04/03/2026
I was called a health nut this week, so I embraced it and turned it into a newsletter! Sign up for my newsletters on www.passporttochange.co.uk
Our society continually gives us mixed messages about food, you can eat healthy foods when you are on a diet, or training in the gym, but when you aren’t what are you doing eating like that for! Are you not missing out? We know that the right foods help us to change our body shape, and our energy levels, this is shown time and time again with people who have started to go to the gym, weight loss groups, and change things for themselves. But when we consider doing this because we have an illness we are told that diet has no bearing on health, and won’t make any difference, which surely can’t be the case? During illness a healthier approach to food is ignored and when you do decide to go down a healthier route well suddenly you are considered the health nut in the household.
Now labelled as a health nut because you are now eating smoothies, omelettes, porridge, salad and doing yoga you become the outlier instead of following the routine of eating a highly processed, synthetically vitamin and mineral enriched cereal for breakfast, followed by the obligatory help me wake up out of my stupor pint of coffee with syrups. Then the can of energy drink at brunch because already the energy is waning despite having the earlier coffee, followed by hot counter foods you are struggling to really identify the ingredients of for lunch cooked in denatured fats.
Now labelled the health nut because you’ve chosen to chew your food and take your time over it, this is instead of eating on the run, giving the message to the body that it’s not the food that is important but the activity you are carrying out is. This rush suppressing the digestive process, leaving you with poorly digested food causing bloating, reflux, excess acidity and digestive issues. Bloating is just the start of the digestive discomfort, one of those dashboard indicators, that over time becomes a cause for nutritional deficiency, gut dysbiosis, allergies, intestinal permeability, and longer term systemic inflammation. Now, because you’ve chosen to take your time over eating and having balanced meals across the day, you no longer experience bloating and that feeling of tiredness in the afternoon, or need a couple of biscuits and a cup of caffeinated tea at 3pm, to help keep you going for the last couple of hours of slog at work which leaves you shattered.
Because you are eating natural foods as the household…. and what also becomes the work health nut, because I promise you everyone notices when you bring a packed lunch of salad to work, and you are practising good hydration, carrying your water bottle with pride, you leave work with energy, and are able to go to the gym or for a walk and make dinner, and feel motivated. There is no need for you to be buying the cheeky takeaway on the way home from work because there is little energy left at the end of the day to think, never mind cook, or even think about food. Where’s the sofa….
As the household health nut you know that leaving your food preparation choices to others, leaves you with food that can be second rate, nutrient poor, and calorie dense. Cooked in fats that are unhelpful for the balance of the cell membrane, neurotransmitters, triglycerides, cholesterol management and your brain function. Ironically altering the longer term ability to feel better and motivated enough to create a change, whilst over time disconnecting you from your body. Literally now being a health nut is a no brainer!
Let’s celebrate being the health nut in the house and at work, because we realise that the body is just doing its best with the environment we are giving it, we understand that the ball is in our court and the solution is only found within us.
Dis-ease is due to slow changes mostly that we've chosen to ignore the signs we’ve had often for years and in some cases decades, the discomfort experienced is the body’s signals to listen and change. The body has a way of just stopping us in our tracks. If you won't listen it will at some point make you listen and pay attention. It will pull your attention to it. Change, it whispers, please change it patiently asks, until it shouts listen, if we still ignore it then it will stop you, and this is when clients tell me that healing takes a lot of effort. No energy to take part in life.
Illness and dis-ease are not thousands of separate illnesses, of the many labels we often go in search of to understand what we have, but one illness of the body, mind and spirit, the names and labels we give them, and often we are in search of do not help us to get any further towards health. Instead they tell us something we intuitively knew, that we weren’t living well, we aren’t living within natures laws, and we aren’t living in the way that gives us good health and well being. That label may feel like a lifeline, finally I know what is wrong, but in reality its a name for your symptoms, and learning finally to listen and pay attention to how to undo those symptoms, triage them in the first instance maybe, but in the longer term this is the time to find root cause, to understand what is causing them and potentially become the health nut in the household.
