Demystifying Food and Making Healthy Eating Accessible
What do you eat the day after you “overindulge”? How do you grow your booty and have visible abs? How do you regulate your period? How do you lose pandemic weight? These are all questions many of us have or have, at some point in our lives, had. In response to this demand (which was created initially by an industry that sold us an ever-shrinking size 0 and ‘detox’ teas), we’ve seen all sorts of conflicting advice. ‘If you don’t have an appetite in the morning, there’s something wrong with you. Eat anyway.’ And on the other hand, ‘your body is smart enough to know when it is hungry and when it is full, listen to it and feed it accordingly.’* We’ve also heard that bodies can communicate micronutrient needs through cravings, which is why it’s important to eat intuitively. Then we heard that intuitive eating doesn’t work because if some people leaned into their cravings they’d never touch a vegetable in their lives.
Eating is something we do to live. At its most basic, it is a survival tool. Your body, an intricate and sophisticated machine, needs fuel for energy—as any advanced machinery would. But it’s also become so much more in most societies. Family meals are a beautiful social event in many cultures. In Italy, family gatherings happen over home-cooked meals, prepared with love, and a few glasses of wine. In Samoa, food is central to celebrations, with feasts being the standard way to celebrate major milestones and life events.
So why and how have we messed up food culture so much? For a friend’s birthday last year, we were planning on hiking somewhere scenic and having a picnic. I wanted to surprise her with some cupcakes on the picnic as well. When I brought this up to some of the other friends joining us, I got a disappointing response of “why would you ruin the hike by having a cupcake at the end?” I responded that a hike, and exercise in general, doesn’t hold its value in its potential to grant you weight-loss. I ended up not getting the cupcakes in the end because more than one friend joining us refused to have one, despite them loving cupcakes.
Reminders
When I started writing this, the goal was to encourage people to eat in ways that supported their health and hormones. That still is the goal, but I feel like you can’t talk about that without considering the extremes many of us feel like we have to go to in order to be “healthy”. Unless you’re an athlete or a bodybuilder (or just someone with very different requirements than the average person), the only diet rules that you should be following, in my humble opinion, are:
A few more things to discuss:
Yes, you need carbs. You might not feel good on all types of carbs, and you might feel better eating a little less (or a little more) carbs than your friend does. But you still need all three macronutrients.
No, one day of “overindulging” will not change the way you look or your overall health. Attempting to overcorrect the following day can result in a harmful binge/restrict cycle. Just move on and eat normally the next day.
No, exercise does not determine whether or not you deserve to eat. Your body does so much for you every day, exercise is only a small fraction of the energy it expends, fuel it well.
The body(type) you have is the perfect one for your lifestyle. Your body is generally smart enough to adapt to your needs, and if you want the body of an athlete, it would be very difficult to achieve that without the lifestyle of an athlete. If your body is difficult to maintain in a certain way, then that might mean that, based on your lifestyle needs, your body tends towards something different.
Making Healthy Eating Accessible
As discussed above, we live in a time that has really overcomplicated food and eating. Most affordable food options are highly processed and, for those of us short on time, takeout options are often high in sodium, lacking in micronutrients, and really unsustainable for long-term health. So, how can you work around these limitations and create food diversity and a gut and hormone supporting lifestyle?
Fruits and vegetables can be super expensive when you buy them out of season. Going into Autumn, I’m noticing that berries cost so much more than they did during the Spring. This is also, generally, how you get the best tasting and the freshest produce too. I love cherries so much, they’re probably my favorite fruit, but they are really tasteless when they’re sold out of season. Not to mention that it’s such a waste of money getting subpar produce for such a high cost.
Buy frozen fruits and vegetables
Snap-frozen food can actually be more nutritious than fresh. That’s because it’s often picked at its ripest, as opposed to the fresh produce we buy, which is picked before it ripens and then transported to our supermarkets. Frozen fruits and vegetables are also cheaper than fresh, especially when you consider how little food waste there is when you can store your produce in the freezer for months.
Buy frozen protein
When I lived in student accommodation and didn’t have a car to get to the grocery store whenever I needed, I lived off of a meal of frozen salmon, frozen broccoli, and some rice or potatoes from my pantry. It’s not the cheapest thing in the world, but frozen protein can be really good in a pinch and it also often ends up being cheaper than buying fresh.
Learn the nutritional value of restaurant meals
I have a friend who used to swear that the Subway wraps were better than the regular bread, nutritionally speaking. It took a quick little look at their website to discover that the regular bread is higher in protein per serve and higher in nutrients. I won’t discuss calories, as that is not productive for everyone. If that is you, don’t look at the calories, simply consider the ingredients list. Ingredients are labeled according to how much is in the product. So for example, if milk is the first ingredient in your candy bar, then the candy bar contains more milk than any of the other ingredients. If milk, for example, is an ingredient that often makes you feel less than ideal, reconsider.
Incorporate a serving or two of fruits into your breakfast
It’s easier to achieve food diversity if you make an effort to eat fruits and vegetables every day. One of my favorite ways to do that is to have a sliced piece of fruit or a simple fruit salad to the side of my breakfast, or as a snack afterwards. Smoothie bowls are also great for this, or even a bowl of oats topped with some bananas or berries.
Incorporate a serving or two of vegetables each in your lunches and dinners
Just like the tip mentioned above, having more fruits and vegetables every day can be an easy way to incorporate diverse micronutrients into your diet. Those can be highly beneficial to your gut and everything affected by that, like your hormones and your digestion. It’s really easy to just pop some frozen veggies into the microwave for a few seconds, season them, and add them to the side of your meal. You can also have fun with this by creating or finding fun and delicious salads to go to the side of your meals or, if you bulk them up with some protein and starches, as the meal itself.
Meal prep
I am such a hypocrite for bringing this one up, but it really is a good tip if you don’t have much time. I personally struggle with meal-prepping, but as a student I’ve never really felt the need to meal-prep, because I’m usually at home during my meal times. When I’m really busy, I throw some frozen protein, potatoes, and vegetables in the oven and call it a meal. However, if and when I do find myself really pressed for time, overnight oats, leftovers, and precut (by me, earlier) fruits and vegetables have always come in handy.
Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested in a meal-prep hater’s guide to meal prep that doesn’t suck, because I’d be more than willing to experiment and find ways to make meal prepping more interesting and fun for all of us!
* If you’ve suddenly had a change in appetite and suddenly don’t feel like breakfast, there may be a hormonal issue at play, consulting a professional may be necessary then.
