Nourishing Yourself from the Ground Up: Home Cooking and Healthy Mealtime Practices
To help our bodies obtain the nutrients we need to support great digestive and overall health, cooking from scratch is a powerful strategy to have at your disposal. Home cooking puts YOU in charge of exactly what goes into your meals, and therefore your body, and leads to healthier outcomes by enabling you to make educated choices.
When you cook with fresh whole food ingredients that (preferably) were grown in local healthy tilth (nutrient and microbe-rich) soil you are transferring these health-giving benefits directly into your own internal ecosystems and literally nourishing yourself from the ground up!
Much like our brains, our gut microbes also have a ‘plastic’ or pliable quality and you can literally effect change in your microbiome within a day – they’re like a lever on our biology! This means every day YOU have an opportunity to prevent the likelihood or reduce the severity of chronic illness and create a healthier body just by spending some time in your own kitchen. When the body is given whole, natural foods, free from processing, chemicals, and toxins, it enables the natural processes we all have within us to detoxify and heal.
But how can you achieve more fresh produce and clean ingredients on your plate without adding hours of cooking time to your already busy day? Here are some of my top tips:
Prioritize fresh produce.
Look for fresh, organic, local, and seasonal foods to ensure nutrient density.
If you have a local farmer’s market or a farm that provides a CSA (community supported agriculture) check it out and get to know who is growing your food! Check out localharvest.org to find farms near you.
Look up the Environmental Working Group’s dozen and clean 15 list to learn which foods are highly laden with chemicals and pesticides and which ones are ok to buy commercially grown to keep unwanted harmful ingredients off your plate while also watching your wallet.
Pasture-raised meat and eggs, wild caught fish and pasture-raised dairy are preferable, but certified organic is your next best choice. If neither of these options is available to you, look for antibiotic and hormone-free (raised and added), minimally-processed meats and limit consumption.
Choosing canned and frozen foods is also okay.
Frozen foods are usually picked fresh and then frozen quickly, so they retain a lot of nutrition.
Canned foods should be the last choice as they are typically high in sodium and some cans have an inner coating with chemicals that can leach into your food. My favorite go to’s are canned chickpeas which I incorporate into meals or make into hummus, and canned fish (wild caught) for a quick snack on rice cakes or with a baked potato.
Prep fresh produce and herbs for a few meals ahead of time.
If you are like me and hate the washing and chopping part of meal prep, do it once in a big batch to last you for a few meals. For example, wash and finely chop fresh herbs and keep them in a glass container to sprinkle on meals for flavor and gut healthy nutrients.
Cut and chop a few vegetable servings at a time and keep in a refrigerated container for easy cooking and assembly on busy evenings.
Pre-cook batches of beetroot, carrots, potatoes, rice, peas, or any other vegetables to make stir-fried rice or oven roasted veggies in a hurry.
Balance your plate.
You should aim to get protein, carbohydrates, and fat at every meal; use the USDA My Plate graphic and guidelines for each food group. The IIN version of My Plate is modeled after the USDA guidelines but also includes primary foods which I have talked about in my prior blogs.
To recap: primary foods are more than what is on your dinner plate. Sometimes we are fed not by food but by the energy in our lives. Healthy relationships, regular physical activity, a fulfilling career and a healthy home cooking practice can fill your soul and satisfy your hunger for life, and are each considered an important primary food.
Take stress off your plate.
Stress is one of the biggest disturbances to digestion and the health of the gut microbiome. In fact, stress has been linked to many digestive health issues, including gastric reflux and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).(1) Effective stress management and self-care are important components of healing the gut and working toward optimal digestive health. It doesn’t matter how much kale and broccoli you eat – if stress is also on your plate, it will impact your body’s ability to properly digest food and absorb nutrients.
I encourage you to find a healthy balance for YOU rather than strive for perfection which tends to set us up for feelings of failure when we do not hit our (self-imposed) high standards. Small steps every day add up, so try some of the tips above and enjoy the process rather than being focused on an end goal.
References:
IIN Health Coach Program materials
IIN Gut Health course materials
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25779692/ (1)
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/eating-while-standing-up (3)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30588436/ (4)