I promise I won't always write about nutrition because that is only one of the many passions I have but that is one passion that all my time and efforts seem to be going into lately so automatically my thoughts are there as well. And then what do I blog about? My thoughts.
There are a lot of nutrition misconceptions that I could try to publicly disprove. Like the fact that gluten is not evil. Or that organic food is not always worth the price. Or that dietitians do more than just help people lose weight. etc. But I will not bore you with all of that. Y'all hear me blab about that enough as is. BUT there is one thing that I want to expound upon and let me just preface this with the fact that I am in no way a pro. I am speaking solely from my four semester college nutrition knowledge here and have absolutely zero credentials to say anything about this matter but I am rebelling and doing it anyway. #livingontheedge
And that is this: There is more to nutrition than losing weight. There is more to fitness than how you look. There is more to eating well than cutting out sugar. There is more to life than calorie counting. There is more to happiness.
I don't know if I ever had an eating disorder so to say but I have definitely experienced disordered eating. There was a point in my life where calories were bad. I would read every nutrition label and would see the calories and automatically change my perspective. I was becoming obsessed with food intake to the point where I had memorized how many calories things were. I would have thoughts like "I am eating a spoonful of peanut butter. That is about 2 tablespoons which is 190 calories which will take me about 2 miles to run off. Now I am combining this with a banana which is about 105 calories and will take another mile or so to burn off. Oh no I gained a pound, that means I need to lose 3,500 calories of fat to get that off." Can you see how disordered that is?
LIFE IS NOT MEANT TO BE THAT WAY.
I had forgotten this way of thinking until I had the opportunity to represent the BYUI Dietetics society at a corporate wellness fair ta couple weeks ago and I talked to people about this. I saw the guy with the gluten misconception, the calorie counter, the kale salad breakfast lunch and dinner-er, the 6 hour fitness junkie and the list goes on and on. It just made me think about what our world has come to.
Life is meant to be enjoyed. Food is meant to be enjoyed. I feel like we, as a society, are creating unhealthy relationships with food. We eat for emotional comfort and stress relief, we use food strictly as a tool for weight management, we continue eating after we are full, we limit ourselves to only eating "healthy foods," we are constantly on diets, and certain foods are forbidden. I repeat, life is not meant to be lived this way.
What if we were able to change our mindsets to the point where we actually ENJOYED food. Where we ate when we were physically hungry, where we stopped eating when we felt satisfied, where our motivation wasn't based on how we looked but rather how we felt or what we could do, where we ate a balanced diet of foods we like, where we were rarely on a diet and ate a variety of foods? Doesn't that sound like a much better way to live?
Now don't get me wrong I am not saying eating a meal filled with fruits and vegetables is wrong or that limiting your sugar intake is bad or even that being conscious of what you eat is bad. Not true. But what I am saying is I think sometimes we take things a little too far. There is so much to do is this life. So much to experience. We must remain balanced.
"Surely God is well balanced, so perhaps we re just that much closer to Him when we are. In any case, I like the link between hale, whole, health, heal, and holy. Our unity of soul within diversity of circumstances--our "stilling of the center" --is worth any effort."
So perhaps take a step back. Eat a bowl of ice cream. And enjoy it. I give you permission.
