Eat Your Veggies!

Hey y’all,

I had a lightbulb moment tonight

I’m watching a documentary called “Un-Inflame Me” (I found it on Amazon Prime, but it’s awesome, so watch it wherever you can). I had heard several times that eczema and several other auto-immune disorders were due to having a build-up of toxins in the body. Over the past year and a half I did a ton of stuff to detox my body, but I did wonder about why I had so many food-sensitivities and why my eczema came back with a vengeance despite avoiding many triggers and only partaking in a few occasionally once my skin healed. While watching this documentary, they reiterated the toxin point from the view of chronic inflammation.

Eczema is just one of a plethora of symptoms that can come from chronic inflammation. I’m not sensitive to specific foods, but specific foods are very inflammatory. If you eat too many inflammatory foods or have an inflammatory lifestyle, it can cause you to become chronically inflamed.

I’ve learned just how important anti-oxidants are for inflammation. A few days ago, I wrote a blog post called “All or Nothing Diet.” In it, I said that veggies were something that you either ate a lot of or didn’t eat at all when you were trying to heal an auto-immune disorder. I still think that’s true while you are initially healing, but veggies are super important for maintenance.

While you can heal while eating only meat, it’s a lot like eating only white potatoes. You’re not helping your body; not really. You’re simply avoiding foods that can cause more inflammation. Many vegetables can cause slight inflammation before they release their anti-inflammatory power, so it’s a good idea to avoid them at first (especially ones that grow above ground – root veggies don’t cause as many problems).

In my previous post, I also said that it was good to eat a lot of veggies. Of course, at the time I didn’t say about how much since I didn’t know myself. I just thought “a lot” would get the point across. However, the documentary I just watched mentioned that you want to eat colorful (purple is best) fruits and veggies for about 50% of the majority of your meals.

I did find a quick article about the best anti-oxidant/anti-inflammatory foods, but the easiest thing to remember is to eat fruits and veggies WITH COLOR. Yes, bananas taste good, and white potatoes taste good, but even though those are a fruit and a vegetable, they are white/pale yellow and don’t really contain that many anti-oxidants.