Today I’d like to ask you to ditch the word “healthy.”  Let it go, never to be uttered by your well-meaning lips again.  Not to yourself, not to your husband, not to your mom, and not to your kids.

Good.  Bad.  Skinny.  Fat.  Rich.  Poor.  Smart.  Stupid.  Tall.  Short.  Black.  White.  Great.  Terrible.

And finally…

Healthy.  Unhealthy.

Psychology labels it “splitting.”  Thinking in absolutes.  Overlooking the middle ground.  Even a pretty girl gets a pimple sometimes.  That’s so ugly.

Back in the day, Dr. Goulet, my general surgery rotation staff doctor once barked at one of my fellow medical students (loudly–I wish you could hear him): “Don’t tell me, ‘I don’t know.’  It’s LAZY.”  Well, I kind of differed in thought.  Seriously.  Medical students on their first clinical hospital rotation?  Clueless.  (Stay out of the hospital in July.)  I, like a coward, averted my eyes, thinking, “Please don’t ask me the answer!”

Back to “healthy.”  Are you clueless or just lazy?  There are great excuses, by the way, for both of them.  However, when you feel the word “healthy” forming in the back of your mouth–stop.  Make a new sentence that includes positive attributes about the food if you can.  If you can’t, well, that’s what this blog is for!  E-mail me, Facebook me, text me, or comment below.

The yellow pepper my family ate with lunch today was not “healthy.”  It was “good for the eyes, helps prevent cancer, and helps keep the immune system strong.”  Can your chips hold a candle to that?  No way.  Your body asks you to choose the yellow pepper.

Same holds true when “unhealthy” starts to slip out.  Can it.  WHY is it unhealthy!  “I’m sorry, sweetie.  That soda pop has acid in it that’s hard on your teeth and the sugar is really hard on your system.”

Simply reducing food to HEALTHY and UNHEALTHY sets people up for confusion. “First they tell me it’s healthy, then they turn around and tell me it isn’t.  What am I supposed to do?”

Focus on nutrients.  Nutrients per calorie.  Detrimental side effects (“No, honey.  Blue and red food dyes are associated with thinking deficits in people, and so our brains just don’t need that.” or “Hmmm.  I’ve been reading a lot about wheat causing headaches, I wonder if I’d feel better cutting that out…”).

CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK TO CHANGE THE WAY YOU EAT!!  You can do it!  This mama whose hometown was Candy Land did.  You can, too.  Food matters.  Put in positive.  Leave out detrimental.  Each person will have foods that suit them best or don’t suit them at all.  When you start feeling great, you’ll almost never look back.  Focus not on weight, but on real nutrients, nutrients, nutrients–versus enriched botoxed flour products.  You’ll get so good at eating nutrients, you’ll be healthy.