Breakfast and Brunch

Poor form during exercise (in everything from walking, to running, to lifting weights) increases the risk of injury, both acute injury like from twisting an ankle as well as from chronic injury and the development of arthritis. When we use the “wrong” muscles for a movement (like what happens with chest breathing) we end up putting abnormal stresses on joints which can wear down the cartilage and lead to that “bone on bone” type of arthritis which leads to joint replacement surgery. The diet industry likes to blame body weight for things like joint pain and arthritis, but a person’s body weight has very little to do with it. When we aren’t using the proper balance of muscles because we use incorrect training methods, or because we don’t take the time to warm up our muscles before exercise (and cool down afterwards), it creates tightness and “pulling” that disrupts the alignment or “tracking” of our joints, leading to injury.

But even if someone doesn’t like dessert foods (in general), they still enjoy things like barbecue sauce, fruit, or balsamic vinegar, for example, all of which have sweetness as the predominant flavor. I’ve shared before that I started this journey by eating ice cream at every meal, and was pleasantly surprised that after a few days, the idea of ice cream for breakfast no longer sounded good. How to Eat Intuitively by Eating Dessert Besides the fact that I now give myself permission to eat dessert on a daily basis, eating dessert actually helps me eat other types of foods more intuitively. However, the syrup in combination with the cinnamon sugar coating on the french toast sticks was quickly making me feel a little over-sugared, more than the protein in the french toast seemed to be able to balance out.

However, we recently made a batch of lentil curry simply because we did not have any other food (i.e. animal protein) in the house, and I found myself eating about twice as much food as I normally do for my given hunger level. As I noted in this post, I’ve been realizing more and more lately that I still have a tendency to try to latch on to food or my body for a sense of stability, clinging to the fact that these parts of my life are often predictable. I have decided that it is important to me to get comfortable eating all kinds of different foods because I don’t want to be averse to certain meals because of the amount of food I will need to eat to feel satisfied. Whether that means exploring the woods with my sister and her kids, trying new foods with my best friend, or traveling to a new city with my husband, everything is more enjoyable when it’s shared with the people I love.

When I was struggling with dieting and disordered eating, I had a lot of fear surrounding the relationship between food, exercise, hunger, fullness, and the size and shape of my body. Rather than trusting my body cues in hopes that it will allow me to avoid body changes (this would be rooted in fear of my body changing, which is still putting a greater emphasis on my appearance than I would like to have), freedom comes from trusting that the way God made my body is good. Body trust in the righteous sense is an expression of faith that there’s more to life than the physical, and that my outward appearance does not matter because I have such a deep sense of conviction and purpose in my life that stretches deeper than what the eye can see. Trusting that God equipped my body with the ability to regulate my eating and exercise sets me free from the pressure to diet in the name of ‘health,’ to define my identity, or to earn affection from God and others.

Even though the phrase usually is just comparing the pleasure of something like dessert to the pleasure of something sinful, this feeds the underlying idea that eating delicious food is bad, like engaging in sin is bad. In light of the fact that our bodies are a good gift from God, sometimes the church wrongly teaches that in order to steward that gift well, we need to do everything we can to keep it in perfect, tip-top shape (i.e. keep it looking “ It’s actually a sign of weak faith to believe that we need to follow diet rules in order to honor God. Instead, when we read the bible, we learn that diet rules are futile, that diets are idols which are nothing at all in the world, and it’s actually a manifestation of trust in God when we eat a variety of foods and denounce the temptation of food rules.

The cherry blossoms in Washington DC were a gift of friendship from Japan to the American people in 1912 and today the burst of pinks and whites accentuate the beauty of the American capital making spring one of the best times to plan a visit to Washington DC. California poppy is a small orange flower like a little drop of orange paint on the grass, not too remarkable on its own but during the spring bloom millions of poppy flowers cover California grasslands The lavender fields start to bloom in May and typically last until September and the dahlia fields like warmer weather so they start to bloom in late June or July and last until early fall. Mid-March is typically the best time to visit Savannah to see beautiful spring color, but if you’re lucky you can find azaleas blooming anytime from late February to early April.

I don’t think that going on a diet is the same thing as having an eating disorder, but they both originate from the same place: we look to our bodies, or food, to fulfill a need that it can’t rightfully fulfill. Diets are about weight loss, food rules and physical aesthetic whereas intuitive eating is about freedom, honoring our bodies, and finding our identities outside of our physical appearance. Christ points us back to God’s original design for the role of food in the human life which, if you read the bible, looks strikingly similar to the original 10 principles of intuitive eating. When we understand that intuitive eating is only a piece of a whole, just one facet of a life lived for God’s glory, we’re set free to finally live, to finally find fulfillment, and to finally thrive as children of God.

My attempts to control my life through food paradoxically backfired and I felt completely out-of-control, binge eating entire jars of peanut butter after starving myself all day. But it didn’t work, and that’s because food can’t fulfill the need we have to be satisfied by God. Once I stopped trying to make food a means for controlling my life, I was able to let go and allow it to fill its God-given purpose of satisfying my body’s need for energy, flavor, and fullness. I counted laps, reps, minutes, and miles, trying to “make up” for the foods my body craved so that I didn’t need to feel so guilty about eating past my calorie goal.

While diet culture disrupted that natural, internal signaling process and created a lot of confusion for most of us, we can always turn away from the harmful ways of the world and come back to God’s truth. Christian intuitive eaters recognize that the bible isn’t a diet book, and it’s a bad idea to try to make it out to be one. Christian intuitive eaters recognize that scripture alone is sufficient to inform our lives, and that it’s dangerous to start adding extra rules to the bible. Christian intuitive eaters understand that we don’t need to worry about eating food that God created because He gave us food as a good gift for the purpose of meeting our needs.

Second of all, there’s no such food (or even group of foods) that can singly “cure” all hormone imbalances, because there are so many types of hormone imbalances that are so very different from each other. Such an intervention would only be appropriate for someone with too little thyroid hormone (i.e. hypothyroidism) but even then, there are seven different types of hypothyroidism! While a natural source of iodine would be great for someone with iodine-deficiency hypothyroidism, it would be really bad for someone with Hashimoto’s Disease (a form of hypothyroidism) because giving iodine to those patients actually worsens the condition. That’s because iodine stimulates the production of a chemical called thyroid perioxidase, which is one of the targets of the autoimmune reaction that defines Hashimoto’s disease.