Well you should probably be eating more fruit all year round, but spring is the ideal time to reduce your fat intake and increase how many fresh fruits you consume.In chinese medicine, spring time is liver season. Isn’t it interesting that when spring comes around, we say it’s time for “spring cleaning”, and begin to store away all of our winter clothes and blankets, and some of us even do a deep clean on our homes?
Yet this practice very much relates to the neceessary internal cleansing of our bodies as well; our permanent homes, where we truly live. Spring is a time of renewal, and the perfect season to cleanse the body, flush out toxins and excess metabolic waste from the winter months. To support the liver during this time, you should eat more fruits.
Here’s Why You Should Eat More Fruit
1. Fruits are comprised of nearly 80% water just like your body, so they are able to flush out more toxins in contrast to other foods that need to absorb water from your body to properly digest and take longer to exit your system.
2. Fruits are high in fiber, which again pulls toxins through the body and assists in re-building liver tissue.
3. The liver is a very important organ, the second largest in the body (your skin being the first). It processes everything you consume, sorting out the “good stuff” and eliminating the “bad stuff”. You can protect your liver by eating fruits containing high amounts of anti-oxidants like berries,citrus fruits, mangos and cherries. Antioxidants protect the liver while it’s carying out the detoxification process.
4. Many fruits high in anti-oxidants like strawberries, cherries and citrus fruits are widely available, fresh and local in the spring time. Eating locally and seasonally supports your health and your community.
5. Fruits provide the body with a quick, clean and easy energy source. The liver helps convert fructose to glucose and turns it into sustainable energy for you. Essentially, by eating more carbohydrates (in the form of fruits) you’re giving your liver a break from the “hard work” of breaking down other forms of energy.
6. Fruits provide more calories than vegetables and help you feel full and satisfied for longer, thus preventing sugar, salt and fat cravings helping you slim down for the summer. You’ll also become more hydrated, so your body doesn’t trick you into thinking you’r hungry when you’re actually just thirsty.
7. Transitioning through seasons can pose a threat to the immune system, and some people tend to catch colds or get sick at the beginning of spring. By eating more fruits high in Vitamin C and other antioxidants you are greatly reducing your chances of getting sick by keeping your immune system high.
Myth Buster: Sugar & fruit sugar are not the same. Grouping these two in the same category would be an injustice. Processed sugar has been chemically cleaned and stripped of all it’s nutrients making it a foreign substance in the body. To get processed sugar out of the system, your body has to leech minerals like calcium from the bones.
Fruit sugar however, is also accompanied by fiber and an abundance of Vitamins and minerals that offer up cleansing properties to the body and serve as a clean energy source. When someone eats a high fat diet (lots of nuts, seeds and avocados, or in some cases meats) the cells can become coated like an oil spill, making it very difficult for the cells to absorb sugar. When fat is lingering in the blood stream, this is where sugar becomes a problem. If sugar cannot be absorbed by the cells, it’s left floating around in your blood stream with the fat and can cause insulin resistance resulting in a crash. Many people who have experienced this in the past found they had a much different experience just by reducing how much fat they ate. For this reason, it’s important to reduce your fat intake for a few days prior to consuming more fruits, and then keep your fats low while getting more calories from fruits. If you’re not sure about this, just try it for 7 days and see how you feel.
If you do decide to reduce your fat intake and eat more fruits this spring, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below!
Learn more recipes and tips like this in our 3 month course How to Go Raw, Not Crazy! We’re taking a few more student testers, so if you’d like more details on how you can get a discount on registration you can email us with the subject line “how to go raw”.
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