You are what you eat.

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food” it’s one of the oldest saying I am familiar with when it comes to nutrition.
My mum always used to tell me that if everything was going wrong in your life at least you are in control of what you eat.

I’ve always been a fit and active person and I attribute that to having a healthy lifestyle of eating well throughout my life. Afterall, a six pack starts in the kitchen.

From what I have learnt from my knowledge in natropathy and nutrition there has to be a balance of all foods, relying heavily on functial foods best suited for you and your digestion.
However, I don’t believe it takes a qualification to understand that eating more whole foods and maintaining a rich intake of fruits and vegetables is the optimal state of living.
I strongly believe in nutritional being the best preventation for sickness and disease.

I have accidentally been a vegetarian for most of my life because I grew up on a farm where we grew our own produce and while we still had meat fresh from the livestock on our property we had an abundance of  fruit and vegetables available throughout the changing South Australian seasons.

It felt only natural to get a qualification in nutrition and natropathy because of my childhood, I had no intention of making a career or getting a job out of it I just simply wanted the knowledge for myself and own personal benefit.

When I moved out of home at 18 I felt my wellbeing decrease significantly, being financially independent at such a young age is so difficult and can be really determental to your health. I couldn’t afford to pay for good quality whole foods anymore when I went grocery shopping at the big two (Coles and Woolworths). It was a really hard time in my life where my nutritional went down hill fast and I slipped into depression.
I reflect on this now as a great life lesson in truth and always treating your food with respect. Suddenly I found myself in a place where consumers had never even touched a cow, looked into it’s sentient eyes let alone watched that animal die to be served up for dinner.

Eventually I knew I couldn’t keep living this way with my hair falling out in clumps and filling up on two minute noodles and I decided to get a second job performing music around town. Sometimes I would get paid nothing, other times I would get $50-150 in cash that would go towards food. It might seem ridiculous but investing in high quality food from the farmers markets was something I became obsessed with and really wanted to invest my money into.

Doing this forced me to learn new nutritous recipes and be inovative with the ingredients I was buying. I became more interested in functional food.
Basically, functional foods is whole, fortified, enriched or enhanced foods that provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition (vitamins and minerals), when they are consumed at efficacious levels as part of a varied diet on a regular basis.
For example, purple or gold potatoes have enriched anthocyanin or carotenoid contents when they are purposely bred into already existing plants.
Needless to say potatoes were and still are a main staple of my food intake. It’s truly fascinating and the knowledge never stops, I plan to never stop learning about nutrition or my own body and how it functions best.

• Haley