“Stayin’ Alive”

Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Lately, I’ve been watching videos and reading books about how eating “natural foods” supports a healthy body from the inside out. It’s made me pay much closer attention to what I buy, and especially to how foods are grown and processed. Learning how natural and minimally processed foods interact with the human gut has been an eye-opener.

Even someone just starting to explore this topic will quickly grasp the critical role of gut health—and likely begin to rethink their own. Knowledge is power, and already, in my case, it’s shaping my choices. I’ve changed what I shop for and how I eat. It’s still early days, but I can feel some encouraging shifts, and I like them.

This journey is teaching me why a living gut is so much more than just a stopover where food gets digested. The gut actually is a bustling, living community, teeming with a diverse array of microbes. Now, I understand this and know how, in countless ways, these tiny residents are “talking” to the rest of my body, influencing everything from how efficiently I absorb nutrients to how balanced—or frazzled—my moods can be.

All this has changed the way I shop and what I bring home to eat. My trusty Yuka app helps by scanning and rating products, steering me toward simpler, more natural foods and away from the ultra-processed. It’s become second nature to check Yuka scores before anything goes into my cart.

And honestly, the more I learn and the more I swap in these “different foods,” the better I feel. A big part of it is weaning myself off the highly processed products surrounding us—quick, tempting, cleverly marketed, but often stripped of what truly nourishes us. The sad truth is that many processed foods replace critical gut nutrients with fillers, additives, and hidden sugars. That’s great for sales, but not for our health.

Our bodies were never meant to handle so many artificial, sneaky ingredients. In reality, we need to feed the bacteria that live inside us. That means avoiding foods so stripped down by processing that they’re useless to our digestive system. These products are popular precisely because they’re engineered to light up our brains and keep us coming back for more—they’re everywhere.

I won’t claim to have transformed overnight. But I can say I’m noticing—and welcoming—some subtle but meaningful changes. My digestion feels calmer, my energy a bit steadier, and my mood a little brighter.

Most of all, there’s an unexpected, gentle undercurrent. Maybe it’s simply more happiness, rising from this new sense of actively caring for myself, of being less passive about my own well-being. It’s an inner nourishment, rooted in making choices that are more aware, thoughtful, and real.

Dear Friends: This is my current take on succeeding, “one day at a time.”—Diana