Crisco and Avocados
When I was in high school, my swim coach— a hyper-enthusiastic recent college grad— went through a phase of being a bit obsessed with his team “eating for performance.”
It involved lectures and food pyramid diagrams and him showing up in the cafeteria at lunch time to monitor our nutrition.
One image stands out in particular: he’d filled a bunch of different sized clear plastic tubing with some substance (Crisco, is my bet) to represent the fat content of different foods.
It was the nineties, so fat was considered the food equivalent of the source of all evil (remember how everything had a “fat free” version, usually filled with obscure chemicals that we now know should really have been what terrified us?).
He’d hold one up and say something like, “This is what you’re really eating when you add butter to that baked potato!” or “See? This is all that burger boils down to at its most basic level!”
My favorite was the tube marked “avocado”— he’d hold it up and rail against the lowly avocado as if it were a pint of Haagen Daaz dedicated to our athletic demise. I’m convinced that tube is the reason I always feel like I’m getting away with something when I make avocado toast— what gluttonous luxury!
Look. He meant well. He was trying to get a rowdy group of teenagers to think of their food as fuel, which I totally get.
He just forgot to remember that those same teenagers ate for a whole host of other reasons as well.
We ate to be social and fit in.
We ate to adhere to our family norms.
We ate because we were hungry and and found a dollar buried in our backpacks and the vending machine was handy.
As it turns out, as adults, we do the same thing.
We have a rough day at work and “reward” ourselves with a pitcher of margaritas.
We’re tired and it seems easier to order pizza again than even open the fridge and see what’s there.
We carry feelings of scarcity and not-enoughness that create a void we fill with comfort food.
We use food as any number of things and forget that, at the end of the day, it’s still what our bodies depend on for fuel.
I’m not going to preach at you here.
You know what foods make your body feel good. What gives you energy and vitality.
You also know what you reach for as a numbing tool or a comfort or a “reward” even if it comes with feeling heavy or lethargic or just plain ol’ “yuck.”
What I am going to ask you to do is pay attention and make sure you're giving yourself enough of the stuff that feels good in your body.
I’m not a nutritionist and I don’t personally aspire to “perfect” eating (whatever that even is)— I take pizza Fridays very seriously and have no intention of changing that any time soon.
But part of self-care means giving ourselves the tools and opportunity to make choices that serve us and that includes what we eat and drink.
I will never tell you to skip making ice cream sundaes with your kids on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But I will ask you to think long and hard about whether grabbing that pint at 10pm because you’re tired and bored and it’s simply your habit when binging Netflix is really what you want to do, if it will make you actually feel good.
What if you gave yourself and your body some amazing fuel this week?
What might it feel like if you made sure you were well hydrated this week?
What if you just tried out asking yourself the questions, “Is this really what I want to put in my body? Will this feel good? Am I eating this because I’m actually hungry or is something else going on?”
I invite you to take just a week and pay attention.
Focus on getting enough feel-good food and water into your body.
This isn’t a diet. Or a weight-loss thing. That’s not my concern here.
This is about taking care of yourself.
Poor nutrition and dehydration make us feel like crap, plain and simple.
Who wants to feel like crap? Why make everything else we want for our lives that much harder?
Good food, good hydration, and (as we discussed last week) good rest are foundational basics that set us up to do everything else that’s important to us.
Every single dream we have for our lives, whether it’s being a more patient parent or running a seven-figure business or writing our dissertation or keeping the romance alive in our marriage, requires energy and creativity and brainpower.
If we want those tools in our arsenals, there are steps we can take. Beginning here with the basics.
I want to support you.
Let’s talk about your dreams. Let’s talk about the steps you can be taking right now to create change and movement toward them. What obstacles continue to challenge you.
Book a 30 minute call with me. It doesn’t cost a thing and there’s no sales pitch involved, so really, what do you have to lose?
2020 has been *cough* challenging and I think most of us have been shaken out of old habits and comfort zones in unexpected ways.
Let’s talk about what that has looked like for you.
Let’s talk about how you can utilize it to dig deeper into what you want most for your life.
Seriously, book that call right now. Let me support you as you choose how to move forward.
I promise there won’t be any Crisco-filled tubes or lectures about the evils of avocados.
And between now and when we talk, keep taking good care of yourself.
Self-care isn’t a luxury— it’s the foundation from which we launch every decision, every step, every dream.
Stay curious out there, my friend.