Food for Wellness

Is food your friend or your enemy? Do you use food to nourish your body or do you emotionally eat? When you think about eating, are you overwhelmed by what is the ‘right food’ to eat or do you just not have an appetite.

Food is a powerful tool when it comes to our self-care. Beyond nourishing our body with nutritious food, the conditions in which we eat, our state of mind while we eat, our beliefs and relationship to food can support or create roadblocks in our nutritional health.

As a health coach, my role is to gain an understanding of your relationship with food and provide you with the support you need to change negative habits that create barriers to your nutritional well-being and replace them with new habits.

An additional offering to those interested, is a customized food plan. Please note however, the food plans that I provide to clients are not specifically for weight loss, but rather to create a healthy, realistic and consistent relationship to food that optimizes your physical and mental health.

You Are How You Eat

Who has ever heard the saying – “you are what you eat”? Now while I do not know the origin of that statement, I want to assume that whoever coined that clever phrase  intended to promote healthy eating for optimal health and wellness – you know when you eat  salad you feel more energized versus eating a Philly cheese steak. But what if we took it one step further. What if what we ate was a reflection of the value we place on ourselves and therefore our self-care? What if how we ate and the experiences we created around eating was tied to our self-care?

I feel like I may have lost some of you at this point… so let me explain.

Food is a source of nourishment and so when most of us eat, we do so from a place fueling the body, not wanting to pass out, we’re foodies or basic human necessity. All being valid reasons for eating, the experiences we create around food and eating is actually more connected to the value we place on our self-care than we think.

Picture this very familiar scenario – After commuting home following an eight-hour work day, you literally have 1.5 hours to get kids home from school/daycare, fed and homework completed before one of the kids needs to be at their afterschool activity. While you are down one child due to the activity, you have enough time to clean up, wash dishes, prep lunches for the next day and maybe (JUST MAYBE if things ran smoothly) you were able to get the other kid(s) bathed before the other one has to be picked up. While all of this is happening, you are literally grazing like a scavenger eating the mish mash of food either left in the pot, pan or plate, followed by a few carrots or slices of cucumbers (because clearly you need your vegetable intake) downed by the coffee/tea that you have reheated maybe three times already!

Or what if because your partner was working late that night, you decided you would stay an extra hour at work and grab a “healthier” option of food on your way home cause tonight you were dining alone. As you sat at your table with your phone/laptop/tablet in hand you surfed through social media while eating your subway sandwich (with no sauce) not really enjoying your meal but more thankful there were no dishes to be done!

Now for years scenario one was my life. I prided myself on my ability to get shit done in a short span of time. Not sure what the reward was for all that, but I can definitely tell you what the outcome of garbage eating habits led to… over a year of dealing with H Pylori. For those of you unfamiliar with this infection it is basically an infection caused by a bacteria that literally tears your stomach apart. While I  have no idea how I ended up with this infection, what I can tell you is that the way I was eating, my relationship with food and the environment in which I ate in was a huge contributing factor to being hospitalized 3 times (my bestie has an incredible story about the last episode…fack!!!).

Now let me be clear this blog is NOT about scaring the shit out of you by telling you about my experience with this infection so that you basically become vegan – because the truth is the outcome of my stomach issues would have still been the same vegan or not – because at the root cause of my issues was not respecting the importance of food in relation to my self-care.

I ate bland food because I had to and I cut out pepper sauce because I had to, but I was still doing 50 things, spinning around my house while I took a forkfuls of rice, or bland chicken or broccoli in between doing everything that needed to get done (according to my self-created list). Food was definitely a source of fuel and I placed no real value on what experiences I should have been experiencing as I ate. And so as a result and for over a year I dealt with other stomach related issues and couldn’t lose weight (even though I was eating “healthy”).

The power of food far exceeds what many of us attribute it to. Yes it is for nourishment and growth and development, but is also for self-care. What would it mean to put your fork down between every bite to allow you the enjoyment of chewing your food and savoring each bite? What would it mean to have time to guess what spices were used in the chicken you were enjoying? What would it mean to eat until satisfaction and not fullness because you had the time to eat and didn’t shovel food in your mouth? Maybe this is an experience you already enjoy, but for so many of us it isn’t. How do we holistically engage in self-care if one of the key things we need for basic survival is simply placed in a queue of ‘to dos’?

I am by no means trying to preach like I have this eating experience in the name of self-care down pact. Fuck truth be told it has really only been since starting my certification 7 weeks ago that I have brought intention into how I use food as a source of self-care, but what I can tell you is that the body knows your behavior in relation to food. Like most things related to self-care, it is a work in progress and not something we can engage in all the time (honestly just due to life)… but if we are how we eat, then at the very least we are all worthy of making our own plate of food, sitting down and savoring what the food has to offer our mind, body and spirit.

INVESTMENT: Cost depends on need

If you are interested in the Food for Wellness program or have questions about this program or some of the other programs and services on this page, get in touch using the form below.