Sometimes we can guide each other along toward courage and heath. Who's done that for you? Who could you be a guide for in this season?
In college, I had a nutrition professor
who was passionate about food, I cannot recall her name but her love for all
things health and her slender build and long dark hair are engrained in my
memory. Growing up, I always refused whole wheat, whole wheat anything. If it
was brown and I would not touch it but after a few weeks in her class, she
opened my eyes to health on another level with sprinkled vocabulary words like
flax seed and saturated fat and whole wheat bread and flour made its way in to
my cart and home with me. She brought in samples of recipes with muffins filled
with carrots and apples and seeds that were surprisingly delicious and gave us
all copies. I walked out of class eating my muffin and talking on the phone
with Ricardo in amazement at the taste and ingredients.
A few years later, I regularly
babysat two of the sweetest, calmest children I have ever known. For snack, I
was ever cutting up apples and pears and peeling oranges and spreading
sunflower butter on celery sticks topped with raisins and mixing bowls of nuts
and dried berries. At this point, I was hardly eating fruits, besides Cuties
and apples but as I cut and chopped, the aroma was so sweet and the pears were
so juicy, I started purchasing them, too, enjoying each bite. Sunflower butter was a new concept, as peanut
butter was always a staple growing up but it was delicious none the less,
especially homemade with cinnamon and maple syrup mixed in. And nuts made a
perfect snack, with a few chocolate chips.
Their mama was the first person I
knew to do science experiments with Halloween candy; I had never heard of such
a thing and it took me by surprise the day I came over to candy sitting on the
counter with a list of ways to examine and dissolve them. Candies I had grown
up eating and never thought twice about - except the time a classmate told me
they were made in a science lab but I had no idea what he meant by that or that
it was not natural for candy to be made that way. It sounded kind of fancy to
me and tasted delicious.
But this time I thought more
about it. Looking on the packages and realizing what I was consuming made it
that much less appealing when I did not know what half the ingredients were.
A little while later, after Penny
was born, she started getting rashes, which seemed to be triggered by certain
foods, mainly those with preservatives and artificial colors. This made me
evaluate what we were eating even more and drove me a little crazy and forced
me to narrow our choices to healthier options with better ingredients and lots
of fruits of vegetables, which I had thankfully already been exposed to and implementing in our diets.
When people are passionate about
something, there tends to be a natural guidance towards it. I love how they showed
me through their knowledge and expertise on the matter in the way they lived
and treated their bodies. A sort of leading by example.
After all, are we really what we
eat?
Here's to guiding and health.
____________________________________________________
This is part of a 365 day blogging series through Savor by Shauna Niequist. If you would like to blog along, whether daily or weekly, I would love to have you for the journey; be sure to link back to the post. And if you are not a blogger, you can join along, too. Just leave your response and answers in the comments.