Nourish Your Self Whole

New column by author Matthew Albracht

Dear Friends,

We have a new addition for our paid subscribers: the Nourish Your Self Whole column by author Matthew Albracht. Matthew was such a popular guest on our monthly paid subscriber community call, we thought it would be great for him to share more of his information here.

Enjoy!

MW

Nourish Your Self Whole
By Matthew Albracht

Taking good care of our physical health and nourishment is a crucial part of living a vibrant, joy-filled life—as well as helping us be of highest service towards a healed planet. It’s all deeply interconnected.

Healthy nutrition and lifestyle choices are key to keeping our body running in its optimal and precision-tuned natural state of wellness. The unhealthy choices we make are frequently the driving force behind our body’s undue degradation, far more than most people realize. The encouraging news though is that robust health is well within reach for most people. Good food and lifestyle choices are essential medicine.

This is why I’m excited to be joining Marianne’s Transform Substack to share more with subscribers about how you can better claim a healthier physical self. After all, the deepest transformations in life occur when we are deeply tuning into all levels of being—body, mind and spirit. 

In this Nourish Your Self Whole series, we’ll explore many topics related to good health, starting with best practices related to food choices, as well as a number of environmental and lifestyle issues that are important. We will focus primarily on the most important and highly-leveraged steps you can take to live more healthily.

Weaving these nutritional and lifestyle “pillars” into your life can help create substantial healing for your body and get you back into the shape in which you can more fully thrive. This will inevitably lead to a more fulfilling and energetic life. And, I believe, it’s one of the ultimate acts of self-love. It will also help you better serve your highest purpose and be an even more powerful ally towards the collective healing of our whole planet.

As we move forward, I’ll also share yummy but healthy recipes, make some live how-to videos from my kitchen, and we can do some periodic live Q&A’s.

This deep dive adventure into healing will be fun for me and I hope for all of you. 

Let’s get started! 

Healthy Eating Doesn't Have to Hurt…

In fact, as I’ll share more in this series, a healthy diet can satisfy your cravings, fill your belly, heal your body and change your life.

For many of us, eating a consistently healthy diet can feel overwhelming and complicated; it may even seem impossible. You may cringe at the thought of giving up your favorite foods or wading through streams of confusing, conflicting data in the hopes of making solid dietary choices. You may even wonder, “Who has the time to become a nutritional expert or the discipline to count every calorie?”

Here’s the good news: You can feed your body the nutrients it needs to thrive without sacrificing your taste for scrumptious flavors, rich and varied textures and portions that allow you to feel full and achieve a well-balanced caloric intake. I’ll help guide you through it all.

Good nutrition can help you: 

• Prevent and, in many cases, reverse disease 
• Generate more energy and vitality
• Improve mood
• Lose unwanted weight without worrying much about calories (eat plenty of the good stuff!)
• Improve blood sugar and cholesterol
• Shed longstanding body aches and pains 
• Clear up foggy-headedness
• Create vibrant skin
• Experience better sleep, and more…

There are many nutrition and lifestyle influences we can all pursue to achieve optimal wellness. The four pillars I’ll start with in this Nourish Your Self Whole series are your best bet when it comes to creating good health, vitality, and a more fulfilling life. Just as physical pillars hold up a building, these four pillars will support your fundamental health and lead you to inspiring results. They are in line with the most up-to-date research, and with nutritional experts who have evidence of success from their own applied practice. I too have seen these principles work in my own life, time and time again. 

These pillars will form a solid foundation for anyone seeking a better quality of life. They will almost certainly help you realize noticeably positive results. While the pillars are not the only things you can do for better health, they are at the top of the list. Below is an overview of each pillar. As we move further into this series, I’ll share much more about each one—giving good data as well as practical tips on how to best navigate your way to good health. 

Foundational Pillar 1: Eat a Whole Foods Diet. We did not evolve eating the chemically laced, overly processed and hyperpalatable foods that line much of our grocery shelves. For millions of years, we evolved eating a diet based on whole foods, not Cheetos and soda. The multinational corporations behind most of our highly processed foods are masters at getting us addicted to maximize their profits. They cram these foods full of preservatives to extend their shelf life, put in cheap and often toxic alternative ingredients to cut costs, and fill them with known addictive ingredients. In fact, these companies spend billions of dollars researching which ingredients will suck you in for more. While they reap financial rewards, we pay the price. 

Whole foods here means foods that are as unprocessed as possible. For instance, a salad of mixed greens, blueberries, sunflower seeds, shredded carrots, avocado, radishes, and your favorite protein would be whole foods, while something like a boxed toaster pastry—full of highly milled and processed flour, sugar, and artificial flavor additives—is not. The additives and preservatives in processed foods work against our thriving health in a myriad of ways and can destroy good “probiotic” gut bacteria. If there are more than five ingredients listed on the label and/or you can’t pronounce them or would need a translation, then a good rule of thumb is to skip it! 

This pillar underlies all the rest. You’ll find that if you follow the other three pillars below, there aren’t many highly processed foods you should or would want to indulge much in anyway. 

Pillar 2: Reduce Sugar and Refined Carbs. We’ll explore why you should reduce your intake of refined sugars and simple carbohydrates. Too much sugar is highly inflammatory in the body and is a hot bed for diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It can disrupt healthy functioning of insulin and other important hormones, and can cause weight gain by triggering the body to store fat, along with a whole host of other troubling consequences. In fact, things like high fructose corn syrup, the main sweetener in sugary soda and many other processed foods, is now believed to be one of the top disease creators on the planet. 

Highly processed grains, especially refined (or “white”) flours, quickly turn into sugar in your bloodstream as well, so they should be kept to a minimum. 

Pillar 3: Eat Good Fats, Ditch Bad Fats. You’ve probably heard by now that there are good and bad dietary fats. We will look at why you should delight in eating plenty of healthy and satiating fats. These can include: extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil (all cold-pressed); and for non-vegetarians/vegans, ghee, high-quality fish oil, and grass-fed animal fats. These kinds of healthy fats offer critical nutrients. They are often anti-inflammatory and help fuel your body more sustainably than sugar. 

Most of us aren’t actually getting enough good fat, so add a little butter back to those sautéed vegetables! We’ll also explore why you should eliminate bad, inflammatory fats, which we are getting far too much of in our modern diets, but can be a major contributor to cancer and heart disease, to name a few. These include easily oxidized industrial oils from vegetable seeds like canola, soy, corn, safflower, sunflower, and so on. (Yes, I know, we’ve been told over the last few decades that they are better than whole food based unrefined fats, but they are not). It’s also critical to strictly avoid all hydrogenated and trans fats, but beware—they are hiding out in all kinds of processed foods. The good news is that you can be quite liberal with how much healthy fat you are eating, swap it out for the refined carbs and sugars. Be decadent!

Pillar 4: Indulge in a Rainbow of Vegetables (and a Bit of Fruit): Vitamins, Minerals, Antioxidants, Phytonutrients and Fiber. Eat as many vegetables as you can possibly consume each day. Six to ten servings a day are a good target. Fruits are important, too; just keep them on the modest side. They are loaded with sugar. Fruit should be kept to one to two servings a day for most people, depending on how well your body can balance its blood sugar. 

Delight in as many colors and varieties of vegetables and fruits as you can. When it comes to produce, the individual colors of the rainbow contain different phytonutrients that are critical for our bodies’ optimal function. The vast array of nutrients all contribute to a vibrantly functioning body and are especially crucial in keeping disease-causing stimuli (like inflammation) at bay. They are the best antidote to wrangling free radicals in your body, which are a primary cause of cancer. So, eat up!

The most important thing to keep in mind is that all four of the pillars work in powerful concert with one another. Each supports the other in crucial ways that will reveal themselves as we move forward. That doesn’t mean you have to be at 100% compliance in every one to get benefits, every step you take will help, but the further along you push the envelope into each of the pillar’s guidelines, the more benefit you’ll obviously see.

In the coming months, I’ll share much more on each of these, as well as lots of other good stuff. I’ll home in on the most highly-leveraged steps, that would have the most positive impact to best maximize your valuable time and energy. 

As we move along, let me know how it’s going for you. I hope we can have a dynamic relationship together towards a more nourished and whole self. 

BIO:

Matthew Albracht is the author of the book: Nourish Your Self Whole: A Guide to Core Dietary Pillars, with Achievable Steps for Vibrant Health. Link: https://amzn.to/3jYsfyp He is a certified Functional Medicine Health Coach and has a B.A. in psychology and an M.A. in Humanities and Leadership with a focus on Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community.

Matthew’s writings have appeared on CNN, HuffPost, Medium and other outlets. He is also a former Executive Director and current Board Member of The Peace Alliance (www.thepeacealliance.org). 

You can learn more at www.nourishyourselfwhole.com or follow him on social @MatthewAlbracht

Disclaimer:

This health information being shared is only intended as a reference and is for educational purposes only. It should not be considered as medical advice. Readers should always consult doctors and other trained health professionals if facing health challenges.