Articles by Donna DiMarco

  By Donna DiMarco, CN, LNC

Do you love yourself? Do you love yourself enough to take care of your health, to change a bad habit, to prevent disease? Do you love yourself enough to physically be healthy to stay around another few years with a good quality of life? If you said “no” to any of these, you may want to search deeply for the reason you feel you are not worth the effort.

I’m going to talk about how we might give ourselves the ultimate gift of love: health. What is it? What if I lost it already? Is it gone forever? How can I keep from losing it in the first place? What can I do naturally that might help? I hope to help you to make that first step, simply and safely. Do YOU love yourself enough to do some of it? I’m going to take you through some simple steps to better health. Keep copies of these articles to provide a sequential direction toward wellness. These are the same things I do for my clients and if you accept the challenge, you will be empowered to be your own nutritionist—without the fee!

What is health? The answer is simple; it is the absence of disease, degeneration and symptoms. In other words, total functionality of your body. Many people accept the nagging backache, the frequent headaches, the lack of energy, lack of libido, stuffy nose, gas, constipation, stiff joints, etc, etc. I frequently hear people tell me that they never realized how many “little things” they tolerated unconsciously until they discover they are gone. I bet if you tallied every little symptom, you’d be amazed at the length of the list.

Some people already have a disease, like multiple sclerosis or cancer. Does that mean they are lost? No way, it means there are different degrees of health. The diabetic may still take insulin, the MS patient may still be in a wheelchair, or the cancer patient may still need to have a cancerous growth removed. But there are things we can do to speed up healing, reduce or minimize the symptoms, or delay the advancement of the disease.

Many people aren’t aware of how important their dietary habits are. So many clients may have a stuffy nose, or watery eyes find quick relief by eliminating the one or two foods they eat the most on a daily basis. This list often includes: sugar, dairy, wheat, coffee, and yes, soy. “But I thought soy is so good for us?” Even the good things can have a negative effect if we consume too much of them; soy is hidden in many foods in the form of soy oil and lecithin.  I suggest you rotate your foods every other day. That means if you eat whole-wheat toast one morning, you won’t have a hamburger on a bun for lunch, or pasta for dinner, or some brown gravy thickened with flour the following day.

How much dairy do you consume? “Well I never drink milk”, you reply. But how about the cream in your coffee, the cheese you snack on, the pancakes made with added milk, and that luscious milk chocolate that we so often crave? Are your bagels spread with cream cheese? Is there milk in your mashed potatoes?

Keep a food diary of everything you eat for a week. Scrutinize it for patterns of a single food. Use a colored highlighter to signify wheat and a different color for each food you are checking. See if one or two colors appear each day. That would be the food to eliminate. Cut it totally from your diet for three weeks. Note your symptoms before you begin, then check your symptom list after three weeks of offending food elimination. Is there any change? Look at yourself carefully. Are you still bloated after a meal? Can you wake up a little more enthusiastically and energetically? Are your bowels better? Are you taking as much allergy medicine? The results will reveal what your first step should be.

Are you worth the effort it will take to keep that food out of your diet for a while? If you just proved to yourself that you feel better by just eliminating that food for three weeks, why would you want to go back to eating it again regularly? Are you not worth being symptom free? Yes, you can occasionally eat the offending food, but that should only be once or twice a month, and never on consecutive days, and only after abstaining from it for a month.

This is not a food allergy, but a sensitivity. It’s the body’s way of saying, “Notice, I can’t handle any more wheat, dairy, or whatever” By eliminating a particular food you are giving the body a rest from working so hard to detoxify it. You literally give your body a vacation. When you add supplements that aid digestion, detoxification and/or elimination, you are helping it rest and recover even faster by doing some of the work for it. Very often certain supplements are only necessary for a season until the body is recuperated enough to go back to work with full steam.

How about it? Do you love yourself enough to begin this journey to wellness? Will you do these few simple tasks, will you eliminate at least one food that you eat every day? Are you worth it? I think you are, join me!

Donna