If you want to balance and optimize healthy eating and tasty foods, this article is meant to help encourage you. I’m convinced you can fulfill both goals at the same time because that has been my practice and desire for my entire adult journey.
I’ve enjoyed and been enamored with foods like most people who think they have a deeper relationship with food (as a lifelong companion of comfort, love, and joy).
I started my young career around my passion for food in event planning, seeing through a “foodie” work lens in the kitchens I worked beside along with thousands of event hosts and planners.
I can’t think of one instance where healthy food menus were requested for the larger ballroom and banquet space events. But, when I planned parties in restaurants, the healthy menu requests became more obvious. Like in the Mediterranean restaurants that use healthier ingredients, methods, herbs, and spices. They used EVOO and vinegar bases for dishes, instead of creamy-butter sauces.
That aligned with a healthy identity I was evolving into where healthy foods can be good and better-tasting than non-healthy.
Plus, healthy eating is easier on the body where you and your gut get along better in happy and healthy agreement.
Reflecting on this, I think it starts from appreciating food and the body. That’s where a healthy balance and triad relationship between you, food, and your body are daily observed from a mirror and a nutrient absorption lens (that only the body sees).
When we have a healthy eating lifestyle, then we don’t have to let the next evolving health trend (or diet) impact us so much or at all. We can change one food or category under question or change, and rely on the variety of others.
Maybe you remember like I do when nuts were considered bad for you because of the fat content, and now they’re the hero of healthy fat and snacks. And if you eat them along with the right foods (like fat-soluble Vitamin A foods), they synergistically help your body.
From your body (aka the end-user or the health critic in you), it’s smart to know how foods are better absorbed from a nutrition-biology standpoint.
I made a visual of some of these synergies.
Some are palatable for pairing, like chocolate and raspberries. A few are odd and you have to really get creative to appreciate. For those, instead of trying to put them together in the same dish, you could figure out how to start with one and end with the other.
Your gut doesn’t care what it looks like on a plate. It cares how it mixes together in your mouth and ultimately in your stomach.
It helps to be informed and to listen to your inner gut if that’s a strength for you. If that’s not so easy or has not been helping you out much lately, then eating “from the rainbow” and having healthy eating habits is a good start.
You can turn a boring broccoli side into a delicious soup or a can of pinto beans into a zesty dip. Both are then easier to digest and you get to enjoy better. That’s just a couple of examples of how healthy eating can be delicious.
Sometimes it just takes a little thought and food prep. It’s encouraging we can reset and start over each day with new healthy eating goals.
In my younger years, I studied the French language, and that helped me to learn catered dishes back then with French titles and names like hors d’oeuvres and foie gras. The French are also known for their buttery recipes and patisseries, where a bakery is on every Parisian corner. So, it’s interesting their obesity percentage stats are lower than we have in the U.S.
One reason for this is that French people eat smaller meals and take time to enjoy the bites. They slow down to chew and appreciate food aromas. They enjoy a slower-paced lifestyle. Paris has the pace of living similar to a smaller metro city in the U.S. where the emphasis is on quality living, and not just immersing in the hustle and bustle.
French foods revolve around the idea of high quality over high production. There’s a respect for ingredients. They have a different way of seeing and appreciating the food they eat. Take cheese: they use the highest quality milk to make their cheeses. And in our American factories, we turn the lower quality milk into cheese.
In the U.S., we love our convenience, fast-paced, and relatively inexpensive options. And in our Melting Pot culture and diversity, we have many cooking influences that help bring back helpful balances.
And each of us can get interested in the nuances behind what we eat, ingredients, cooking, and knowledge. And that helps to become healthy eating inspired. It’s a lifestyle choice.
Each day, it starts in the morning. Breakfast can be nourishing like a protein-rich smoothie. You can choose a prebiotic-probiotic combination. Examples would be starting your day with oatmeal or a banana and yogurt.
Then rolling into lunch, you can add a healthy eating menu: cooked red onions with fermented foods. It’s easier to make your own fermented foods than you think as they’re not advertised everywhere like fruits in a produce section.
These days, many of us are into sustainability and feel deeply for the climate changes we’ve seen especially over the past couple of years. We value recycling despite knowing our efforts of placing our trash in the right bins are limited and we have almost no control.
One way where you can do something about this is to reuse grocery containers for fermented foods that are healthy for you, us, your gut, and the environment.
You could make simple sauerkraut leaving the slaw in a jar of water and salt out at room temperature for a few days and then refrigerate. Your slaw tastes better and has health benefits. Plus you salvaged the jar as a bonus.
When you make healthy eating changes, in the beginning, it may seem odd to you and your stomach as you both adjust. You can gauge how this impacts your daily gut and entire GI system and see how that lands.
All our bodies are different (e.g. we’re all given different metabolisms). But our bodies are similar too as we have the same systems and needed organs to function.
So what works best for one person is different for another. But I think too often we reject ways that could work for us because we don’t see the benefits of it working out for us or our busy lifestyle, and so we skip the healthy habit and lose out on an opportunity.
Another worthwhile cause (and food for thought) is snacking on healthy snacks like carrots and hummus every few hours in the day. I think many would have their weight goals met as the body is happy with the food energy boost, and thereby fed assurance that it won’t need to go in survival mode. Plus, it wouldn’t have to process as much food in one sitting.
…Retraining our body, restoring our body-minds and learning how the body functions along with the world can make a difference for all of us.