This blog post was written by James and Dahlia of Married to Health! 

Happy New Year. Like most people, you may be making a resolution to live healthier in 2019. Maybe you want to lose weight, build muscle, or perhaps reverse or prevent disease. Whatever your motivation is there is a vital nutrient that usually gets overlooked, but is necessary to your healthy lifestyle. Many talk about superfoods, supplements, and other elixers to help reach your healthy goal, but what we have in mind is a bit more simple.

What is this very important nutrient you are wondering? …. FIBER! Now before you get bored and close this article, hear us out. Fiber is what some would call an essential carbohydrate. It is a carbohydrate that can do amazing things in the body much like those essential fatty acids that get a lot of attention. Simply put, when you make sure fiber is in everything you eat, you make it almost impossible to overeat, spike your blood sugar, and cause excessive oxidative damage to your body.

So, how does one ensure fiber is in every food you eat? Simple! You eat plant foods. When you eat plant foods, you ensure that fiber is in every bite! Nuts, seeds, greens, vegetables, beans, legumes, and fruit all have fiber. It is only in recent history that we have been heavily processing these natural plant ingredients and essentially stripping them of fiber. We take whole grains and turn them into flours, take vegetables and turn them into sugars (corn to corn syrup), and take fruit and make them into juice or concentrates. The list is endless. What was once a strawberry and whole grain is now a “Poptart” or some commercial concoction that is designed to make you crave food and overeat. When we take out the fiber in a natural plant food we are taking out what makes that food safe and healthy. We are taking out what our body craves and needs. We are taking out what our healthy bacteria need to live and thrive.

So this year, make fiber a priority! Love yourself, love health!