Musings on Healthy Living

During orientation for AMI, we wrote "I am" poems about food. I struggled more than I expected with this project. I have had a love-hate relationship food for most of my life: I loved eating and hated how it persisted in love handles. Like your typical teenage girl, I struggled with body image issues. Since I exercised all the time, I knew the culprit of my frustration had to be food. If it is all about calories in and calories out, then I could calorie count to my perfect body type. Right?

As I grew past my teenage years, I realized there was a little more to the story. Pressures on how one should eat are constantly around us, some that we are aware of, and some that subconsciously sneak in when we least expect it. This includes anything from advertisements for Dunkin Donuts to the size of your bowl and spoon. I studied Psychology and read Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and heard about all the sob stories of my mom's bulimic and anorexic patients. Yet I still fell into the same processed food traps the ads wanted me to fall into and felt ashamed.

Don't get me wrong, I worked hard to cook healthy meals with balanced nutritional content. Learning about environmental ethics, especially, helped me see food differently. Specifically, Leopold's line, "children think heat comes from the furnace and food from the grocery store," flipped something in me, because I still felt that food came straight from the store, even in college. While I tried to go to the farmer's market, eat meat only rarely, and cut back on processed sugar, every decision to eat better was a conscious one I had to make over and over again. Oftentimes it just got too exhausting to do and the desire for an easy-ready meal at Cook Out took over.

AMI does an amazing job of making healthy eating not only accessible, but enjoyable in a way in which I am filled with gratitude each meal. After a month at AMI, I feel my love-hate relationship with food shifting. I see food in a completely different way. Instead of analyzing the calorie content on the side of the box, I look at the whole food. In a carrot, that means everything from the inedible leaves on top to its hairy skin and the soil it grew in. For meat, I don't need to buy the trimmed meat, but rather just get meat that has lived a healthy life. It is knowing all the work that goes into each bite I take and appreciating it all the more for it. What I love the most is that I know that if I can continue eating this way, I can expand my quality of life and life expectancy.

Things I never thought I would think would make me feel healthier:

1. Drinking whole milk. 

2. Eating breakfasts that surpass 300 calories.

3. Eating little to no meat each day.
4. Eating food that is in season/stored.
5. Knowing where my food comes from and having a say in it.

I am nervous that once the ease of whole food, seasonal meals goes away at the end of the fellowship, I will revert back to my old habits. So part of why I am writing this blog post is not just because I want you all to know how healthy I am, but to keep myself accountable for staying this way when I am back around all the toxic advertisements, beautifully packaged Oreos, and don't have the luxury of time to garden and cook all day.