8. Following Your Own Food Path

Reading Labels and Trusting Your Body

We’ve come to the final part of this lesson, and that is how, in your quest for daily wellness, you can keep the dogma out in the future. Undoubtedly, in addition to purchasing simple whole foods, you will purchase food that has a label; it’s inevitable. And in fact, I encourage you to.

Why is that? Because snacking is joyful. I have made it through a lot of difficult time in the last year thanks to organic Barbara’s Cheese Puffs. They’re one thing that my mother purchased when I was a child; they’re hugely nostalgic to me, and they have provided me a sense of childhood comfort that I could not otherwise have. I don’t generally eat them, but I’ve eaten about a bag a week for the last—since last March.

The Importance of Joy and Moderation

There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with any of it. Moderation is what matters; eating with joy is what matters, and making sure that you’re eating quantities of foods that don’t make you feel bad. So let’s acknowledge that you’re going to buy things that have labels, and you’re going to read those labels. And when you read those labels, you’re going to have feelings and you’re going to make choices, the main choice being: “Do I put this in my cart or do I put it back on the shelf?”

I encourage you to read labels through the lens of everything you’ve learned. Specifically, through the lens of everything you’ve learned about what foods make you feel good. Obviously, there’s no health value in buying something that has a list of artificial colors, artificial flavors, and additives, but if occasionally you eat those foods and they don’t make you feel bad, then there’s not really anything to stress about. Daily consumption is probably not a good goal and probably not going to serve you well long term, but something occasional—occasionally most anything is pretty okay.

Personalizing Your Choices

So when you’re looking at ingredients, I encourage you to look for specifically foods in labels that you know make your body feel good, regardless of what you’ve heard about them. And I encourage you to avoid foods and ingredients on labels that make you feel bad, regardless of what you’ve heard about them.

Personally, we’ve discussed prebiotics. When I see inulin as an ingredient, I don’t care that I’m adding to the fiber of a processed food, and I don’t care that it makes that processed food better for me; it’s going to make me bloated and it’s going to give me a stomachache. So I put it back, even though it’s a good ingredient. It’s an ingredient that my body wants nothing to do with.

A Final Word on Trust

So when you’re looking at labels, when you’re deciding—even through recipes that you see online—what you want to cook, what you want to make for dinner, what you want to have for a treat that you might want to make, stop looking through the lens of what the world has told you you should be eating and start looking through the lens of what your unique body knows it should be eating.

Again, I’m so happy that you went through this with me and that we have taken a journey together to discover how food can make you feel as well and whole as possible, and how foods can be healing for your body. I don’t have anything more than that. I leave you with trust; I leave you with the trust that you’re going to figure out, or you already have figured out, what works for you and you’re going to eat accordingly and you’re going to feel better. And there is nothing I could give you that is tastier or more delicious or more healthful than that.