11 Reasons That Diet Is Important For Holistic Healing And Wellness

If you’re going on your holistic healing journey, it’s important to take your diet into account. Good nutrition is one of the foundational pillars for holistic health, holistic healing, and overall wellness.

In this article, we take a look at why diet is so important for your healing journey, why it makes a huge difference to your results, and the various aspects that you may want to consider to help improve your diet, nutrition, and holistic health.

What Are The 8 Pillars Of Holistic Health And Wellness?

There are a variety of different models and theories for the requirements of holistic healing. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the 8 Pillars of Wellness by Dr Peggy Swarbrick, and the 8 Pillars of Holistic Health and Wellness are great ones to reference.

Here are the 8 pillars of holistic health and wellness, they are a great assessment tool for self-evaluation during journaling. They allow you to see if your needs are holistically being met, and what areas of your life you might need to give extra attention to.

1. Physiological Health And Lifestyle
2. Good Nutrition And A Healthy Diet
3. Environmental Safety and Security
4. Financial Security And Abundance
5. Emotional Wellness And Emotional Security
6. Social Wellness And Community
7. Intellectual Wellness And Purpose
8. Spiritual Wellness

If you’d like to learn more about the 8 pillars of holistic health and wellness you can check out my article here on the different facets of, and requirements for, holistic health and healing.

How Your Eating Habits Are Related To Your Holistic Wellness

Your eating habits are related to your holistic wellness in several different ways. Building a good nutritious diet, and being able to stick to it, helps you to create beneficial habits, a strong mindset, and discipline. 

Not only that, it helps you to build an excellent mindful relationship with your body and its needs—which helps to enhance your intuition, awareness, and perception.

Your eating habits often translate to how you approach your overall well-being, so being able to master good nutrition and healthy eating habits can transfer into better overall health and an improved sense of well-being. 

When you’re looking after your diet, you’re much more likely to be fostering a good sleep and exercise routine.

A good diet supports improved mental health, physical health, emotional health, energetic health, the flow of energy around your chakras, and ultimately your spiritual health.

What Are The Benefits Of Healthy Eating And Good Nutrition For Holistic Healing?

When we refer to healthy eating and nutrition, what do we actually mean by this?

Healthy eating and good nutrition mean that you’re ensuring that your body gets all the vitamins and minerals (also known as micronutrients) that it needs for optimal health. 

Along with a good balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats—also known as macronutrients or ‘macros’.

Good nutrition means that you’re mainly sticking to a whole foods diet where possible to ensure that your body can easily break down and digest your food to receive the vitamins and minerals it needs. 

And it also means that you’re eating the right amount of calories for your current health and fitness journey. For example, if you’re trying to gain muscle, maintain your weight, or lose fat you’ll either be eating more, the same, or fewer calories than your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).

Healthy eating and good nutrition mean that you’re breaking habits with food that don’t serve you, such as starving yourself, bulimia, binge eating, overeating, mindlessly eating, or any other form of an eating disorder.

Having a good nutritious diet is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Your diet and nutrition plan needs to be tailored to your health and fitness needs. 

For example, you will need to adjust your calories depending on your muscle and fat needs, and whether you need to gain muscle, lose fat, or maintain your weight.

And you will need to adjust your foods to your requirements for vitamins and minerals too. If you have deficiencies you’ll need to ensure that your diet is adjusted accordingly to meet your specific and individual needs. 

Furthermore, your nutrition needs aren’t fixed, they can change from season to season too.

If you’re wondering how diet relates to wellness, here are some important reasons that you should be taking your nutrition seriously if you’re looking to embody the best version of yourself.

1. A Healthy Diet Can Improve Your Mental Health And Emotional Wellness

In your holistic healing journey, many people find that they want to heal old traumas along with letting go of emotional patterns and mental habits that no longer serve them. 

If this resonates with you, to be able to do this, you’re going to need to think with calmness and clarity during the process to interrupt old routines.

Junk food doesn’t support this process because it’s often full of artificial sugar, high levels of fat, salt, preservatives, and other additives that stimulate the same reward system part of your brain as drugs.¹

Junk food is often highly processed and full of unnatural levels of sugar, fat, and salt in order to get you addicted—so you keep buying the product. And there are a number of different problems with this in regard to your holistic healing journey.

Not only can junk food disrupt your hormones and cause addiction—which we often see within eating disorders, but it can also alter the way you think and your moods.

In essence, when you eat a lot of junk food as opposed to whole foods, you’re no longer in control of your senses, moods, and thought processes—because you’re being driven by the need to satiate your thirst for junk food’s addictive ingredients. 

During this cycle, not only are you being driven by your addiction to junk food, but your mood is often governed by it too. 

For example, when you feel like you have satiated your sugar fix—you’ll most likely feel happy and content. Whereas if you don’t have your sugar fix —you’ll most likely experience feelings of irritability and frustration.

On top of this, along with your mood being governed by your addiction to certain ingredients, your mood is also affected due to the hormone disruption caused by junk food. 

A medical journal by Health Promotion Perspectives notes that the regular consumption of fast food was correlated to impaired insulin and glucose function, lipid and lipoprotein disorders, along with a variety of other chronic diseases.¹²

Breaking habits, disrupting toxic cycles, healing trauma, or being a generational curse breaker are hard enough as it is—without adding mood swings and a lack of self-control into the mix!

To combat this, try to stick to whole foods wherever possible. Whole foods contain natural levels of sugars and fats which can be more easily processed by the body, and they don’t disrupt your hormones or cause addiction in the same way that junk foods are designed to.

2. Good Nutrition Can Improve Your Physical Wellness

It’s no secret that good nutrition helps to improve your overall physical health. Nourishing your body with whole foods supports your body, mind, and soul. 

Overall, you’ll be in better health and will feel much stronger and more energized.

When you eat better—you feel better. This helps to translate into having more energy and strength to commit to your holistic healing journey.

A clinical study by the American Journal of Health Promotion (AJHP) found that participants who ate a whole-food, high-fibre, predominantly plant-based diet for 16 weeks felt healthier, had better energy levels, and felt more confident in making better dietary choices for good health.

Remember that your body houses your brain and mind, so anything that supports your physical health, brain function, hormones, and mindset is going to supercharge your holistic health and healing journey.

Medical journals suggest that a wholefoods-based balanced diet can be used in integrative medicine to help improve gut health, heart health, chronic pain management and weight loss, whilst reducing the risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.⁶’⁷’⁸’⁹’¹º 

Whilst another clinical journal notes that the Mediterranean diet and plant-based diets, in particular, are a form of holistic medicine that have been associated with a variety of public health benefits, including a lowered risk of heart disease.¹¹

3. A Good Diet Helps To Support Your Energetic System (Nadis) And Chakras

Food contains prana. In Sanskrit, prāṇa means vital life force energy. Prana is the energy which sustains living things, and you can increase and help to maintain your pranic energy by eating foods rich in prana—which means that they are rich in vital life force energy. 

Not all foods contain prana or high levels of prana—some foods have higher levels of prana than others. Foods can also be depleted of prana due to how they are made, cooked, or stored. 

Foods which are high in prana, help you increase your prana levels. And foods which are low in prana, contribute to the depletion of your prana stores. Whereas foods that are neutral help you to maintain prana but don’t increase or decrease your pranic energy.

For example, meat is often considered to be extremely low in prana because it is regarded as a ‘dead’ food. And frozen vegetables are also considered to be low in prana because the freezing process depletes their prana.

In general, foods that are considered to be high in prana are; whole foods, organic foods, fresh vegetables and fruits, locally grown and seasonal whole foods, and foods which are minimally processed.

However, this is massively simplifying the concept of pranic food. There are many foods and consumables which are not considered to be good for your pranic energy such as onion, garlic, chilli, eggplant, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco. 

This is because they are too stimulating. They’ll seemingly give you a boost of energy initially, but then quickly deplete your overall prana and energy afterwards. 

In general, foods which are overly flavoured, salty, spicy, pungent or sour are considered to be disruptive for your pranic energy stores and subtle energy balance.

The main thing to remember is that the food and drinks you consume can either add vital life force to your body, or they can deplete it. Overall, junk food, coffee, tea, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, are considered to be bad for your pranic energy.

If you want to support your holistic healing, your subtle energetic body, and your chakras, then aim to eat whole foods, fresh fruit and vegetables, and organic foods as much as possible—as opposed to highly processed foods which have been drained of their prana.