Hello friend! I hope you’ve been having a wonderful week. Today I want to talk to you about a trend I see on social media and various holistic lifestyle websites: the focus on these magical superfoods that are guaranteed to change your life. Can I just get real with you for a moment and say that I’m getting a REALLY sick of the articles that claim eating x food will cure all that ails you?

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that’s not the way food works. If you start eating goji berries, drinking matcha tea, adding bee pollen to your smoothies, or guzzling down pomegranate juice, yes you will be taking in more antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, which is always a good thing. However, you are not getting to the root cause of the issues that drove you to seek out these superfood cure-alls in the first place.

If you suffer from leaky gut, a bacterial imbalance, Candida overgrowth, undiagnosed food sensitivities, struggle with emotional eating, or are trapped in a cycle of binging and purging, no amount of goji berries is going to change that. That is the same mindset that leads us to prescribe a pill for an ill: the desire to be well without actually having to change anything major about our diet or lifestyle.

If you want to feel fantastic, get rid of your bloating, anxiety, or chronic constipation, then you need to be willing to put in the work to make that happen. And I’m here to tell you that you are worth making an effort for. Yes it might be hard or scary at first to make these changes, but I promise you will reap the rewards in the long term.

Sidebar: As with lots of claims in terms of health, this one comes with a huge caveat- a lot of research points to the role of socio-economic factors when it comes to health. It is hard to manage stress, eat well, get proper sleep, exercise, and all the other things we know contribute to health when you’re food or housing insecure, when your community is mistreated by the medical establishment, or when you’ve suffered physical, psychological, or emotional trauma. Hopefully, as a society will get to a place where everyone has access to nourishing food and safe housing. But until then, some ways we can help, if we have the privilege to do so, are to donate time and money to local organizations making a difference. This article contains some great places to start!

When you choose a variety of fresh, whole-foods they will all work to send positive messages to your cells and genes so that they can express to their full capacity. And yes there are certain herbs, foods, and oils we want to consume more of when we’re working with specific imbalances in the body in order to promote optimal healing.

But if you start drinking pomegranate juice every day in the hopes that it’s going to cure the hardening of your arteries and yet you don’t change anything else about your diet and continue eating inflammatory oils, irritating grains, or foods to which you have a sensitivity or an allergy, it’s not going to do a hell of a lot because, unfortunately, you haven’t removed the cause. You have only applied a delicious band-aid over it.

The same goes if we don’t change our thoughts, move our booties occasionally, and practice gentleness and compassion with ourselves. These superfoods can help. But they are not a cure-all. They are one tool in a kit we should have loaded to the brim with many different tools that all promote the healthiest, happiest, strongest, most confident bodies and lives possible.

Remember that the most important part of any healing journey is treating yourself with compassion, making small changes that add up to big gains in the long term, and creating a lifestyle that works for you and your body, not your mother/sister/friend/coworker’s body.

Well friend, those are my thoughts for today! If you’re looking for a place to start in terms of introducing some new foods to your life, download my FREE 7 Day Anti-Inflammatory Meal Plan & Shopping List.  And for extra support I just published a great little guide with my Top Ten Tips to Banish Belly Bloat, which you can download right here!

As always, thank you for your love and support. Please stay safe and take care of one another!

Cait xo