat. As Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine said, Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” That goes for anti-aging as well.
Unfortunately, eating for anti-aging is not as sexy as buying the latest cutting edge serum. I’m as guilty as the next 40 year old woman. But nothing we put on our skin for anti-aging can compare to what we eat.
According to this article, senescence, the process of growing old, begins at the cellular level. Of course, it makes a lot of sense. Even so, we’re not conditioned to do anything tangible about it.
Perhaps it goes back to how we were educated about food growing up. We were taught to eat because a) we need to eat real food in order to get desert, b) because we’re hungry, or c) because it’s on the table.
For the most part, we weren’t taught that we eat to give our bodies fuel. We eat to support our bodies at the cellular level, making sure they get the nutrients to keep doing their thing, including multiplying and dividing.
If we had, perhaps this whole aging thing would be such a big hairy deal to unwind.
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