Nourishing Health Not Hotness
What does it mean to nourish our bodies? Dictionary.com tells me that to nourish means to provide with the food or other substances necessary for growth, health, and good condition. In today’s modern western culture, to nourish, is often thrown around as a buzzword in various discussions surrounding health and wellness. So many conflicting opinions have emerged that we are often left wondering what REAL nourishment is for our bodies.
For me, the last 15 years have been an intensive period of both formal and informal education surrounding this topic with a lot of self experimentation and my views have fluctuated from one extreme to the next. For a good chunk of that time, I subscribed to the theory that my body would be nourished through a low fat, low calorie diet with plenty of exercise. In reality, this sort of lifestyle led me to be chronically UNDER fed and UNDER nourished. Sure, my weight was “normal to low” and I was quite thin but my body was far from nourished and far from healthy. I was right where our body image obsessed culture wanted me, believing that appearing healthy externally with a certain body fat percentage, bmi, jean size, weight, etc. was the truest measure of health while looking back, I was a far cry from healthy. This phenomenon is all too common in our culture that constantly pressures us to look a certain way.
Conversely, when I look at the majority of people around me, I see many who are chronically OVER fed and UNDER nourished. What do I mean by this? They are consuming an abundance of food and calories, yet their bodies are still lacking proper, real nourishment.
