Food...yup thats right....food.

As many of you know, I have had a love-hate relationship with food my entire life....well....mainly hate.  I had an intense phobia of food and it controlled me for many years...like 20 of them.  This is a topic all on its own, and another topic would be that my relationship with food was a 'cover-up issue' for other things I could not deal with....neither of these are included today in detail.  


What I am here to say is that I am loving food now.  I wonder if you ever sit down at a meal and taste your food, or if you are too busy talking, working, studying, or generally spacing out to even realize what you are doing? 



I realized about a year ago that I never TASTE my food, and I found out while in a class on mindfulness.  The instructor gave each participant a craisin and asked us to put it in our mouth and observe what it felt like in our mouths, what it tasted like, the texture, and anything else we could think of in 2 minutes....  I don't know about you... but having 1 craisin in my mouth for 2 minutes with out eating it was almost torture.  It was worth it in the end however because I realized that one craisin has intense flavor, sweet, tangy, earthy, back to sweet, it was like a party on my taste buds.  That class was the beginning of my love affair with food.  Rather than seeing food as the enemy, or something to feel ashamed of, or even something to avoid, I started to see it as not only a necessary part of life, but as a privilege and an exciting experience.  


Food has many functions, it brings people together, it is used for celebration, it is for nourishment, it runs the economy, it is the basic substance that is necessary for life to keep moving forward.  I want to challenge you to think of food in a more detailed and loving way.  I honestly have at LEAST 2-3 conversations about the food I am eating with one of my incredible friends who also enjoys food tremendously.  Every now and then I will send or receive a text along the lines of "I am eating this bran muffin, and Oh. My. Gosh. the honey that they put on the top is soooo good!", and honestly, both of us just get a kick out of the joy of eating.  We have begun to share recipes (not that I have started to cook...come on lets be real...one step at a time), and we purely love what we are eating, we love what it does to our body, and we love that we share a mutual joy of the process.  Just the other day I got a text saying:  "I just ran out of 'Blueberry Muffin Top' cereal, this is NOT good!", it was a crisis and we laughed so hard about it.  (My friend LOVES that cereal and recommends that everyone on God's green earth try its heavenly wonderfulness).  Grocery shopping has become an adventure both for new fun foods, and crazy deals on our favorites.  Who would have thought that I would be so excited about something that I used to loathe?


I am telling you this, because we live in a society that teaches that the love of food is unhealthy and dysfunctional.  That message could not be farther from the truth.  In a world of extremes, skinny/fat, happy/sad, emaciated/obese, beautiful/ugly, it is good every now and then to take a step back and say "What the hell am I believing, where is the grey area???"  


Popular media is and always will be around us influencing our purchases and essentially what we ingest for survival, I am just saying that you have a choice.  Would it hurt to add a little joy into something that you have to do anyway?  Would it be terrible if you ate a balanced meal plan with fruits, veggies, AND desserts?  Take a minute and smell the waffles!!  One of the essentials of life can be so rewarding and fantastic, and we walk right by it everyday scolding it for being "bad", and then we go to our therapists and explain how nothing makes us happy!  


You have happiness on your plate everyday.  You can choose to notice it and enjoy it, or you can overlook it and continue being miserable... You get to do what YOU want to do...those are the JOYS of being a responsible adult!


Cheers!
You are Loved!
Haley