Fruit as healer

Our bodies need fruit.

Please do not fear fruit. Fruit is often labeled “sugary” & “too quickly burned.” But what is not often recognized is how very different fruit is from all other sugars. Fruit has a healing wholeness to it. It has fiber, astringent juices, antioxidants, minerals, & vitamins along with natural sugars. Fruit burns way less quickly than actual processed sugar because of all these other nutritious elements. And while it still does process through the system quickly, it is its divine design to do so. As a general food group, fruit is meant to reach the body’s needs quickly & efficiently. For someone with a body weakness (which is sadly most humans at this stage of existence), fruit eaten on its own can cause blood sugar highs & lows (& for a Diabetic, this would need to be worked with much more carefully than the average person). But this is not the fault of fruit or due to it being an unhealthy, too-sugary thing to eat. It is that the body has a weakness & how the fruit is being processed is simply highlighting it. A lot of times, a challenge to digest fruit properly can mean an adrenal-weakness, but there can be plenty of other reasons too; which is actually amazing because eating fruit in & of itself & noticing our digestion process can tell us some things about our overall health.

So what do we do if our body is sensitive to fruit? My advice is not to avoid fruit but do take it slowly, as slowly as we need to be comfortable while still including it in our life. Sticking with berries is a good place to begin, as they are less sweet than say a banana. We can work our way up to eating more of them & make sure to get greens in our daily diet to help support our body’s healing journey in processing properly.

What about eating fruit with fat or some other type of food in order to calm the blood sugar highs & lows? This is part of what can cause blood sugar challenges in the first place, because instead of the fruit sugar getting processed quickly as it was designed to do, it is now getting slowed down & stagnating in the body due to the fat or other food it’s being paired with which digests more slowly. When the fruit stagnates, as does any food or sugar that stagnates from not processing as it should, this is how acidity, dampness, & inflammation arise & ultimately create the conditions for disease. So I do not recommend that, though there are absolute times when an apple just tastes so good with sunflower seed butter. And so this is an important piece also! Food should be joy. Food should be pleasure. There are ways with food that can help a body to heal, but these ways should never be rigid or miserable or forced. And like I’ve always said, if there’s a mental challenge with food in any way (such as emotional eating or a past eating disorder), we will need to make extra space for a surrendering, free, joy-full connection with food as our first priority, and any healing ways will need to come second. And we must give ourselves full permission in this. Body healing is not just about the body! I am a complete believer in both healing ways & freedom with food, & know they can absolutely coexist in every way. There’s just lots of movement & flow to it & making room for our needs as nuanced, complex beings who can have all our needs met. Here’s to healing & here’s to freedom! And embracing the beautiful, healing gift of fruit (& berries & melons too) rather than fearing it & depriving ourselves of their necessary goodness for our well-being.