Nutrition: Eating Well is Easy
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Photo Credit: Sherman Tan
If you’re very lucky, one day you’ll have an Ah-Ha moment when it comes to food. And it’ll blow all of those diet books, the magazine articles, the endless commercials and miracle drugs out of the water. It will be so simple, so obvious, that for the rest of your life, those fad diets will mean nothing to you. You’ll be able to read Us Weekly’s 9,430th story on “Celebrity Moms Who Shed the Baby Weight in 3 Days!” without wanting to stab the supermarket cashier.
I don’t want to say what that moment will be for you. As Mary wrote in Tuesday’s post, we are all different. We require different things to be as healthy as possible. So we require different revelations too.
But I’ll share my own. After fifteen years of yo-yo dieting, of miserable teenage years, of weight loss centers and spurts of progress followed by years of regression, I just gave up. I was tired, so tired, of fighting with my own body. The war I had waged since I was eleven had exhausted me. My body and my heart sat on opposite sides of the battlefield, spent and wasted and both miserably unhappy, with no victor (except maybe the Lay’s Potato Chip people). I love food and I was tired of denying it, tired of denying myself. I just didn’t want to think about it anymore. I wanted to think about something else.
I was also broke. I’d flirted with cooking but never really gave myself up to it. Now, faced with boring lunches for work day after day, with bags and bags of cereal for breakfast, a thought occurred to me- what if I taught myself to cook, really cook? It’d be cheaper than going out to Baja Fresh every day. And who says I had to make salads for lunch anymore? I wasn’t on a dieting, that was over. I was done with that. I could have whatever I wanted.
So I got out a couple of books and looked for something that sounded good, something that was relatively easy and did not sound like a punishment. I don’t remember what it was- obviously not very memorable. But a few weeks later, I stumbled upon this recipe for soup. It was Wolfgang Puck’s recipe for Vegetable Soup (with a fancy French name- Provencal Vegetable Soup). It looked easy. Soup was easily transportable to work and it would last all week. I just hoped it would be good.
It wasn’t good. It was miraculous. But moreover, I thought that I was miraculous. I couldn’t believe I’d made something (ME) that tasted so good (a lucky, totally accidental coincidence that it was an “in-season recipe” and I was in the right season. Pure luck). And I didn’t care that it was healthy. I mean, it was a nice benefit but the War on My Body was over, you got me? This wasn’t about diet, it wasn’t about eating to make myself skinny or to run faster or to look like a magazine cover model. It was about food, about taste- pure and simple. The fact that I felt good, really good, after eating it was a happy bonus. But it was enough to make me want more of the same. My heart and my body had found a tentative peace accord in a damned vegetable soup.
Logic snapped it into place- real food tasted better than fake food. I feel stupid for even writing that but there you are- it just does. Plaster me with labels, go ahead- call me pretentious, a “foodie”, blindfold me and throw me into a Whole Foods where you think I belong, tell me I’m smug. I do not care. I am so happy to have finally found peace with my body and my heart that I couldn’t care less what you think it says about me- about how much money I have (um, not a whole lot) and what I believe (hippies 4 eva? Yeah, not so much).
These days, eating well is easy. It’s actually a JOY. Cooking is fun and relaxing and suits my Type A personality to Do Things Well (especially since the outcome is cheaper than eating out and crazy delicious). I try new things so I don’t get bored (Indian is next- I like to choose super spicy things during a hot summer because I am clearly a genius). I pay attention to what makes me feel good. I eat more for lunch than for dinner. I don’t have carbs before bed. It might not be what works for you but it’s working for me just fine.
And yes, ok- I lost weight. A lot of weight. I have more energy and I sleep like a champ, blah blah blah. All of that stuff is great and I appreciate my health, I do, but when you love food, that can’t always be the point. Or, at least, not The Only Point. (See Above. See exhausting). For me, the Ah Ha moment came when I stopped listening to everyone else and started listening to my own body, how it ran, and what it needed. What it wanted. What a surprise to realize that all it wanted, all along, was really good food.
So, in a weird way, ignore everything I just said. Seriously. Start blocking out all the other voices. And start listening to yourself.
For the recipe for Provencal Vegetable Soup by Wolfgang Puck, click here.
Judi Cutrone is a writer with Otherwise Incorporated for Women’s Health Foundation, where she has learned far too much information about her nether regions. Follow her on Twitter and at Tasty is British For.
