The conversation I wish to have here about food goes far beyond recipes and pictures. Don’t get me wrong, I love food porn more than the average bear, but there is very little out there about our relationship with food and it’s a problem. There is serious confusion around what we should and shouldn’t be eating, how we should or shouldn’t be moving and what is or isn’t healthy. While I would never purport to have all the answers, my training with Marc David in The Psychology of Eating program in Boulder, Colorado opened my mind to how my dis-eased relationship with body and food was standing in the way of me being the best version of myself. If you struggle with self-judgement, weight issues or unwanted food habits, the tools I share here (along with the food porn and recipes) may help. Like most folks I’ve talked to, I believed that a healthy weight could be controlled by calories in, calories out. I assigned morality to foods (Ex. ice cream=bad, lettuce=good) that encouraged self-judgement and body hatred during and after most meals. What a revelation when I heard, “Food is morally neutral.” So, if my old thinking was flawed, what should I replace it with? David suggests the root of our issue is the pace at which we live. In his book, The Slow Down Diet, David states that eating to match our pace of life causes us to constantly be eating in “stress-response” (Think: fight-or-flight, aka. eating while being chased by a lion.) The result of eating under pressure is decreased calorie burning, nutrient absorption, cellular energy production, oxygen and digestion, all contributing to weight gain and a myriad of other physiological abnormalities. The tonic then is to slow down. Sounds simple, right? But I have found it’s easier said than done. My catering company, Taproot Whole Foods, was born from working with clients at Advantage Integrative Medicine in Western Colorado as an Eating Psychology Counselor. I never went to culinary school or worked under great chefs in three star restaurants. I have no knife skills. What I do have is the desire for the world to eat higher quality food. What I realized in working with my clients is that, for many people, “better quality” required time they didn’t have. If I couldn’t get clients to comply with slowing down to fix wholesome meals for themselves, then I would just have to do it myself…enter Taproot. What began as a meal prep program, grew into a full service catering company (although I explicitly stated on my website that we were not). We specialized in offering farm-to-table menus that reflected the season and the bounty of what our local farmers were producing at the moment. My hope was to inspire people to cook for themselves, using the whole food ingredients available to them when they saw how simple and delicious our food was. In some cases it worked. In most cases, people were happy to continue running around like road-runners, pop the lid off their wholesome lunch and eat it while driving to their next appointment. I effectively missed my mark. As I’ve alluded to in other posts, I eventually got burned out and chose to close the company. I saw myself losing my focus on self care with the altruistic excuse that I was helping so many (more important) people. Well, isn’t that the irony of the century?! So, here we are. Me: still wanting to help. You: still looking for answers. Hopefully here, we can both get what we need without sacrificing too much of ourselves. Bon Appetit!
More Than Food