You pay attention closely. It’s new and beautiful and you don’t want to miss a thing. Every moment: the swift urgency, the patient calm, you absorb it all, nothing else matters – when you’re in love you pay attention to everything. You soak it up and pack away the tiny moments in your mind to be pulled out later, to be rehashed, remembered, and analyzed. In the beginning it is all interesting, and if you’re lucky – if you find your true love, that new feeling will continually revisit you after waves of stagnant plateaus, or angry bouts. You aim to please and give it everything you’ve got, like a sprinter taking off from the blocks, full of strength and energy and enthusiasm. Eventually things will slow down, habits will form, patterns will settle in, but in the beginning you burn with desire and can never get enough.
Food.
I love it.
Everyone loves food, but I have found, late in my life, a new relationship with food and my body. One that brings happiness and satisfaction in a variety of ways. In my early relationships I focused on what I thought would make me happy, I had expectations and set out to find food to satisfy them. Often times this led to regrets and unhealthy choices (and if I’m honest this statement could probably apply to my love life as well!). Instead of listening to my body, I made choices based on cravings and wants. Now I listen to my body and have developed a healthy relationship with both it, and the fuel I feed it with.
My love affair with food began as most new relationships do, with a stage of curious wonder. After beginning Crossfit I was introduced to the Paleo lifestyle. I was interested in trying it out for performance’s sake – as a competitive addict, I was willing to do anything to get an advantage, so I dived in full force. I cleaned out all of my cupboards, researched a bunch of recipes, shopped for Paleo staples and began the learning process. Like a new lover, I was ready to go and acting hastily based on my intense feelings. I went out too strong and found myself lost in the kitchen, in the grocery store, and in my macros. It took awhile to dial it all in, and throughout the process I learned many valuable lessons.
Now, I’m not a scientist, a doctor, or an expert by any means, but I am a dedicated, committed lover. I have paid close attention to every detail of every bite of my food and the reactions my body had to it. Like a new lover I was absorbed in the process of eating healthy and pushing my body to its limits by carefully observing everything. After two years I have settled into comfortable patterns and habits, but I still haven’t lost that new love feeling. That’s how I know this is true love and I’d like to share with you what it has taught me. As we all know, the best relationships are the ones that bring out the best in ourselves.
Lesson – Cravings
In the past, my relationship with food left me with intense cravings and I would often find myself devouring a bag of chips, like literally an entire family sized bag of chips, or cookies. Afterwards I’d not only feel guilty, but my body would crash and I would feel unhealthy (again, not unlike many of my relationship choices with men in my early years…). Though it was never worth it, I continued to do it for years. I thought it was a sign of some moral weakness or character flaw, but after discovering healthy eating and paying attention to my body I’ve learned there are two types of cravings and once you know this, you can manage it. There was nothing wrong with me, I was just letting the wrong type of craving lead me.
The first type of craving is what I call a “tongue craving”. This is when you want something simply for the taste of it – for me I find that in the middle of the afternoon I crave the warm, bitter taste of tea on my tongue, and at the end of my longest days I want the sweet taste of chocolate. These cravings originate out of a need for pleasure and are fine in moderation. In my previous relationship with food, I let these cravings rule my world and it led to poor health because tongue cravings don’t honor what the body needs. There is science behind your insulin response and metabolic reactions to consuming processed, grain-filled foods, but again I’m not a scientist, just an intense lover. I encourage you to research the myriad information out there on your own because part of a new love affair involves getting to know your partner. (Here are some resources if you’re interested: Guide to Paleo for Beginners, Wheat Belly, the Godfather of Paleo – Loren Cordain).
Though tongue cravings don’t honor what the body needs, “body cravings” do. After you begin, and spend some time on your journey into healthy eating, you’ll become more in tune with your body. By paying close attention to what I eat and how it makes me feel, I’ve developed the ability to listen to my body. When it needs something it tells me and I don’t deny it what it wants (I’m a self-sacrificing lover). This is great because I feel satisfied and don’t have to restrict myself. Rather than feeling guilty for giving in to my cravings, if I understand they come from a need within me, I can indulge in them happily. For me, after intense conditioning I crave salty foods, and because I treat my body as a machine that requires high quality food (think 110 octane, not regular pump gas) I choose to have a sweet potato with sea salt and cinnamon, or a bag of Terra Sweet Potato Chips – yes, I still devour the whole bag as I did in my previous relationship, but now it’s a source of joy and satisfaction rather than guilt and disgust.
Lesson – Performance and Recovery
When you’re working hard, lifting and preparing for competition six days a week, your body takes a beating! I often get the question, “How do you do it all?” I am a single mother, full-time teacher, track coach, adventure enthusiast (seriously, I love random journeys and those things take time), motocross racer, and I train between 7 to 10 hour a week for competitive Crossfit. That level of activity takes a miracle, and I find that natural foods are it. If I eat clean and avoid gluten, processed sugars, and boxed foods I can do it all without fatigue or being tired. And eggs. That’s my other secret, eggs everyday keep me ready to play.
I log my food on and off and I log my workouts daily. As a result, over the past two years I’ve noticed some patterns. Resoundingly, my food intake has a direct impact on my performance and recovery. I cannot stress enough the importance of what you eat for doing well. Now, food isn’t everything, I also see similar patterns related to sleep, consumption of fish oil, and mobility, but food is the primary miracle maker.
Lesson – Keeping Ahead of Yourself
Now food is important to maintaining performance and recovery, but with a grown-up life and schedule, it’s difficult to keep it clean on short time frames and busy schedules. Another thing I’ve learned on my journey is to stay ahead of myself and to constantly reflect on my progress. I have to stay in touch with my relationship so I don’t accidentally slip and let it slide to the back burner of life’s priorities.
Whenever I’m listening to my body and it starts to tell me it’s not happy through fatigue, soreness, or a drop in performance, my first step is to log my food for 3-5 days. I’m typically lazy about it so I don’t write down quantities or types of calories I’m consuming, just what I’m eating. Usually what I find is that I’ve decreased the amount of veggies I’m eating. There is a ton of research and information about the health benefits of eating vegetables, but like a lover I base my decision on my feelings. I think with my stomach and not my brain.
To help remedy this I plan ahead. Every Sunday I make my breakfasts for the week so I can grab and go in the morning and I use this same mentality for veggies. I split my cauliflower, carrots, celery, cucumbers, broccoli, and other vegetables into snack sized portions for the entire week so I can grab them quickly and keep my body fed properly. I like to mix it up too, so I’m not always grabbing the same types of veggies. You know what they say… variety is the spice of life.
(I also eat organic baby food, I know it’s weird, and trust me, I get a lot of funny looks, but it comes in pouches that require no utensils and no refrigeration. Plus, it’s all natural, so it is a very convenient source of fuel).
Lesson – Experimentation and Being Open to New Things
Speaking of variety… I used to fall for the same type (both food and men…) regardless of the fact that it never worked out. You can’t stick to a healthy relationship if it isn’t interesting, fun and deeply satisfying. I found that after I began to get comfortable with my new food choices, I began to experiment with them -this was the best thing that ever happened to my relationship with food.
I learned how to use spices in different ways (like adding a dash of chili powder and cinnamon to anything I cook with ground beef – try it and thank me later 🙂 and to eat foods I never tried before. This opened new avenues for me and also helped me to stay in love for the long haul. After hitting a stagnant plateau in a relationship it’s easy to start looking elsewhere, you know the thought, “Maybe that bag of Doritos would taste better than my usual…” By introducing new things to your existing relationship you keep it fresh and deter the need to look elsewhere. Try new things, don’t be scared to experiment.
Lesson – Annoying the hell out of… I mean Sharing Your Passion
Another pitfall of new relationships is going too hard too soon. It’s an honest mistake, when you fall in love it is so exciting and invigorating, you want to stand on the highest mountain with arms wide open and scream it to the world… the problem is the world isn’t always ready to hear you. For that reason I’ve learned that it’s important to scale your enthusiasm based on your audience. If someone solicits your advice, you can have a little more animation and include lots of information, but if it is someone who didn’t ask, you have to be careful how much you talk about it. Getting too excited about healthy eating will annoy a lot of people!
What I’ve found to work best is begin on some common ground and ease into the conversation about food from there. I realize you could just avoid talking about food choices altogether, and some people do include diet on the list of “never-talk-abouts” with religion and politics. I disagree though, when something is so life-changing and impactful, it should be shared. To overcome this taboo topic-block I like to let people tell me about their food habits and healthy choices, and then moderate how much I tell them based on that. For example, if my friend tells me she’s proud of herself for avoiding chips for the last two weeks, I talk to her about healthier alternatives to chips such as plantain chips, banana chips, or sweet potato chips. This way we can talk about a healthy diet as honoring your body, not restricting yourself. To stick with a relationship it has to be something you enjoy, not constant hard work.
Lesson – Loving Your Body Inside and Out
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my love affair with food has also taken me on a journey to loving myself. After getting rid of gluten for performance reasons I learned that I have been suffering from celiac disease my whole life. I didn’t know that it was possible to live without arthritic pain, depression, acne and stomach issues. I truly thought those were just natural human ailments. Since I’ve transitioned to clean eating, I have found a new way to live. Quite literally, my life is better without gluten in it.
As a result of getting healthy, I found that I have more energy which allows me to do more things that make me happy, which leads to satisfaction, which leads to a healthy self-image. Not only am I happy with the “inside” of my body, I am now much more happy with its outside appearance as well. Clean eating leads to a more natural body composition. When you’re body reaches homeostasis through proper nutrition and exercise, it becomes the best version of itself. Everybody has a different make up, but when you feel comfortable in your own skin your beauty shines in a more definitive, self-serving way no matter what the appearance of it is.
One last thing…
True love is the type of love that changes you for the better; a healthy relationship builds you up and lasts through the good times and bad. Developing a healthy relationship with food has helped me to become the person that I am today, one I am happy to share with the world. One that survives the good times and the bad times not only intact, but smiling the whole time.
I hope you can find happiness in your relationship with food too… and that you keep reading what I have to share with the world :).
Cut To It 