Thoughts on Health FAQ… Healthy Cooking and Joyful Eating

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My morning coffee… in a mug that my son painted for me

Every single thing that goes into my body right now has to bring me joy, or I’m not putting it in my mouth.

I’ve always lived by this philosophy… eating only the foods I *love* and feel great about… and I’ve always had a healthy relationship with my weight and my body. If I don’t like it, no matter how healthy I think it is… it doesn’t go in my mouth. And if I love it, really love it, feeling no guilt what-so-ever associated with it, I eat it! Endless amounts of it! In whatever quantities I want, how ever often I want.

That’s it. That’s the criteria. Does it bring me joy? That’s all I want to know.

You may think that if you let yourself eat ONLY foods that bring you complete joy, you’d be lost in a diet of fast food, fats, and artificial dye #5.

I really don’t think so. Because if you sit with it for a moment, you’ll *feel* that most of us eat these foods with a bit of guilty pleasure… a feeling of “well… I’ll only eat half…” or “I’ll regret this tomorrow but I’m going for it now!” Those foods wouldn’t even make it on to my plate. If I have a bad feeling about it, feel that I *shouldn’t* eat it, feel that it is unhealthy for me… I’d rather throw it in the trash or compost it then eat it.

I love butter, love it to the point that I’ve eaten an entire stick of it… love candy… and I eat butter and candy with absolutely no hesitation and no little voice inside my head telling me it is bad for me. I have unwavering faith in the body’s miraculous ability to take the nutrition it wants from what I eat when I eat with joy and discard the rest.

It is our vibrational relationship with food which affects what we can handle and how it is processed.

Knowing we are pure energy, knowing food is pure energy… it is the interaction between the two that allows for the exchange of nutrition.

I eat what I want when it pleases me, and I don’t eat when I don’t want to… never making myself eat anything no matter what the current health fads are… and as a result, food is not weighty to me and does not have the power to dictate my weight.

As a physician, I can tell you for a fact that most folks who struggle with weight view food as a *weighty* issue. Food is very serious. Important. Heavy. They look at food and the food has control, strength, and power. As a result, there is simply almost nothing that someone struggling with weight can put in their mouth that won’t contribute to the weight issue.

The solution to this, to every single thing in life it seems, is joy.

Love, fun and joy. If food is no longer weighty to you, if it is no longer so serious and so heavy… guess what food becomes? Food becomes fun. A choice. A delightful joyful party that we get to have every single time we decide to put something into our bodies. It is no longer a struggle. It has no control over you.

You simply decide if you love what you are wanting to put into your mouth — do you love it freely and with no strings attached? If you have a feeling that it is not good for you, it has to much fat, it has too many preservatives, blah blah blah… put it down. Throw it out. Better to eat nothing and have a drink of water then put something into your precious, lovable, amazing, wondrous body that you do not love. Why would you? Why would you put something inside of you that you do not love?

So, for me, this means most of the time I prefer organic food. There is something about pesticides and artifical ingredients that turns me off. Many times I’d rather eat nothing or just have a carrot then the crap that is out there. BUT almost as often, I enjoy eating candy when we watch a movie, driving through fast food when I have a craving, and having donuts for breakfast because I can truly and deeply say that I can eat these foods without the least little bit of guilt. Deeply believing that my body will excrete (or not even absorb in the first place) the parts of those foods that it does not want. If I can eat it with joyful abandon, then it passes my criteria for healthy. Doesn’t matter what it is.

 

Miles enjoying a smore

For everybody, this will mean a different thing. If you are a vegetarian, then putting meat in your body that does not feel ethically right would not serve your body well at all, no matter what kind of data they show about healthy animal fats… don’t eat it. If you believe that dairy is bad for you, then don’t eat it. You *know* what foods feel right to you. You *know* what foods you are a vibrational match to and which foods you are not. You know this by how you feel when you think about how that food was produced, how it was prepared, and the ingredients in it. You *know* how you feel about that food, and you know if you feel joyful at the thought of consuming it.

Watch this Abraham You Tube video, that goes a bit more into detail about this idea of eating foods that bring you joy. The second half really gets into some good stuff. The last minute or two of the video is amazing.

So, beyond only putting into my body the foods I feel good about… how do I decide what to make for dinner?

My favorite cookbook on earth is Food To Live By: The Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook. It’s my cooking bible. I love every single recipe I’ve ever tried in it. The organic spin on this cookbook matches my belief system about food in general. These are the types of foods I feel best about preparing.

My other favorite cookbook is The Pioneer Woman Cooks — I absolutely love her style (comfort foods) and the recipes and pictures in the book make this the easiest to follow cookbook that I’ve ever used. I tend to substitute organic foods whenever possible when I follow her recipes, and I love everything I’ve ever made from this cookbook as well.

A shelf in my pantry, stocked with garlic grown in our backyard and homemade apple pie filling, applesauce, strawberry and blueberry jam that I made from fruit we’ve picked

In general, I feel very turned off by pre-packaged mixes. I do not use cake mixes, cookie or muffin mixes, pancake mixes, hot chocolate powders, etc… it just doesn’t *feel* good to me.

When I have made foods with these mixes in the past, I’ve learned that while they turn out looking amazing, as I bring these foods up to my lips… I feel yucky. I feel like they are pretend fake foods. Yes, my homemade pancakes (made from a recipe in the Food To Live By cookbook) are much flatter and less fluffy then ones made from a mix… but when I eat my pancakes, slathered in tons of organic butter and with a million handfuls of chocolate chips thrown in… now those pancakes just *feel good* to me to eat.

So… this is NOT to say that I don’t think our bodies can eat pre-packaged brownies and cakes made from mixes… I do think we can vibrationally dismiss anything in those that don’t serve us well… but I don’t think that *I* can, because I can’t eat those items joyfully… at least when I make them. If someone else makes them… heck yeah, I can dig on in. But when I make them… I don’t feel right. So I’ve learned that when I’m home and the kids want hot chocolate, I feel good about heating up some milk on the stove and melting in a 1/2 cup of chocolate chips, instead of reaching for the instant powder.

It’s been a process that has taken me all of my adulthood to figure out… what types of foods I like to make and how I like to make them… and it continues to be a process, unfolding eternally. I expect that the foods I choose and cook two decades from now will be quite different then the ones I reach for time and time again today.

But that’s okay, because it is very very simple for me to figure out. It’s just: do I love this completely? Do I deeply enjoy eating this?

If I can eat it with no strings attached… if I *want* to eat it… then I do. And even if this changes for me mid-bite… I have been known on many an occasion to spit the food right out of my mouth (discretely, into a napkin… or okay, directly into the trashcan) if I don’t feel good about swallowing it. I never feel that I *have* to finish the food on my plate. If I change my vibrational relationship with the food I am wanting to consume, that is the most important thing to me. Not finishing my plate. Not eating what I should. The most important thing is that I feel good about the foods that go into my body.

If that is one bite of my meal, so be it. There are always hungry pets and a lovely compost bin eagerly and joyfully ready to consume the rest, and the process begins again. Many times I’d rather put my fork down in the middle of a bite and just drink a glass of water than finish eating something that has lost it’s appeal to me.

So it seems sort of silly for me to be telling you about what feels vibrationally *right* for me to be eating, as I’m sure it is completely different from what feels vibrationally *right* for you to eat. So I’m going to end this post here… two cookbook recommendations and a you tube video that nails everything down that I’m trying to say.

What do you think? Have you found that the *weightier* you feel about food the more *weighty* it’s become in your life? Do you feel free to change your mind in the middle of eating a food that you realize you do not love? Do you eat foods that may not seem nutritious, but that you love love love and never seem to suffer bad consequences from? xoxo