What does your food journey look like?

My food journey has been this…

Growing Up-

Food was a non- issue growing up, we more or less just ate to eat. We didn’t seem to have any sort of a relationship with food other than we ate when we were hungry. We didn’t eat real healthy meals but we didn’t eat terribly unhealthy either.  I do remember loving to go to friends houses because there moms bought foods like frozen burritos, mac & cheese, sugary cereals and many other processed goodies that we did not get very often growing up.

Adult Life-

In my 20’s I still continued to eat like I did growing up. I didn’t know much about cooking and so I made a lot of the basics tacos, spaghetti with sauce from a jar, a lot of dishes containing cream of something, cream of chicken, cream of mushroom (yuck) I would bake occasionally cakes, cookies. Again my relationship with food was more or less I ate when I was hungry and never gave much thought to what I was eating.

In my late 20’s is when things began to change. We had moved to Colorado and it opened up a whole new world of food for me which included cookbooks, Food network, cooking classes, no meals containing cream of anything, cooking that actually took more  skill than using a can opener, lots of cooking going on in my kitchen along with entertaining friends and lots of adult beverages I never knew existed (crazy things can happen when you take a girl out of Utah J)

I loved this time of exploration of food, I learned so much about food and cooking and I enjoyed every minute of it. This was also a very hard time in my life I had never moved before, my husband was gone a lot,  I was trying to find a place for myself in my new world. I began to suffer with situational depression, and along with that came emotional eating. I was a smoker at the time and my first step to trying to feel better was to quit smoking which if you have ever smoked before and tried to quit you know that this to can also lead to some temporary depression (a feeling like you have lost your best friend) This only helped compound my new destructive relationship with food.  Together with my new found love of cooking, my replacement for the cigarettes with food, and the depression I slowly ate myself to 20 pounds heavier.

I noticed the weight creeping on me and could not figure out how. For hells sake how could I be gaining weight? Not only did I work out everyday I worked in a damn gym! My family and I ate well, I have good genetics, I am way too short (5'2) to gain even 5 extra pounds, what was I doing wrong? At that point I just gave in to my new shorter, chubbier self and figured once I could get out of the depression it would all melt back off.

A few years later we moved back to Utah I became a little more myself mentally but my body…HA! Not so much. I then had to make a choice to learn now not only how to cook but to cook healthy and learn how the food I was eating was affecting my body.  I learned that my family and I definitely ate good but I mean good as in heavily creamed pastas, cheesecakes, breads and burgers. Come to find out just because you make it from scratch doesn't mean it's healthy. I also did not need to be replacing every cigarette I use to smoke with an Oreo... I was just swapping one evil for another.

Now here I am well in to my 30’s and I have reached a new food journey, which is learning to use food for health, and performance.  Digging deeper into what foods are really made of and how I can use there nutrients to my advantage. I am discovering new ways to cook and bake.  I love being in the kitchen as I always have only now I am in the kitchen to fuel my body not feed my depression.

I will always continue to explore all types of food and cooking healthy and on occasion not so healthy ;)
I feel lucky to have had such a food journey as it has taught me so much about the effects of food in our lives…Mentally, Emotionally, and sometimes even Spiritually.

What does your food journey look like?

Do you eat the way your family ate growing up or have you changed your eating habits?

Do you eat to live or do you live to eat?

Do you eat for pleasure, comfort?

Do you turn to food when you are sad, depressed, hurt, lonely?

To socialize?

As a reward?

Do you eat because you’re bored?

I encourage you to take some time write it down and you may get some perspective on where your bad or good eating habits stem from. It may help you to understand why you make the choices you do and how you could maybe tweak them to feel better, loose weight or improve the performance in your workouts.