2. Good food

Hello again!

I am talking today about the second point on my previous list "What is happiness".

2. Good food

lunch during summer

So what exactly is good food?

I've read somewhere that instead of depriving ourselves from foods that we think we shouldn't eat, we need to learn how to nourish ourselves. Especially as women, we need to take care of a good and happy relationship with food and eating habits. A lot of women in the western societies suffer from a weird and guilty relationship with the food they eat. I had my own experiences with binge eating. It started in puberty (of course) and lasted on until my early twenties. As a child I was rather skinny and the type of child that you would have to call a hundred of times to come to eat dinner. I was more interested in playing and feeling totally unaware of hunger, so my mom would have to remind me to eat and motivate me with little tricks. She bought plates with pictures at the bottom so I would eat up to see the nice pictures.
Puberty came and with it came the shame. As my body started developing curves and breasts quite early around the age of 11, I wasn't prepared for all the sexism and comments that would wash over me every day. And I was also dancing in a ballet school with some ambitions. Of course the body image of the traditional ballet environment wasn't healthy and so I started to feel guilty of eating. I felt like I shouldn't eat, I didn't deserve to eat because I wasn't thin enough.
At this point people would conclude that I developed anorexia. But I didn't. Instead I developed a binge eating disorder. But back then in 1999 there wasn't a name for this invisible kind of eating disorder. My habits were unsteady. Sometimes I skipped meals or didn't eat much of it, only to later get a hungry craving for something (my cravings were typically vanilla yogurt and cheese that I was secretly sneaking out of the fridge and eating it guiltily and quickly and unrecognized by anyone). I got addicted to sugar and ate big amount of sweets and ice cream, regretting everything later, hating my uncontrolled self, wishing I would have more discipline. Whenever I lost weight in controlled times, I got compliments from my family and attention from the boys in school. Whenever I bounced back into cravings and put on weight, guys were commenting it, making fun of it, my family making passive aggressive comments about me eating everything from our fridge and getting fat. My ballet teacher was not amused and in a big fight with her I ran out of my dance school and quit ballet forever.
With the lack of exercise in the following year, I got even chubbier. And hated the food more and more. And I felt like the food hated me too.
Only when I moved out of my moms house and lived together with healthy young women with good eating habits, I learned to have some positive feelings for food again. I educated myself about binge eating and what you can do about it, I read why "french women don't get fat" and reflected about eating culture, I relearned the habit to cook proper meals every day, sit down and give myself some quality time with my food. And I learned what it means for me to nourish myself with good food.

I guess everyone has to make their own journey with these things and learn what good food means to oneself. For me this is a list of things that for me define good food:

1. It is appreciated and tastes good:
So no artificial low fat slimming shakes and other tasteless trash. But something with a lot of taste and butter and herbs and spices and prepared with love.

2. It looks and smells good: I make sure to look at it and smell it and put things in a nice way.

3. It is the right amount: I make sure to eat when I'm hungry to fill my empty stomach, but it is neither too much nor too little. And I would never starve myself or keep eating endlessly after not feeling hungry anymore.

4. It is fair and doesn't harm anyone: I make sure to buy only organic food. And especially for food from non-western countries I make sure it's also fairtrade (for example coffee, chocolate, bananas, mangoes, coconut and tea). And for all the dairy and meat I buy only a little bit knowing exactly that the cows, chicken and pigs had spent most of their life time outside with healthy food and enough space to be happy. I also prefer to get regional and seasonal fruits and vegetables.

chocolateria kreuzberg

What is "good food" for you?