What truly feeds us is the relationship we have with, not only our food, but also our Self. This includes everything that surrounds us and how we connect with nature through our food choices. It is the appreciation of simple things, like the quality of the food, that brings out the taste. It is how we care for it while we cook and eat that makes a difference in how we experience food. With the holiday season coming up, the relationship we have with eating is very intermixed with our history around food as we were growing up. It is a time of being at the table with those who taught us through time how to eat, what to eat, and how our relationship with food grew into what it is today.

Taking really good care of ourselves seems like it should be so simple that we don’t even consider how our relationship with food plays into our choices.

I often hear from new clients that they are frustrated, because they have been dieting for most of their life without success. They feel it is hard to get healthy, because of limited choices so they keep falling off the wagon. The thing is, there is no wagon in a healthy life-food-style! There is positive self-restraint, not denial and restrictions, but rather mindfulness, self-respect, love, and care. The dieting approach is like being called by the sirens, overtime you are away from your controlled atmosphere. If you know the story, it is similar to the daily promise that we will stay on course, but something calls us down into the depth of the ocean, and we once again get lost in cravings. Especially during the holiday season, there can be many triggers for dieters. So perhaps this time, think nourishment instead.

EATING FOR NOURISHMENT

Why are we eating? When we are eating to lose weight, we tend to eat from counting calories perspective and we don’t consider nourishment. What is it about the mindset of losing weight that seems like it should be painful? During the holiday season being on a diet is never a good idea, because you will get trigger and the risk of letting it all go is just so much higher.

I see it all the time with my clients and I love it when this shift happens. It is a shift that happens for good! The choices are plentiful, because we are eating food from the earth, and by default that pretty much means we are healthy! Yes, it is a new way of eating and thinking, but it is sustainable and it helps you quit dieting! For the holiday season most give up on themselves, because they know the caloric intake is so different than there normal dieting choices. Well, it does not have to be that way.

We each need to find our life-food-style

The food culture these days is all about pleasure, but we forget that pleasure is more than what pleases our taste-buds. That is where we get lost! We need to bring pleasure into eating healthy, because being nourished is so much more than picking nutrient-dense foods. We each need, like, and crave different things and we need to learn how to honor and navigate that. We are unique individuals with different bodies, preferences, stories, and dreams. To embrace that is what nourishes us from a life-style perspective.

I consistently find that when we focus on being nourished, we stay motivated, on track, …and we lose weight!

How to eat. What to eat

I cook meals from whole, real, and seasonal foods and. I feel inspired by my heritage of Nordic foods, which are much more dense than what we tend to call dieting foods here. Even the holiday meals can be healthy, because of the choices of ingredients we make. I cook based on ingredients and the whole thing becomes so much easier to tackle. Especially if you, like me, are not a chef. In my online course I show you how to use the different ingredients in easy and accessible meals, this way it is more fun, more intuitive, and much more simple to make great healthy meals.

Apart from loving my good comfort foods during this season, I also have a craving for the outdoors (I love nature), a hunger for feeling healthy and vibrant as I age (let’s call it mature – I am still only 52 for a couple of weeks), and a thirst to fight disease (I am considered high-risk breast-cancer). So I arm myself with healthy, nourishing choices, because I want to eat to live in a thriving way. I surround myself with food bowls and tea-cups that feel good to hold and earthy to look at, because that is what I like from a style perspective, it helps me feel grounded and nourished and remind me that there is more to eating than just the food, it is the whole experience. During the holiday season there are so many ways to create nourishment from the environment and shift the experience of eating.

• Instead of eating from the dieting mentality of what I cannot have and should/should not eat, I eat based on what nourishes my body, which is more about how food makes me feel, and for that matter how my mind and soul feel, as well.