2 thoughts on “Diet and Exercise as Healing Practices”
I like this post a lot. I think it comes down to balance. When I was growing up and things were very chaotic in my household, I used food and exercise as a means of control when everything else was out of control. It turned out to be less than healthy or beneficial (surprise). I think that I’ve swung to both extremes, but when I truly listen to what my body needs it leads to better emotional and mental health overall. I also tend to be very regimented, and when times are stressful (like, being back in school….) sometimes I lean to extremes in order to regain control over a schedule that is racing and out of control. Nonetheless, it has been helpful to have friends reinforce the need for a physical and mental break. To “let loose” for a little while in order to allow some internal processing to occur. It is also very helpful to have a sort of schedule or regimen to which to return once your equilibrium is being re-established, and many people do not have that schedule. Having my morning yoga or walk (can’t run much anymore after the military) helps me to feel centered and helps with an immediate sense of accomplishment in the mornings, even when I have a very stressful week. Thanks for sharing your process.
Thanks for sharing, Elicia! I agree about balance…and about having a routine in place to fall back on when difficult times hit, because that’s certainly not an easy time to start healthy habits.
For anyone who doesn’t know me personally, you might have noticed the many references on this blog recently to Germany (we are now at the tail end of a summer spent in Cologne, a city in Northwestern Germany), but there’s something you might now know…something that happened during our trip that has had a profound effect on the life of our family, and is the reason I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks. In the early hours of July 4th, my 6-year-old daughter Christine fell 9 feet from the loft bed where she was sleeping and was severely injured. It’s a very long story, but the ultimate result was that she sustained a skull fracture, a concussion, a temporary facial palsy as a result of the swelling pressing on her nerves, and a broken collarbone.
Not exactly the adventure we were looking for when we set off on our European summer. Also definitely not the July 4th I was planning…or the July 5th, or 6th, or 7th, or…you get the idea.
After five traumatic days in a German hospital, our little girl came “home” to our rented apartment and has been recovering remarkably well for someone with such serious injuries. Her emotions, too, have regulated fairly well after this extreme ordeal–she really is an incredibly resilient person, and always has been.
She doesn’t get it from me.
I’ve still been struggling with negativity, fear, and doubt regarding my daughter’s injuries. I wish I had my husband’s optimism for our daughter’s future to be nothing but bright. I’m getting there, but as someone who is naturally a bit of an Eeyore, it’s an uphill battle.
Thankfully, I have some resources. First of all, as a Christian, I have comfort and peace from my relationship with Jesus Christ, and a belief that throughout this ordeal, God is in control. I have had a strong sense that my daughter has plenty left to do on this Earth–even when things did not look good for her immediately after her injury. Second, I have some very dear friends and loved ones who have offered support, checked in every day from afar, and have even sent money for meals and for me to get a massage. (I will say that you never know who will come out of the woodwork to help when you ask for it on Facebook. I was floored to receive super encouraging messages from two high school acquaintances in the midst of this sad time…and equally surprised to hear nothing from a few friends I consider close.)
I see how it is…
But since my faith and my friends aren’t really what this blog is about, I wanted to share a little bit about a couple of other resources that have to do with the healthy lifestyle message I try to proffer on A Love Letter to Food (can I use the word “proffer” without sounding absurd? Also, can you please ignore my Desserts section when I’m talking about my healthy lifestyle message? Mmkay, thanks.)
Of the constellation of practices that are helping me heal emotionally in the wake of my daughter’s injury, diet and exercise have definitely played a role. As for diet, it might sound surprising, but I don’t mean that my diet has been all sunshine and rainbows and that’s helped me feel great. Besides…please allow me this Derek Zoolander moment… I don’t think sunshine and rainbows are edible.
Anyway, what I mean is that, as a part of my healing process, I have been giving myself some extra grace when it comes to my diet–letting go a little of my usual vigilance over my eating habits. As a temporary measure, I’m finding this a relief. One less thing to worry about. In fact, due to some unfortunate timing, my son and I were scheduled to take a 2-day trip to Rome departing only a few days after my daughter was released from the hospital. After a lot of agonizing, I decided we should still go (and I absolutely don’t regret it–it was a life-changing 48 hours). While there, I decided to let myself have the extra serving of gelato, even though I wasn’t that hungry–and I normally never eat if I’m not hungry. Other indulgences included chocolate croissants for breakfast and a crazy-good lasagna dinner. “When in Rome,” right?
I’m sure eating appropriately for emotional healing is different for every person in or recovering from crisis, and may shift as the situation shifts–and I’m certainly not advocating drowning your troubles in gelato all the time. In general, research has revealed that healthy eating has been shown to improve mood, (and, for the record, the Mediterranean diet seems to be the best option to stave off anxiety and depression). But “comfort foods” get their name for a reason: sometimes, in the short term, they really can help us feel better, especially if we associate them with happy memories. And I certainly am going to associate gelato with this happy memory of eating it with my son on the streets of Rome.
Exercise, too, is something that for the first week after my daughter’s injury fell by the wayside. Self-care just didn’t mean going for a brisk jog in those first few days when I was getting three hours of sleep a night and spending all day at my little girl’s bedside. But now that Christine is on the mend, I’ve begun to return to my usual routine of yoga and running. Today, after the kind of run that makes all the song lyrics feel like they’re all singing your story (“and I don’t really care if nobody else beliEEEEEves, cause I’ve still got a lotta fight left in MEEEE!”) I read this awesome article–please, please read it–that confirmed the rejuvenating feelings running always brings. Aerobic activity literally clears your mind by generating new neurons in the area of your brain linked to emotion regulation.
Hey, here’s a pic of me on my run with no makeup! You’re welcome.
My takeaway: in times of crisis when emotional healing is needed, listen to your body when it comes to diet and exercise. And then, if after awhile, your body is still telling you to eat fried chicken and Twinkies and get under 500 steps in a day, be gentle with yourself as you ease into healthy habits. And of course, for anyone in crisis, please seek professional help for emotional and physical issues.
What are the diet and exercise habits that have brought emotional healing in your life?
Now that we’ve been in Europe for over three weeks, I would say I’ve gotten my bearings in many regards. I’m now used to taking trains, trams, and busses (or walking) everywhere I go, and I can roll with the unpredictability of weather that can go from requiring coats and gloves to shorts and flip flops overnight.
But one cultural clash that continues to plague me is grocery shopping. I swear, it’s the most harrowing thing I do here (well, that and ordering food from waiters who obviously think I have disgraced their establishment by choosing to dine there). Sometimes it seems like EVERYTHING is different and I am constantly making direly embarrassing mistakes. Then again, some things about grocery shopping in Germany are undeniably awesome, like the fabulous deals on chocolate and local wine, or the fact that they don’t hand out plastic bags like it’s going out of style.
So if you ever intend to spend time in Germany as an American, plan to prepare some of your own food, and need to purchase it at a grocery store, here is my step-by-step, sort of tongue-in-cheek (but also kind of serious) guide for how to grocery shop, from what I’ve learned in our first three weeks in-country.
Before you leave your house, arm yourself with reusable grocery bags. Otherwise, you will be paying to purchase them at the store (since plastic grocery bags are not a thing here) and by the end of your stay in Germany you’ll find yourself with 87 canvas bags.
Walk to the store, because you don’t have a car.
Enter the store. Attempt to pull a cart from the line, only to realize that they are all chained together. Fiddle with them for awhile to see if you can unchain one. After about 5 minutes, figure you probably look like one of the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, give up, and opt for a basket.
(Realize later that you had to insert a Euro to detach a cart.)
Marvel at the beautiful array of fruits and veggies, especially those different from at home, from plump heirloom tomatoes to purple asparagus.
Semi-stalk another shopper to determine whether or not this is the kind of German grocery store where you have to weigh and label your own individual produce. (I didn’t do this at a Hofer in Vienna and was very pointedly informed by the checker that since I did not weigh and label my single tomato, I could just leave it right there at the register instead of buying it.)
As you wander the aisles, impulse-buy at least one fun-looking European product, like chocolate with currants or a mysterious pink cheese.
Snicker at all the products that are comical to American sensibilities, like the breads with the word “Dinkel” on them and…these?
Do the mental calculus of trying to figure out what familiar, no-recipe-needed dinner you could throw together with the ingredients this store provides. Settle on something easy like pizza. Get through adding mozzarella, tomato sauce, and toppings to your cart before realizing they don’t sell pizza dough here, or anything close to being suitable for a pizza base. (Unless you want to try to make pizza on a croissant, pretzel, or Vollkorn bread.)
Put everything back and start over. This time, decide you’ll make some other easy meal–chili, let’s say–only to realize that they don’t sell any beans, corn, or chili powder.
Cry.
Buy a frozen meal and pray you can figure out how to cook it in Celsius.
Get in line behind the 19 other waiting customers. When you reach the conveyor belt, arrange your items on it like tightly-fitting puzzle pieces in a feat of engineering that could only be German.
Okay, get ready. Here comes the hardest part: checking out.
The checker lady (who, by the way, is sitting, not standing, behind the counter like in the U.S.) will now slide your items across the scanner as fast as humanly possible and push them into the holding pen at the end of the counter.
Here they come!
Scramble to open the bags you brought, load your items into them in some halfway logical fashion, and pay your bill before someone behind you groans audibly in frustration at your slowness. (Yep, this has happened to me, too.)
Heave a sigh of relief and pat yourself on the back as you walk out. You just got through grocery shopping in a foreign country! But…
Since your kitchen is the size of an airplane bathroom, there’s only so much you can keep around at once, so get ready to do it all again tomorrow!
And finally, remind yourself that this will get easier and it’s all part of the experience of living in another culture for awhile.
Hey! It might get a little quiet around here for the next couple of months because our family has some pretty exciting plans in the works: we’re going to Germany for the summer!
For a long time, my husband and I have had a dream to see what it’s like to live abroad for at least a little while. I can remember sitting together at Four Peaks Brewery in Tempe, AZ after a marriage retreat in 2014 when we first came up with the idea we called Operation 2020. (If you’ve ever been on a marriage retreat, you know how they encourage you and your spouse to talk about your shared values, hopes, and dreams.) Over what I recall being a really tasty salmon salad, we talked about how cool it would be to spend an entire year in a foreign country. Immersing in the language, culture, and day-to-day life of a totally different place seemed like an incredible experience we could give our kids (and ourselves, who are we kidding?) We figured that by 2020 our kids would be ideal ages–13, 11, and 9–for travel, and we’d have six whole years to plan and save.
Germany was the logical choice for our destination. I am what you might call a Germophile. My family heritage is Swiss and German, my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees are both in German, and I taught German language at the college level at Arizona State for a couple semesters. I spent the summer of 2003 in Germany on a study abroad program with my alma mater, Wheaton College. Since Anthony and I wanted language learning to be a component of our kids’ experience abroad, it only made sense to go where at least one of us speaks the language and feels somewhat familiar.
As time went by, though, the reality of what it would mean to spend an entire year in Germany began to dawn on us. Probably, we’d have to quit our jobs, figure out work visas, and find some means of employment that would support a family of five for a year…not to mention having to either homeschool our kids or find a suitable school for them in another country. This mountain of potential obstacles dimmed our enthusiasm for making our trip last a whole 12 months. Our thinking began to shift. What if we spent three months instead? Like a summer? No visas required, no taking the kids out of school, and maybe Anthony could even keep his job and work remotely.
When we looked at this option, it seemed vastly more appealing, and we realized it could happen sooner than our original plan! With me finishing my nutrition degree last December, I knew I could work part-time in the spring to make a little money, leave for the summer of 2017, then perhaps find a more “serious” job upon our return. (Though I do plan to stay at my position at the Halle Heart Children’s Museum for awhile!) Anthony discovered he could in fact work remotely–coincidentally his co-worker has been doing just that from Germany off and on for the last year or so. Everything seemed to be falling into place.
And then came the additional motivator of Donald Trump becoming a serious candidate for presidency. What better time to leave the country?
So in September 2016 we started looking at flights. After clearing with our kids’ principal that they wouldn’t be kicked out of school if they left a couple of weeks before the end of the year–hey, travel is educational!–we bought tickets to spend 80 days in Germany, starting May 8th. The eight months since then have been a maelstrom of preparations. Our itinerary is now set with two weeks in Munich, one week in Vienna, and eight weeks in Cologne. I’ve wracked my brain to try to think of every detail of everything that needs to get taken care of before we leave, from the macro level of train tickets and accommodations to the micro level of how many earrings to pack. Our departure date is now four days away and I’m crossing my fingers that basically everything is, as the Germans say, “erledigt”–which is a nice one-word way of saying “taken care of.” At this point, my feelings about the trip keep reminding me of pregnancy: after eight months, I’m just ready to GO!
I’ll try to post delicious recipes and interesting nutrition content as much as I can over the summer, but things might be sparse here on the blog for awhile. (Who knows, though, maybe I’ll learn a lot about German cuisine?)
Wishing you a happy, healthy, and tasty summer. See you in August!
A few months ago, I wrote a post that proved to be one of my most popular: a month of semi-vegetarian meal plans. Because, when it comes right down to it, a lot of us are just too stinkin’ busy to put a whole lot of time and effort into meal planning. Or, when grocery shopping day rolls around, we’re stumped as to how to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of cost, healthy choices, and ingredients we have on hand.
I feel you, because I sometimes lose my meal-planning mojo, too.
Thankfully, I generally get it back pretty quickly. As a nutritionist and food blogger, that’s kinda my job.
So here we are with another round of semi-vegetarian meals for a whole month! As in my first month’s post, these weekly plans have multiple aims. Here you will find meals that:
Are healthy, half-meatless, and full of good-for-you ingredients like fruits, veggies, beans, and whole grains
Mostly don’t take long, making them weeknight-friendly
Work for YOU by making double batches of certain items for re-use later, as well as using up entire ingredients so you don’t end up with half a container of ricotta cheese and a random 5 oz. of chicken broth at the end of the week
So here you go! Four weeks of meal plans, based on four adult servings per meal. I hope they help take some stress out of your day/week/month!
Thursday:Chicken Souvlaki with added fresh spinach for extra veggies
Friday: Salad with Gorgonzola, Walnuts, Dried Cranberries, & Apple w/dressing of your choice, Better-Than-Store-Bought Biscuits (make a double batch and save half for Sunday)
Wednesday: Easy Chicken Enchiladas (use meat from 1/2 a rotisserie chicken and 4 oz. reduced-fat cream cheese, not 8 oz. full-fat), Zucchini & Yellow Squash sautéed with olive oil, salt, and pepper
Thursday: Crab Quiche, Roasted Carrots (put in the oven with the quiche at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper)
Friday: Broccoli Chicken Divan (use meat from the other half of the rotisserie chicken), Rice (leftover from Monday)
Saturday: Dinner out
Sunday: Spinach Lasagna (half batch serves 4) and green salad of your choice
Tuesday: Mexican Salad: lettuce, corn, black beans, tomatoes, green onions, cheddar cheese, and dressing of your choice, other half Perfect Cornbread Muffins
Wednesday: Beef and Carrot Stew with Couscous (substitute carrots for rutabagas in the linked recipe if you can’t find rutabagas or they’re not in season)
My husband Anthony and I have been married for over twelve years now, and throughout our marriage, we’ve always made it a priority to have a weekly date night. I can’t sing the praises of this practice enough. It has provided us regular time and space to talk, given us something to look forward to throughout the week, allowed us to do try some fantastic restaurants and do some truly awesome activities, and probably helped us keep our sanity in the midst of raising three kids.
And sometimes, for extra fun, we go on dates with other people.
Wait, I mean, like, double dates! Dates with two other people. But we’re still with each other. You know.
Recently my best friend Joy and her husband Bryce invited us on a double date, which we knew would be a great time, since 1.) They’re delightful people with goofy senses of humor, 2.) We’ve hung out for years and even vacationed together once, and 3.) On one of our double dates we actually came up with an idea for a new invention called “Fingie,” which is a finger you put on YOUR finger when you need to do disgusting tasks but keep your own finger clean.
See? I told you they were fun.
Ikea selfie with confused-looking Bryce
We didn’t have any particular plan for the double date at first–except for sushi, because Sushi Kee is always a no-brainer–so I tried to think of something that would be interactive but still low-key. As I got to thinking about the location of the sushi place, I realized that Ikea was close by. And hey, if you can do a mall scavenger hunt and have a good time with a gaggle of kids under ten, then a scavenger hunt with adults in the land of Scandinavian home improvement seemed like a guaranteed winner of a date night.
Using several ideas from a post by Natalie at A Beagle and a Baby, and with some input from Joy, I put together a list of 15 items to either collect in the store or take pictures of by the end of the hunt. After our sushi dinner, we headed to Ikea, where we divided and conquered! (Divided into couples and conquered the labyrinth of Swedish-designed furniture and tchotchkes we never knew we needed.)
Some of the highlights of our hunt included…
Anthony in dishwashing paradise with twelve of his favorite scrubbing brushes (to fulfill the clue of a photo with twelve matching items).
Me being “surprised” on the toilet. P.S. Someday I want to start a new website, www.surprisedonatoilet.com. It would just be a photo gallery of people, preferable celebrities, getting, well, you know. I think it could go viral.
Anthony’s first attempt at “pushing a cart the wrong direction” (clue 15)…
Only to be clarified by this type of pushing a cart the wrong direction:
Me tackling clue #8 (“team member hiding in some greenery”), which I must say felt pretty stealth. In the future, if my home is ever broken into by intruders and I need to hide, I’m going to remember that a corner behind a fake potted plant is an excellent choice.
And finally, my favorite. Anthony feeding a french fry (which just happened to be left in the cafe) to a stuffed lion (who just happened to have his mouth open as if awaiting food):
All in all, it turned out to be a hilarious, super fun double date. Thanks, Joy and Bryce!
If you’re looking for a fun activity to get you out of a date night rut, need something to do indoors during inclement weather, or just love Ikea, check out this free printable of an Ikea Scavenger Hunt list. I’d love to hear about your experience if you do!
I like this post a lot. I think it comes down to balance. When I was growing up and things were very chaotic in my household, I used food and exercise as a means of control when everything else was out of control. It turned out to be less than healthy or beneficial (surprise). I think that I’ve swung to both extremes, but when I truly listen to what my body needs it leads to better emotional and mental health overall. I also tend to be very regimented, and when times are stressful (like, being back in school….) sometimes I lean to extremes in order to regain control over a schedule that is racing and out of control. Nonetheless, it has been helpful to have friends reinforce the need for a physical and mental break. To “let loose” for a little while in order to allow some internal processing to occur. It is also very helpful to have a sort of schedule or regimen to which to return once your equilibrium is being re-established, and many people do not have that schedule. Having my morning yoga or walk (can’t run much anymore after the military) helps me to feel centered and helps with an immediate sense of accomplishment in the mornings, even when I have a very stressful week. Thanks for sharing your process.
Thanks for sharing, Elicia! I agree about balance…and about having a routine in place to fall back on when difficult times hit, because that’s certainly not an easy time to start healthy habits.