Bodily Awareness and Attunement
Whole Body Connection — Mind and Gut, Heart and Soul • Ultra-Processed Fear • Joyful Healthy Eating
Senator Ron Johnson’s Roundtable, American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion (9/23/24)
What is going on with public health in our country? What’s the root cause of its collapse? Authors, doctors, author-doctors, government officials, activists, public figures, and concerned citizens are coming together with heightened energy to correct course. Did you happen to see any of Senator Ron Johnson’s roundtable on health and nutrition last week? I tuned in to hear Dr. Casey Means, author of the bestseller, Good Energy; The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health and ended up listening to all participants, a whopping 4 hours of testimony.
Calley Means, Casey’s brother, talked about the perils of scaling food and agriculture “like iPhones” and how misaligned incentives allow food and pharmaceutical companies to profit off our sickness. Jason Karp spoke of our overreliance on scientific studies at the expense of common sense and how our health crisis is also a spiritual one, that we have “lost our North Star.” Marion Nestle sounded these alarms years ago with her book, Food Politics, but it’s nice to see some momentum.
From Fear to a Healthy Relationship w/Food
Our culture’s tendency towards nutritionism, zeroing in on the “good” and “bad” nutrients du jour, keeps our food culture fear-based which exacerbates our health problems. At the senate roundtable, there was a lot of talk about “ultra-processed foods,” sure to become the evil of our time. It is my mission to help steer the conversation about healthy eating away from fear and control, towards connection to our bodies. A relationship with food that isn’t connected to bodily awareness and attunement leads to overeating and bingeing, undereating and starving, obsession with weight and food rules, eating disorders (both diagnosed and undiagnosed, the silent suffering), dis-ease, and disease due to lack of access to fresh, nutritious food or poor decision making. When a person’s food relationship is off, suffering abounds, and all aspects of health are at risk, mental, physical, and spiritual.
To correct course on public health, we need to connect with our bodies—mind and gut, heart and soul. Meditation and mindfulness can help us feel our emotions and learn from them, their ultimate purpose. Bodily awareness and attunement can help us eat naturally, not overeating or undereating, but eating to satisfaction which allows eating to be time-bound rather than a constant activity or constant battle.
Stanford Food Summit
In 2013 I attended the Stanford Food Summit where academics from the seven schools of the University—Medicine, Earth Sciences, Business, Humanities & Sciences, Law, Education, and Engineering—shared research and facilitated discussion on issues related to food systems and health, both human and planetary. The co-founders of Homemade, a start-up launched earlier that year, Anna Rakoczy (LLM / LSM, Stanford, UC Berkeley) and Dr. Chloe Chien (MD / MBA, Stanford), shared their mission which entails reversing the epidemic of lifestyle diseases by helping individuals to adopt and maintain better eating habits by teaching the joy of cooking and eating whole foods made from scratch in a community. Dr. Chien was motivated to start such a company because she could not find it within herself to continue amputating the feet of people with advanced diabetes. At the Food Summit I made the connection between my passion for cooking and healthcare.
Home Cooking is Healthcare
My family cooked and ate dinner together in the 1970’s and I see the joy of cooking in my two young adult children. It breaks my heart to know that many children today don’t recognize as normal a home-cooked meal. Marion Cunningham, warned of such in the thirteenth edition of The Fanny Farmer Cookbook in 1990:
…it’s gobble and go, eating food on the run, reheating it in relays in the microwave as one dashes off to a committee meeting, another to basketball practice. As a result, we are losing an important value. Food is more than fodder. It is an act of giving and receiving because the experience at table is a communal sharing; talk begins to flow feelings are expressed, and a sense of well-being takes over.
Indeed, my friend, Marion, food is more than fodder. Food is connection; food is life.
