Unleash Your VitalityYour Guide To Natural Health, Personal Fitness & Lifestyle Freedom

Fruit!

Without a doubt, you know by now that fruit is one of my favorite topics, and that I’m big on the importance of getting in fresh fruit to your diet. There’s so much that fruit has to offer, and so much value brought to the table. But here’s the big frustration that I hear from many people: “I don’t like to eat fruit because it upsets my stomach”.

Surprisingly, for such a natural food, this problem comes up all the time. I’d like to take a few minutes today to address this once and for all, and give you the insight and clarity that will allow you to never worry about eating fruit again!

With that said, let’s take a look at the real problem here: food combining. It’s all about the combination and timing of different foods – it’s not the fruit. When you combine sweets (whether that’s natural, fresh fruit or refined sugar) with fats and carbs, you get digestive disturbances on some level. The simple sugars are made to be digested and utilized quickly by the body, and when they’re trapped in with longer-burning fuels like complex carbs and fats, the sugars ferment and create gas.

Nobody wants stomach pains and excess gas in their lives! But that’s not a reason to avoid fruit at all. Rather, be aware of when you’re taking it in. Instead of having a peanut butter sandwich with a large bowl of sweet fruit (simple sugars, complex carbs and fats), opt for fruit as a snack or meal of its own. The way I commonly  do this is through the smoothies you’ll find me drinking down – it’s usually a green smoothie, but occasionally a tall fruit smoothie as well…especially in the summertime. The smoothie can give you the calories and volume you need for a full meal, while providing both optimal nutrition and ease of digestion.

Besides the meal option, I’ll give you one more idea: having it in the morning or at night. In the morning, you’ll have a “clean slate” with an empty stomach assuming you haven’t eaten before falling asleep! That allows you to take in fruit and digest it with ease, with some only taking roughly 30 minutes to digest. Then, you can tackle your larger breakfast or snack – already having the health benefits of fruit tackled first thing in the morning.

The other idea is having fruit as your last meal in the evening. This works well for an entirely different reason: how good you feel when you wake up. If you eat your last meal at 8:00 pm and go to sleep at 10:30, you’re giving yourself a 2 1/2 hour window to digest that last meal. If that last meal is a few pieces of fresh fruit, you’ll be fresh and feeling good by the time you fall asleep – and when you wake up the next morning. However, if you make that last meal a random mix of fats, complex carbs and all sorts of other things, you can bet that you won’t be able to digest it by the time you fall asleep (if you can fall asleep – eating at night can be extremely stimulating). Imagine waking up to a stomach full of half-digested foods churning around! No wonder so many people aren’t excited about waking up every morning!

The bottom line with fruit is that you should enjoy eating every bite, knowing that you’re contributing to your overall health and vitality, as well as personal energy throughout the day. You’re giving yourself the kind of nutrition you deserve, but you should also feel good throughout the day. Start to keep these food combining principles in the back of your mind and you’ll find that eating the same foods – just a bit differently – can lead to a dramatically better quality of life.

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