Lifestyle Master Program

Author(s): Ellen Livingston
Publisher: Ellen Livingston

Page 28

Lifestyle Master Program
eBook 1.0 by Ellen Livingston
compromised. Creating vibrant health is a lifelong journey. The key is to be aware of where your efforts can best be focused to bring about the most beneficial results. You can keep a vision in your mind of gradually bringing all the spokes of your wheel into alignment with the rim, or nurturing your weak links until you can bring all the requisites of health into balance.
Here are seven of the most common pitfalls:
1. Not enough fruit
Fruit is the staple of a healthy diet. It is the major source of our healthy calories. Vegetables are important and provide us with lots of nutrients, but they do not contain enough calories to sustain us and many of them are tough to chew and digest. Fatty foods like avocado and nuts are calorically dense, but a healthy diet gets less than ten percent of its calories from fat. That leaves whole juicy fresh fruit as our primary food for health. Most people don't realize just how much fruit we need to eat to meet our caloric needs, especially when we become naturally active.
Because of its high water content, we must eat a much larger volume of fruit than of more concentrated cooked (or dehydrated) foods, to get the same number of calories. This takes some practice! Our stomach loses its natural elasticity on a typical lower volume diet, and we must help it to regain this ability to stretch and flex so that it can comfortably accommodate a normal quantity of water-rich fresh foods. In the beginning, if you eat a juicy fruit meal until you feel full, you may have not eaten enough because your stomach wasn't elastic enough to expand as you ate. Initially it is helpful at each meal to eat until satiated, then to
Lifestyle Master eBook 1.0 The Campaign for Aging Research