Let's Talk About Food....

Let's talk about how we feed our bodies. Are you giving your body the nourishment it needs? Oh, I'm sure you are eating your dark leafy greens, and your blueberries, and your grass-fed beef and cage-free eggs because you are trying to be healthy right? You can eat all the organic foods you want and still not be nourishing your body. Let's talk about primary foods.

What are Primary Foods?

Nourishment comes in more forms that what is found on our plates. According to Joshua Rosenthal (founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition) the food we eat plays a secondary role to the other ways in which we  feed our bodies. Our Primary Foods include our relationships, career, exercise routine, and spirituality. These are the things which nourish our bodies, and give our lives meaning, joy, fulfillment. These are the foods which sustain our lives, making what we eat secondary.

If you are struggling with a bad relationship, a career you are not happy with, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, or not taking enough time for self care, it can throw your life off balance leaving you in an unhealthy state. You have heard the saying "You cant exercise your way out of a bad diet" right? Well, you also cant eat enough veggies to compensate for neglecting your happiness. 

What happens when we ignore our Primary Foods?

Now that you understand what primary foods are, maybe you can begin to make a correlation to some of the health issues you may be experiencing. I remember a time when I had digestive issues after everything I ate. I thought I was eating healthy foods for the most part. I also gained quite a bit of weight, yet wasn't eating a lot of sugar laden foods, so why was my body fighting against me? Well, looking back at my primary foods, I was feeding my body a super-sized serving of stress each meal, with a side of exhaustion, followed by anger for dessert. MMMMM delicious right? Let me tell you, it was heartburn hell and I blew up like a balloon. In my closet hung clothes I hadn't worn in years, but instead I had garments labeled "unhappiness", "shame", "resentment", "exhaustion" that I wore daily...you get the picture. It wasn't until I changed my diet of life that I started to notice a difference in my waistline. I began to serve myself larger portions of self care and smaller portions of stress. I no longer skipped meals because I was so busy with deadlines. I traded in comfort cravings of spaghetti pasta for spaghetti squash and felt so much better! It all started to make sense to me that if I  cleaned up my primary foods, then my secondary food choices become cleaner too. Yeah, I still crave pizza, but not as often. And I make conscious food choices more often based on what my body needs, not what my mind and heart says to eat.

Below is an exercise I invite you to experience. This is a Circle Of Life which is labeled with primary foods. These are various aspects of our lives which need to be considered in our overall health. Place a piece of tracing paper over the picture. With a marker, place a dot on each line of primary food depicting how satisfied you are with each area in your life. Place a dot closer to the center for less satisfaction and a dot furthest away if you are pretty satisfied in that area. Next, connect the dots. Determine where you spend the most time and energy and where you spend the least. Identify any imbalances. What did you discover about your primary foods? Where could you make some changes? If you would like to learn more about how you can better balance your primary foods, let's talk! Feel free to send me a private message on Facebook, or shoot me an email at myhealthyfriendsfitness@gmail.com. Isn't today a great day to start feeling good?

*Circle of Life comes from IIN. 

Best in Health!

Carol Keller
CINHC, E-RYT200, Fitness trainer and Weight Loss Specialist

My Healthy Friends Fitness

myhff.blogspot.com