LUNCHTIME
“A person who has good health has a thousand dreams. A person without has but one.” — unknown
This is a journey of healing, motherhood and taking the time for self care in a time of instant gratification.
A moment of gratitude. I’m blessed with many things. My human meat suit has done right by me for the most part. I can take the time to research about nutrition, provide and prepare it for my family and write about it. Despite having picked up many poor eating habits, having been diagnosed with Graves disease in my early 20s, battling with debilitating autoimmune symptoms, along with struggling with abuse and addiction, I’m lucky to be alive and well now. How I got and get through each day requires a mindful practice of healing through whole foods, bodywork and a number of therapies that help me stay present. While it’s still an emotional and psychological challenge on some days, I now know that I have to stay on course and keep active in striving to improve myself in becoming my child’s best advocate.
Along this journey, I have had the great privilege of experiencing food from renowned Michelin star rated establishments to the provincial street and home chefs. The early exposure to a variety of cuisines, cultures and peoples provided a lot of perspective on the applications of mindfulness in food preparation. With consumption of sustenance being the gateway into nourishing our bodies and minds, I can’t imagine eating in a world without the full sensory experience that leaves you feeling totally sated — from inside out.
Finally, I found a great supportive network in my family and friends, who nurture and nourish me with wonderful ideas, recipes and experiences as well as picks me up when I fall… and boy do I fall.
Why am I doing this? I found that whenever I’m trying to lay out a set of designs for optimizing workflows, it’s helpful to document my process along the way so I can assess what worked, what I can improve and where I went wrong. A mindful approach to design is not dissimilar to the process of self actualization and healing. As Charles Duhigg put it in his book The Power of Habit, “Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”
It took many years of taking health for granted, getting hospitalized twice for substance abuse and then eventually getting pregnant to realize that I had to change. I was on the path of becoming a mother which automatically enrolled me as the primary role model for my child. I was horrified by the thought of raising a bonafide fuck up like myself and had to clean up my act before she arrived. I had to take inventory of everything and troubleshoot down to the atomic level of my mental condition and make the hard adjustments to reframe how I thought about life.
On the path to recovery I had discovered that getting proper nutrition is the foundation to wellness and what I noticed when I became woke to that data point was that our society and culture makes it all too easy to slip and slide into bad habit loops. Our culture, at some point, decided to cash in on short term gains at the expense of our long term health. I know I’m not the only one aware of this fact, so I wanted to document my journey of motherhood and my experimentation with food, our overall consumption patterns and effects on how my child develops over time. Because I know that my child has inherited at least 50% of my genetics and therefore may encounter the same or similar health issues, I wanted to get ahead of probability and prioritize getting her on a path of awareness in self care.
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