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Nutritional healing is a method of healing and medicine that using natural foods, herbs, and other nutritional sources to support health as well as prevent and treat diseases.
How does Nutritional Healing Work?
Nutritional healing involves consuming specific fruits, vegetables, and other foods, abstaining from others, and use dietary supplements like herbs, vitamins, and minerals to meet all your nutritional needs. Nutritional therapy even uses natural foods to create topical therapies that can be used to heal and prevent problems.
There is a holistic approach to wellness used in nutritional healing that involves herbology, spirituality, nutritional science, and bodywork that combine to provide your body with everything it needs to keep itself healthy and well. 
Those who practice this technique believe that strategic eating, as well as abstaining from some foods, can reverse many ailments. One tenet of nutritional healing is that keeping your immune system healthy and robust, via proper nutrition as well as lifestyle choices. It will allow your body to fight disease and keep you healthy.
How Does the Body Use Nutrients?
Because health is greater than just the absence of any disease, nutritional healing also focuses on proper eating to support emotional and spiritual health, as well.
Nutrition with the food you take in provides you with:
- the energy you need to enjoy and take part in your life,
- helps to regulate your hormones effectively,
- enables you to balance the many needs of your body
To fully understand the link between diet and health, we can look to comprehensive research on the relationship between nutrition and the development of the disease. Longitudinal research conducted in Chine helps us to understand the influence diet has on disease prevention. (Source)
Nutritional Healing Fundamentals
From this landmark study, we learned several fundamental principles that are important for nutritional healing.
- Nutrition is not just the foods you eat but how they influence one another
- Food has much better nutrients than supplements
- Nutrition plays a significant role in whether genes are activated to express certain diseases
- Fight the effects of harmful toxins with Nutrition
- Prevent, halt, and reverse many diseases with proper nutrition
- Quality nutrition helps all aspects of your well-being
- Nutrition that prevents disease is also good for your overall health.
- Plants supply more efficient and quality nutrition than animals
When you begin to look closely at the literature and research on diet and nutrition, there is a remarkable consensus about what is healthy, what is not, and what you should eat to prevent disease as well as treat it. (Source)
What Do Nutrients Do for Your Body?
To understand which foods are healthiest for your body, it is essential to understand just exactly what your body needs to function well. Here is a primer on nutrition that will give you the basics for better health.
Nutrients are the basic nourishing compounds found in food. They are essential for the development, growth, and maintenance of all your body’s cells. Metabolic processes in cells slow or stop when sufficient nutrition is lacking.
All food compounds can be divided into one of two categories.
1. Why Do You Need Macronutrients?
Macronutrients include carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and micronutrients, which are the vitamins and minerals found in food. (Source)
Each macronutrient plays a specific role in your health and supplies your body with different types of energy. Your body needs macronutrients in large quantities to accomplish normal functions. Most foods contain some amount of all three macros.
2. What Are Micronutrients and Why Are They so Important
Micronutrients are present in foods in much smaller amounts. You need less of these for daily function, but they are nonetheless particularly important for cellular function. The micros work alongside the macros to support body functions, cellular processes, and overall health.
You need all these things and abstaining from one category or eating too much of another can have serious implications for your health. When you learn to see food as a source of energy and sustenance for your body, you can start to use foods as medicine and engage in nutritional healing.
Food for Optimum Nutrition
Paying attention to what you eat, what food you choose to fuel your body, is vitally important to your overall health and well-being. 
Besides exercise, there is no greater influence on your health and fitness than your nutrition.
You have the power to prevent diseases from occurring and to even treat many chronic illnesses just by changing the foods you eat.
It is no coincidence that as our diet has become more processed and fuller of excess calories, fat, and salt, we have become a heavier, sicker nation.
The incidence of heart disease in the US continues to rise, as do rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and many other chronic illnesses. All while we eat out more, consume fewer whole foods, and rely heavily on packaged and processed meals to feed us. (Source)
If you do not give your body the nutrients it needs, you will not be able to support good health. It’s that simple. 
Using nutritional healing, you can reverse many chronic illnesses. You can protect yourself from future disease, and ensure that you live a long and healthy life.
The Role of Food in Your Health
Instead of thinking of food as something we enjoy eating or something, we do to pass the time, it is becoming more and more necessary to start thinking about the food we eat as medicine.
If you take the right medicine every day, you can treat diseases you may have, stay healthier longer, and feel better. And all of that is possible when you eat the right food.
Food’s role in your health is pretty simple. Food is what allows your body to function. 
Food provides your cells with the building blocks they need to perform their functions, it prevents disease, and it will enable you to maintain your health. If you do not give your body the right kind of food, it can’t carry out these goals, and your metabolic processes will suffer, causing problems with your health.
When the food you eat has the wrong nutrition, your cells can’t do what they need to do. When you overeat, your cells have too much and can’t use it all up. These imbalances create a situation where our bodies are overweight yet undernourished, and we become at risk for diseases. (Source)
If medicine is the maintenance of health and the prevention or cure of disease, then shouldn’t the food you consume every single day be considered the most important medicine you take?
Learning to Eat Mindfully
More and more, our choices in food are influenced by others- ads, food packaging, social media, peer pressure, etc. 
The way we select food is often based more on “want” than “need,” which means we are often choosing foods that satisfy pleasure centers of our brains but not the nutritional needs of our cells.
In addition to learning WHAT to eat, it is also important to learn HOW to eat. Most of us pay very little attention to the impact food actually has on our bodies. Learn to eat more mindfully. Attune yourself to your body’s signals. That will help you pay better attention to the effect your food is having on your health. (Source)
Mindfulness is a practice whereby you focus your attention solely on one thing while you are actively engaged in it.
Mindfulness can be used in meditation, to help you listen to your own body and its needs. But you can also learn to pay attention to your body by engaging in mindful eating.
Becoming mindful of your food habits and choices means paying attention and responding to your body’s signals. For example, do you find that you are always hungry an hour or two after you eat breakfast?
You may not be giving your body enough protein or complex carbohydrates in your morning meal, which leads to hunger very quickly.
Stop Food Cravings with Mindful Eating
Even specific food cravings can be a signal that your body is low is a specific nutrient. A desire for chocolate often signals a magnesium deficiency. An urge for baked goods could mean you need more chromium, while cheese cravings could say you are low in essential fatty acids. (Source)
For each of these unhealthy food urges, there is a healthy food choice. They will give your body the nutrients it needs without the unhealthy fat and calories.
Mindful eating also means paying attention while you are eating. So that you recognize when you are full, how food is making you feel, and what emotions you attach to eating.
While you are eating, you should be doing nothing else, so that you can be attuned to how food makes you feel. This habit will also reduce habits of mindless eating, snacking, and grazing that often contribute to weight gain, too.
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