Nourishing Your Body and Life

Posted by Melanie Beach on January 19, 2012 under Balanced Eating, Healthy Living, Making choices, Nutrition

Each new year brings people to well-intentioned resolutions to eat better, lose weight, get more active, cleanse and more. These resolutions can keep us motivated for weeks, but many are tossed by the wayside within days or even hours. How many of us have joined a gym in January and worked out regularly for a week or two, then don’t make it back for months? Or promise ourselves to stop eating our favorite junk foods only to gorge on them a few days later? Making these sorts of resolutions can be very motivating for a while, but they’re often too big or restrictive to be true goals for lasting change.

 

This year, how about resolving to eat more healthfully, so that you can nourish your body and life and not just feed it?

 

This concept of nourishing vs. feeding popped up recently when the U.S. Congress debated whether or not the nutritional content of tomato paste counts as a serving of vegetable. Sure, on paper the nutritional content of 1/8 cup of tomato paste seems to be equal to the content of a whole piece (1 cup) of fruit; but does that mean that eating foods that contain tomato paste are more healthful than an apple or orange?

Not necessarily.

 

Many times we think of foods only by the numbers – how many calories, how many grams of fat, how much fiber, or how much sugar they contain – without really looking at the deeper nutritional value of the food. Instead of focusing purely on the numbers, maybe it’s time that we take a look at the whole food. Is pizza a healthful choice just because it has tomato paste on it?

Probably not.

 

Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized this distinction by changing the focus of their nutrition guide from MyPyramid – with its confusing charts of numbers of servings, cups and ounces – to the more streamlined MyPlate, with its focus instead on the proportions of foods on your plate at each meal. This draws the focus away from counting servings of food and brings it to – How balanced is this meal? Am I eating too much starch? Not enough protein?

Nourishing meals are foundational to health and wellness.

 

My thought is that good nutrition doesn’t come from meticulously counting numbers all day. It comes from making healthful, nutrient-rich choices on a daily basis that work together to nourish your mind and body. It’s a much more holistic and humane way to care for yourself and those you love. I think it’s time for us to forget those typical stringent New Year’s resolutions and instead resolve to do our best to nourish our lives by eating smarter. Nourishing choices do more than fill your belly, they help you build the body and life you want – one plate, movement and day at a time.