Investing in Your Health - Through Your Food

Our health has a life long purpose – it’s meant to sustain us throughout the years, changes and challenges of walking towards our own individual destinies. Without it, we cannot do much of either of these – at least not as well as we should do.

One of the most important things I have learned over these years spent researching, reading, dreaming up new recipes, cooking and eating food – is that good quality, wholesome nutrition is an investment into my own health.

It is also an outlay of energy into my family’s well-being, future and immediate health not to mention growing healthy children. When you are eating properly, your body functions better, your thinking is clearer and you are simply better able to cope with life’s stresses.

So what do I mean when I say ‘invest’ in our food? Well, for us this has come to mean several things. First of all we maintain a garden of some sort – right now we have herbs, a few greens, sprouting broccoli, soon Brussels sprouts that we are eating, but lots of others things are growing.

We spend time and energy in the garden taking care of it, expanding it, finding the plants we would like to have as well as buying organic seeds where possible. This is a project – it may take a few seasons, years and revolutions around the sun to see the benefits we hope to have.

Then there are our animals – we wanted to stop buying eggs, milk and meat from the shops – knowing if we could provide these for ourselves, they would taste better, as well as give us the immediate peace of mind knowing the animals were well treated, gently raised and organic.

This is also a project for our children who are very much involved in every aspect of the garden, rearing animals (collecting eggs, milking a goat, planting seeds).

I also buy in bulk where possible – raw ingredients are brought in and then made into the foods we would like to eat. We make our own nut butters, mayonnaise, mustards, pickles, jams, chutneys, breads, cakes, cookies, treats and each meal we eat.

Each of these activities are investments in time, energy and careful consideration of our needs, desires, tastes – and other then the actual set up of an organized system….it’s not as much work as you might think.

Actually when your body works more efficiently because you are eating your own far superior food – you have more energy for everything else in your life – and to do it right.

Think about it – with all the adulterated food on the market these days (meat, honey, fish etc.) why worry about someone else investing in making your meals – make them yourself.

April