Learning nutritional awareness would normally mean eating whatever makes you feel good; however, if you can’t connect with how your body feels, or if you are disconnected with your emotions, then satisfying them with food justifies unhealthy choices.
So it’s not always as easy as saying, “eat what makes you feel good.” Sometimes, we’re so disconnected from ourselves that it seemingly makes no difference what we eat or drink: we always feel like crap.
If we can’t control our habits and our habits control us, then learning about the relationship between self, body, and mind is going to benefit the way we see life and treat ourselves. This is something we must practice, like anything else in life.
Self-care, specifical nutrition, is one of life’s greatest challenges. Why is that?
Feel better, eat better, feel better
The way we eat is a reflection of how we structure our lives. When we are not so swamped by our worries and anxiety is when we tend to eat better. When we eat better, we are likely to feel more balanced and less susceptible to flare-ups. Nutritional awareness and proper sleep are also interrelated.
Once we can regularly perceive that our first struggle in life is the struggle between self (our conscious awareness as our “self” identity) and our body’s autonomous systems which keep us alive, we’re on track to take better control of our health through conscious moment-to-moment choices.
“Something as simple as food and eating is not about your body as much as it about your mind, it’s getting command of your mind to be able to choose actions which are in your own best interest.”
Will Smith, from “The One Thing Only 1% Of People Do”
The health advantage
Our awareness resides together with the 37 trillion cells which make up our body (1). These cells operate together within an intelligent electric-organic network which can override your awareness. And our consciousness can override our body’s systems, such as when we consciously breathe.
Our self is conscious and our bodymind is subconscious. This concept of ourselves and our mind-body has decades of Mind-Body Science to back it up, more notably since Dr. John Sarno published his book, “The Mindbody Prescription – Healing The Body, Healing The Pain” in 1998 (2).
Treating the connection between our awareness and our mindbody as two separate intelligence systems allows us to make more compassionate nutrition choices for ourselves. We start to realize that our body’s intelligence wants to have a good relationship with us in the driver’s seat, and the link is two-way. If we’re not fighting against our body all the time, then our lives tend to be more stable. We only need to realize we are fighting with ourselves and to stop doing it. It is simply this two-way relationship between self (free will) and our bodymind. Anyone who remains in stillness for long enough will become aware of such observations. Easier said than done.
Our body will reward us with pleasure in equal amounts to our pain, regardless of circumstances. The food we eat has a very large part to play in this story. When we’re willing to compromise and do not choose premium fuel for our organic-oxygen engine, then both our mindbody and our self-identity suffer together.
Books on Nutrition
Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?
Hardcover – February 27, 2018
by Mark Hyman M.D.
How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease
Hardcover – December 8, 2015
Michael Greger M.D., Gene Stone
Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
Paperback – May 6, 2014
T. Colin Campbell, Howard Jacobson (Contributor)
Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Revised Edition
Paperback – January 5, 2011
Joel Fuhrman
The Anti-Inflammatory Diet & Action Plans: 4-Week Meal Plans to Heal the Immune System and Restore Overall Health
Paperback – October 21, 2015
by Dorothy Calimeris (Author), Sondi Bruner (Author)
The Lupus Diet Plan:
Meal Plans & Recipes to Soothe Inflammation, Treat Flares, and Send Lupus into Remission
Paperback – April 25, 2017
by Laura Rellihan RD (Author), Kelli Roseta (Foreword)
Practical applications of nutritional awareness
We need to consume six essential materials for our body to build tissues and function properly(3): amino acids (protein building blocks), complex sugars aka carbs (fast energy), fats (stored energy), vitamins (help cells build things with amino acids), minerals (also help your cells produce proteins from amino acids) and water.
Eat whole food. It is as simple as that. Don’t eat anything out of a box (except maybe healthy cereal?). In general, Americans are overdosing on carbohydrates (sugars). Stop using seed oils! Use olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil, and ghee as healthy oil alternatives. Stop overcooking food.
Stay away from white bread, white rice, pasta, and potatoes and french fries because your body converts these to sugars, and you’re probably overeating sugar to go with your carbs, and then it all turns to fat.
For instance, don’t eat donuts, bagels, cake, ice cream, cookies, candy, and pastries every single day, but save them for unique, “once-in-a-while” occasions when you can reward yourself with low-nutrition-high-sugar food like that. Eating a burger with a bun has more carbs than you need in a meal, and when you add fries and a soda with that, you’re getting a whole day’s worth of carbs in a single meal!
The more life our food has in it when we eat it, the better it is for us. That’s pretty simple. Dead food has none of the life energy our body needs to rebuild our tissues. Keep it simple. No need to make it more complicated than that. Eat dead food long enough and you’ll feel dead inside. Examples of dead food include white bread, instant bleached white rice, bleached white flour, and most pasta. Meat should not be considered as literal dead food unless it has been processed or over-cooked.
Commercial sliced white bread is dead bread and should absolutely not be considered food. Many of us have already shifted our bread purchases toward healthier, multigrain loaves which have a little bit more life in them and are less like eating cardboard. Wonderbread announced shutting down all its factories in 2012 after declaring bankruptcy. Apparently, people were eating over a pound of this stuff every week in the early 60’s (6), but fifty years later weren’t buying enough of the product to keep the company in business.
From the perspective of a healthy diet, we should get more of our carbs from fruits, honey or even maple syrup rather than overloading on the bloating bread, pasta, and potatoes all the time. Seriously, garlic bread with pasta? Want some carbs with your carbs and another beverage full of carbs to go with that? What kind of balance is that? Where are the amino acids? Sadly, this is the standard for American fast food meal! The nutritional value of one particular $4 Real Deal was determined to have four times the recommended carbs for a single meal. These “real deals” are good ways to make you real sick, really fast!
Learning to eat right is a matter of educating ourselves about how to make intelligent choices which are best for the long-term survival of ourselves, our families, and our friends! It starts with just learning to be more aware of ourselves and the self+bodymind relationship.
Water, amino acids (protein building blocks) plus vitamins and minerals. That’s what we need.

There’s a stark contrast between gut-wrenching carb overload versus healthy nutritional fuels.
We don’t even need to count carbs; counting only protein and carbs is a dumbed down method of nutritional awareness. Twenty years from now, counting only protein and carbs will be considered an archaic and uneducated method of knowing what to eat. Fact is, even with this dumbed down method, most folks don’t realize they are having 4x the carbs, 4x the fat, and 4x the protein needed to survive with almost every fast-food meal which comes served with a white bread bun, fried potatoes, and a carbonated sugar drink.
We live on a world where life as we know it would not exist without water. For most of us, the majority of our body is water. Water accounts for at least 60% of our body’s construction and as much as 90% of its weight. Every cell in our body needs water to function. If you aren’t drinking water, you’re starving yourself of 60% of your daily nutritional requirements right off the top.
So drink at least 2 liters of water per day and stop drinking so much alcohol, coffee, and soda. Just get in the habit. How? Fill two 1-liter bottles of water every morning with cold water and set them near where you work or bring them with you. Finish one by 12 noon, and finish the 2nd one by 5pm or before you leave work.
Give up the ridiculous Starbucks sugar drinks with coffee which have 1000 calories and drink more water. Water doesn’t need to be “boring” like so many people think. You can do many wonderful and nutritious things to make your water more interesting, by adding lemon, honey, maple syrup, spices, sparkling water, apple cider vinegar, and other combinations your tongue will relish and which will quench both your thirst and satisfy your taste. The way to make sure you drink enough water is to refill (2) one-liter bottles each morning and put each one near a different part of your home where you visit often. One by your sink, one by your desk, or on the coffee table. Then every time you see it, you take a sip. Finish the first bottle before 3pm. Finish the second bottle an hour or two before bed. Take a glass of water with you to bed; take another drink of water when you get up to pee at night (because you put a glass of water near your bed before going to sleep).
Eat meat and greens if you’re not a vegetarian. Don’t be afraid to eat meat! Learn about amino acids (your body’s building blocks) and stop worrying about protein and carbs. Your body takes 20 different building blocks (amino acids) and makes 20,000 proteins out of them. Your body makes 11 of these building blocks, and you need to eat 9 of the building blocks which your body doesn’t make. Animal protein contains all nine essential amino acids. You can get all nine essential amino acids from plants, but you have to eat a wide variety since no one plant contains all of the nine essential ones.
If you are a vegetarian, all you need to know is a list of which plants, seeds, and nuts, when combined, contain all nine essential amino acids that your body needs (4). Warning to vegetarians on labels: When you see a nutrition label on a “near meat” vegetarian meat substitute with 20 grams of protein,” you need to know this information is bogus. We eat amino acids, and our body manufactures proteins. A label stating “contains 20g protein” is just nonsense, because how do you know whether it supplies you with the nine essential amino acids your body needs or not? What we need to demand is that labels say, “Contains All 9 Essential Amino Acids” and then we’d know it’s a whole food with a complete nutrition profile.
Stop eating just egg whites! You could eat a dozen eggs per week without increasing your risk for heart disease or high cholesterol (5). One large whole egg contains all nine essential amino acids your body needs and could be considered a perfect food, as long as you don’t overcook the yolk. Egg yolks lose their nutritional value the longer they are cooked (7).
Milk contains 18 of the 20 available amino acids, providing your body with 9/10ths of the building blocks it needs to make every molecule your body ever requires to repair and heal itself. Your body makes the other two, so drinking milk can’t be a bad thing if it’s providing essential building blocks.
What is food? Food is something that contains some or all of the nine essential amino acids our body uses as building blocks for every function of every cell in our bodymind system, plus vitamins and minerals, and healthy carbs and fats for energy.
How many essential amino acids does soda have? Zero, none. Thus, it is not food. Consumption of material which is not food contributes to disease and cancer.
Healthy Diet – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (8)
A healthy diet is one that helps to maintain or improve overall health. A healthy diet provides the body with essential nutrition: fluid, macronutrients, micronutrients, and adequate calories.[1][2]
The requirements for a healthy diet can be met from a variety of plant-based and animal-based foods, although a non-animal source of vitamin B12 is needed for those following a vegan diet.[3] A healthy diet supports energy needs and provides for human nutrition without exposure to toxicity or excessive weight gain from consuming more calories than the body requires. A healthy diet, in addition to exercise, may lower disease risks, such as obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.[1][4]
Various nutrition guides are published by medical and governmental institutions to educate individuals on what they should be eating to promote health. Nutrition facts labels are also mandatory in some countries to allow consumers to choose between foods based on the components relevant to health.[5]
The idea of dietary therapy (using dietary choices to maintain health and improve poor health) is quite old and thus has both modern scientific forms (medical nutrition therapy) and prescientific forms (such as dietary therapy in traditional Chinese medicine).
A healthy diet contains a variety of different foods so that your body can get the nutrients it requires to function properly. We’re fueling an intelligent organic machine. Let’s combine our conscious intelligence with our body’s intelligence and formulate a way to make incremental improvements in the way we think about what we eat.
Wikipedia article references from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_diet
- Lean, Michael E.J. (2015). “Principles of Human Nutrition”. Medicine. 43 (2): 61–65. doi:10.1016/j.mpmed.2014.11.009. Retrieved March 31, 2015.
- World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (2004). Vitamin and mineral requirements in human nutrition (2. ed.). Geneva [u.a.]: World Health Organization. ISBN 9241546123.
- Melina, Vesanto; Craig, Winston; Levin, Susan (December 2016). “Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets”. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. 116 (12): 1970–1980. doi:10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025.
- “WHO | Promoting fruit and vegetable consumption around the world”. WHO.
- “Food information to consumers – legislation”. EU. Retrieved 2017-11-24.
Setting benefit expectations
It goes without saying that with nutritional awareness, you’ll feel better and you’ll feel better about yourself. Your immune system helps fight off disease and sickness; eating poorly makes you more likely to be sick and predisposes you to infection.
Eating a healthy diet means you reduce your inflammation, reduce your chronic pain, reduce your anxiety and improve your mental stability. You’ll be less reactive, have more energy, and you’ll be able to focus on your work and be less likely to need help from the pharmacy to sleep at night.
What you maybe can’t see where you are now is that your life choices and self-control will become more comfortable. By establishing a relationship with your bodymind, and by investing energy into learning how to breathe and eat correctly, you’ll eventually learn to change your thoughts, and your behavior will follow.
Best of all, you’ll be in the driver’s seat of your body, and you’ll be in control of your emotions and thoughts more often.
Nutritional awareness is fundamental to your survival

nutritional awareness gives you a new perspective on what you put into your mouth.
As one of the primary foundation categories for bodymind wellness, everyone who learns and applies proper nutritional awareness will benefit tremendously. Indeed, doctors, surgeons, and the insurance industry won’t profit as much if more people in the world were healing themselves with effective non-medical self-interventions.
Our bodies are not a garbage disposal. Consider why we are willing to put only oil and gasoline into our cars, while we’ll put almost anything into our mouths, even when it’s not food nor nutrition. Our food-burning engines are more tolerable to garbage than a car’s gas engine, but generally, both engines run better on premium fuels.
It all starts with a choice to make small improvements, from the command seat of our bodymind. Improving the self-bodymind connection will improve your ability to override emotional or irrational choices through conscious decision making.
Calming our diet may help to calm our body and our mind.
Imagine a better version of yourself
Would you pour anything but gasoline into your car’s gas tank? It’s somewhat astonishing to consider the fact people take better care of their cars than their own bodies.
Try not to put things into your mouth which are not FOOD (sugar, alcohol, an overload of starchy carbs).
Stop being so hard on yourself every time you lose your self-control and revert to bad habits. Eating healthy doesn’t require using recipes. Lightly sauté your choice of vegetables in a stir-fry pain in ghee (mushrooms, spinach, and Brussel sprouts), or throw some veggies like peppers and asparagus in a pan and roast them with olive oil at 450 degrees for 25 minutes. Put meat and vegetables on your plate, forget the potatoes, and drink water with your meals. Eat eggs more often. Learn to cook in larger batches which you can store in the fridge for quick fixin’s.
Find out how easy it is to make healthy choices and start practicing making those choices every time you shop. Try to focus on getting used to adding only one or two new things to your diet at a time. Cut out the barely-qualifies-as-food items such as white bread, pasta, white rice, processed foods, and other things you probably love. Slowly learn to substitute healthier choices which you like and your body loves too. The All-American diet is growing tiresome; just take a look around at the grocery store and find new things which interest you.
Maple syrup is a better choice for sugar replacement in your coffee and tastes fantastic stirred into cold brews.
Both real maple syrup (not corn syrup) and honey have more nutritional value than white sugar, cane sugar, powdered sugar, or brown sugar. Raw sugar might be nutritious. Both maple syrup and honey should be eaten raw as well.
Whether you’re a Vegan or a Carnivore, stop counting protein and figure out whether your diet provides you with the nine essential amino acids your body needs (from twenty in all).
Most of us already know exactly how it feels when we don’t take care of ourselves. The tendency becomes a habit of spending too much time hating ourselves for making poor health choices. If we hate on ourselves too often, then we’re just slowly killing ourselves. When we keep worrying and thinking about all the things which can go wrong all the time, we are generating the very feelings inside our body which we most want to avoid!
These are the reasons why we see everyone preaching gratitude, and that we need to find some damn gratitude in our lives. Spend more time being thankful, and less time hating yourself! Our failures are not entirely our fault; science tells us so. It means there’s theoretically a way out of every dark corner we may eventually find ourselves in.
Fortunately, technology augmentations can help us quickly calm our mind and regain our much-needed self-esteem, so we can start making small steps towards a better self-image. We don’t need to do it on our own when we can practice so many of the modalities found here in this Guide.
Combinations of technological augmentation and relaxation methods can help us find higher reasoning to make smarter decisions. Our survival depends on it.
Starting right now, from this moment forward, begin to imagine a better version of yourself and work on bringing it into existence through little, constant motions always with the intent of healing ourselves.
Optimal self-healing includes proper nutrition
Proper nutrition is a foundation-class bodymind requirement for optimal chances of self-healing. Premium Food is best for staying alive long enough to learn how to overcome our fears and anxieties and really live our lives. Nutrition helps with Breathing. Weight. Mental Health. Physical Health. Longevity. Energy Levels.
Proper Nutrition powers your body and mind, the mobile organism that you are driving (supposedly). Your wellness entirely depends upon your control of what your hands put into your mouth. The best way to learn how to have more control is to start exploring and combining modalities found in this guide, and find which ones work fastest for you to reduce or eliminate your chronic pain and anxiety.
We need faith in ourselves if we plan to make small nutritional gains towards higher self-awareness, and thus better self-control. It’s not actually about controlling oneself, really, as much as it is oneself learning to control the bodymind. That’s the difference which mind-body medicine brings.
Eating well starts with thinking well
Proper nutrition should normally go together with eating, but frequently what we’re putting into our mouths doesn’t count as food. A proper diet helps with your sleep, and by keeping weight off, it helps with your breathing too. Nutritious food contributes to your flexibility, fuels your problem-solving skills, powers your brain, lowers inflammation levels, and helps reduce or prevent hospital visits.
If you’re having trouble eating a healthy diet, implement the most aggressive self-care balance correction methods to get your state of mind into a place where you can rewire your thinking and start taking care of yourself. If you need to find and release emotional trauma so that you can love yourself, then do that first.
We all need work on understanding our mind-body connection. We must pay attention to ourselves, from an outside observer’s perspective, so as to catch oneself in the act, before dark thoughts make bad things happen which we’ll regret.
Start making the changes you deserve
Self-discipline. You must work on your self, body, mind relationship. You will need to pay more cash for better food more often. You’ll have to change your habits and work on continuous improvement. Your health suffers when you are negligent in this area. But you already knew that.
Stop eating the value meals at fast food chains because, well, there aren’t many things worse you can stuff into your face. Value meals are America’s food industry contributions towards your early grave, and you’re paying them to help you do it to yourself. Regularly eating that way will take years off your life, because you are poisoning your body and mind every time. Then our suffering is payment and retribution for unhealthy choices.
Learn more about nutritional awareness
Macronutrients and Micronutrients
https://www.pomona.edu/administration/dining/health-wellness/macronutrients
The Only 4 Things You Need to Know About Amino Acids
https://greatist.com/eat/essential-amino-acids-only-facts-you-need-to-know
The 3 Macronutrients: Carbs (Glycogen), Protein (Amino Acids), and Fats
http://www.betterlifeunlimited.com/healthnews/health_az/issues/macronutrients_carbohydrates_proteins_and_fats.aspx
The Most Damaging Food Lie We Have Ever Been Told
http://drhyman.com/blog/2018/02/07/damaging-food-lie-ever-told/
What Are The Benefits of Amino Acids and Vitamins?
https://www.livestrong.com/article/443502-what-are-the-benefits-of-amino-acids-and-vitamins/
Everyone Was Wrong: Saturated Fat Can Be Good For You
https://greatist.com/health/saturated-fat-healthy
The Truth About Fats: The Good, The Bad, And The In-Between
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-about-fats-bad-and-good
What Are The Main Functions of Minerals in the Body?
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/main-functions-minerals-body-4171.html
The Best Foods to Build Glycogen (the type of sugar your muscles normally use for energy)
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/foods-build-glycogen-2249.html
https://www.livestrong.com/article/101449-foods-build-glycogen/
Can Fats Be Turned Into Glycogen for Muscle? (a low-carb or carnivore diet question)
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-fats-turned-glycogen-muscle-11127.html
Which Amino Acids Are Contained In Milk & Eggs?
http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/amino-acids-contained-milk-eggs-3992.html
Essential Amino Acid Content in Red Meat
https://www.livestrong.com/article/533556-essential-amino-acid-content-in-red-meat/
Amino Acids and Their Significance for Sleep, Mood and Performance
http://www.aminoacid-studies.com/areas-of-use/sleep-mood-and-performance.html
Live Foods and the Enzyme Connection
https://experiencelife.com/article/live-foods/
Eat This, Not That!
http://www.eatthis.com/
REFERENCES
There Are 37.2 Trillion Cells In Your Body
The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain Paperback – October 1, 1999
- by John E. Sarno M.D. (Author)https://www.amazon.com/Mindbody-Prescription-Healing-Body-Pain/dp/0446675156
6 Essential Nutrients & Why Your Body Needs Them
Where to Find All Nine Essential Amino Acids on a Plant-Based Diet
How Many Eggs Can You Safely Eat?
The Life and Death of Wonderbread
7 Ways to Cook Eggs to Maximize Nutrition
WikiPedia, The Free Encyclopedia | Healty Diet