"Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all."
-Harriet Van Horne
Welcome to my celebration of real food!
My story of what I can only describe as "food loving" begins as a young child. Growing up, I loved watching my parents cook in the kitchen, each excelling at their own dishes. My mother, more of the baker, holds my heart with recipes for chocolate chip cookies and "magic" white bread, while my father, a self-described "foodie" with a passion for wholesome fresh ingredients, clever spice and herb combinations, and technique, has a few favorite dinners to cook: a perfect way to cook chicken, a corn and avocado salsa, and other recipes with fresh vegetables and herbs from his summer garden. I grew into a cook and nutritionist mirroring each of them, as I adopted my mother's love for healthy food (with a hearty fondness for sweets) and my father's love for refined cookery and skill in the kitchen. My style is therefore crafted from an amalgam of attitudes towards food. On the one hand, I share my father's love for vegetables, and I continually search for new techniques to cook them to perfection. (In fact, vegetables are one of my favorite types of ingredients to experiment with, as I hope will become evident in following blog posts.) I also have adopted my mother's love for health; a finisher of several marathons and an avid tennis player, we enjoy the challenge of adapting recipes to please our need for nutritious meals. I guess the main thing that I have learned from my parents in terms of cooking, whether through their persuasion or through my commingling of their tastes, can be summed up in one healthy eating principle (okay, it's kind of two principles):
Enjoy balance, and eat real food.
Let me explore each half of this sentence. First, "enjoy balance." This comes from merrying different styles of cooking, and it can be applied to every aspect of eating healthily (rather, every aspect of living healthily!). There are no "bad" or "good" foods; no foods should be permanently removed from your "to eat" list (see note). The healthiest diets encompass a wide range of foods, most of which are vegetables, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, and lean proteins. There are lots of different opinions on what it actually means to eat healthy, and my approach is to combine different styles, rather than accept one diet that limits your food intake (whether by having fasting days, like the 5-2 diet, or by cutting out food groups, like the Paleo diet). Each diet (a word I hate, because it implies limiting your culinary experience; in my case, I'll use diet in the dictionary definition sense, where it simply means "what you eat") has its pros and cons. Most every type of diet has positive advice it can offer in a journey to eat healthier, and many of them can be harmful if overdone. This is why I like to explore different approaches to nutrition, and I hope you will enjoy exploring with me.
The second part of the principle is agreed upon by most health experts, whether scientifically approaching the subject, experimenting with the best diet for themselves, or advising others on how to eat healthier. Everyone agrees you need to eat "real food." The trick in this statement comes when we try to define real. Is "real food" that which includes the least number of ingredients? The easiest ingredients to pronounce? No "ingredients" at all – i.e., raw food? Food that comes from the land and sea (plants and meat)? And what about people who can't digest certain types of real food – wheat, dairy, nuts...?
As you can see, there are a lot of questions surrounding such a simple principle, and I hope in this blog I can help elucidate some answers to these questions. I have to admit, I don't know the answers to all of them... and some of the answers are constantly changing. But I can promise something to my readers, and that is if you eat real food – whatever that means for you at the time (I mean, everyone knows Dorito's cheese powder shouldn't be considered "real food," right?) – if you eat real food, then you will feel better. Throughtout the chaos of the fitness and health advice world, it is easy to get lost (should I restrict calories or eat more? Should I cut out certain foods? Should I feel bad about eating that cookie?). But this simple causation is what I will be unraveling in my blog: if you eat real food, you will feel better. I have found this for myself, and I want to help you to understand what it means and how to do it. Because if you work to eat better, your stomach will be happier and fuller. You will be able to reach you goals, whether that be losing weight, moving easier, or feeling sick less of the time. And I am here to help you do just that.
Note: As far as I can tell from the science and from health experts, trans fat is a pretty big one that almost everyone agrees deserves to be on the "do not eat" list. There are a few others that have come and gone from the list (some even appearing later on the healthiest-foods-for-you side, which only proves my point that it's hard to assign "good" and "bad" when it comes to food). Among them are coconut oil and saturated fats; fat in general (cue the era of the low-fat diet trend); carbs in general, which actually has an interesting history with a violently changing reputation over the years, especially with added complication due to the recent spike in gluten-free diets; animal fats (should you eat the fat on meat, or stick to lean protein?); the kale crisis; and many many more fad diets, "health" bans on ingredients, and heralding of superfoods. Basically, the field of nutrition is complicated and vastly divided when it comes to what kind of food is actually healthy. Through my blog, you'll pick up tips on nutrition and how to live a healthy lifestyle, but I by no means am the omniscient source of what is healthy and what is not. My goal is to evaluate the scientific evidence, communicate it to you in a way that can be applied to your own lifestyle, and provide you with a healthy helping of recipes and tricks to improve your health and enjoy cooking along the way.
A second side note: as you may have noticed, I like hyperlinks. I want to provide my reader with as much information as possible, which includes the scientific, experimental, and testimonial backgrounds to the advice that I give and the recipes that I create in the name of "healthy eating." If you would like more information, please contact me through email.