Tag Archives: Food

Peace With Food Means Making Peace With Your Life

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The yearning to find peace with food is usually a palpable one. When women speak about their motivation to stop struggling with food, find a weight that works for them, stop bingeing, and feel healthy and fit, the energy is usually intense. When you struggle with food, the wish to find peace-permanent peace-usually runs pretty deep.

No more diets. Pants that always fit. Feeling confident that your weight is going to be about the same as it was last week or last month or even last year. Peace with food means that food, weight, or your diet is not the first thing you think about when you wake up or before you go to bed. Peace with food means that sometimes the chips go stale and the leftover candy gets forgotten in the back of the cupboard.

Because the food is no longer that important.

Peace with food is definitely possible. But in order to get there, you have to go beyond the food. And in order to do that, many women need to come face to face with something much bigger.

In order to make peace with food, you must make peace with your life.

Many women say they want peace with food and an end to yo-yo dieting. They say they’d do just about anything to achieve it. But the truth is, many women are trying to stop overeating without changing anything else.

It doesn’t work.

“I am lonely and I can’t do anything about it-so I eat.”

“I don’t have time to eat lunch and then I come home and binge.”

“I’m dealing with people who are angry and unreasonable. How do I make that okay?”

“I need someone to hold me accountable.”

“I’m busy from the time I wake up until I go to bed. There is no time for me. Food is my comfort. How am I supposed to stop eating?”

Peace with food isn’t really about food. Oh, on one level it is. It’s about feeling in control and effective and able to make choices that are in your best interest. It means (usually) not choosing foods or portions that leave you feeling uncomfortable or sick afterwards. It’s about you (not what’s on the plate) having the power and the control. But I hope you can see that I’m talking about so much more than food here.

Food only loses its power when we own our own power and stop using food as a band aid. Too often, food is the quick fix for things that we are not willing (or are too fearful) to address directly.

No food plan in the world is going to help the women above with their loneliness, their unwillingness to take time for themselves, their struggles with assertiveness, and their ability to ask for help. These are really gnarly difficult parts of life to wrestle with. Honestly, fighting with the chocolate chip cookies (and even feeling guilty when you lose), can feel a lot less daunting. It’s easier (in the short run) to stay on the diet roller coaster than it is to make peace with food.

Peace with food requires making peace with your life. And sometimes that means creating a life that you can feel peaceful with. Learning to say no. Addressing the difficult relationships. Finding ways to take good care of yourself and sometimes putting yourself first. It means addressing the places that may feel scary: loneliness, fear, worry-even boredom. Taking risks that you might have been putting off taking for years. It’s hard stuff to swallow, but the payoffs can be huge. Creating peace with food really does have the potential to transform your life.

And before you get too overwhelmed, please remember that there are real tools (that work much better than diets) to help you do all these things. All of these challenges get more manageable and less terrifying when you find someone to help you through them-and when you take them on in small, palatable bites.

So imagine again that your pants always fit and your weight stays where you want it to. That you don’t diet and you don’t binge and you generally make good choices. And this time understand that it happens because you’ve looked the loneliness in the eye and gotten the help that you need to change it. You’ve learned to stand tall and speak up on your own behalf. You aren’t ending the day feeling exhausted and used up and like you don’t have the energy to do more than open the ice cream.

You’ve rebalanced your life. You’ve done the hard work. You’ve unleashed your inner champion. That’s what it takes to make peace with food.

Feeding Baby Solid Food

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Perhaps all caring mothers (and dads too!) prepare anxiously for the day when they can give their child the first dose of solid food. It is almost like the first signs of the coming of age of the child. Yet most parents face a bout of confusion, often asking themselves the invariable questions of when and how, while the reality is that this need not be something very complex or challenging, if just some simple rules and timings are followed.

Although the theories concerning the right time to introduce the baby on solid foods have varied from time to time, it is now generally believed that this should happen between 4 to 6 months, as this is the point where they are not only developed enough for starting on solid foods but also this is the time when their reflexes for sucking bottled or breast milk diminishes.

There are also some easy symptoms to find out if the baby is really in a position to start on solids. The general signs could be whether, with some support, she can sit up and hold her neck and head up. Interestingly, if the baby also peers at your own plate when you are eating in the baby’s presence. It can also surface in the baby showing signs that she wants more when her bottle is empty and can manage to keep the solid food within the mouth than just pouting it out. Besides the symptoms there are some solid medical reasons why the period of 4-6 months is the ideal one: this is the time when the digestive system has matured enough to tackle solid food intake, without any adverse effect on allergies. It is also the time when the baby’s inherent stock of irons start diminishing and the liquid intake cannot sustain the iron levels any more. This is the time when it would be useful to give the baby such iron rich solid foods like spinach, meat and beans.

Theories abound about what best to have on the baby’s first solid food menu list. Ideally it should start with some supplement of iron fortified cereal, followed by fruits and vegetables, probably in that order as most babies prefer the sweet taste of fruits. Once the baby has got accustomed to these solid foods, other new foods can be added gradually but preferably during the day times only, to notice any adverse responses if any.

Having started the baby on solids, most mothers also have to face perhaps the first time task of making the baby food. Most pediatricians would recommend that making one’s own baby food is the ideal option instead of using pre-packaged varieties, so that one can know exactly what the baby is taking. Fortunately, preparing baby food in the house has now become quite convenient and cheap besides being quite efficient. This also has the added advantage of feeding the baby, as it grows, with some of the regular food of the household, processed through these handy gadgets.

Basically, preparing baby food in the house requires hardly 5 different standard gadgets, many of which are already available in any household kitchen. The essentials comprise of hand-turned food mill with blades of different sizes and shapes to produce the different textures of food; a steam-cooker with an arrangement to puree the fruit, vegetables, and meat. These are normally referred to as “all-in-one baby-food makers”. In some of the more sophisticated models there is provision for defrosting and reheating of previously prepared food.

The other gadgets would include a baby food grinder, to break down chunks of food for the baby. It could be non-electric and portable, but these may not provide a choice of textures. Added to the list is a hand blender for pureeing the food, by just holding the portable device within the food itself. A regular kitchen blender or food processor and a good old-fashioned fork complete the list, these last 2 items being mostly available already.

The History and Future of Pet Food Online

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Pets may not be a new phenomenon but pet food certainly is. In fact, two hundred years ago pet food did not even exist. Horses were just given grass, oats, grains, apples and anything else that was cheap to get hold of in large quantities. Dogs and cats mainly lived on scraps of meat and grains that their owners could spare for them. It was only in the mid 1800s when the American James Spratt was living in London and saw dogs eating discarded biscuits in a ship yard that the idea of creating food especially for pets was considered.

Spratt created bone shaped biscuits from a mixture of wheat, vegetables, beetroot and beef blood that he marketed as dog food. They were an instant success. By 1890 he had begun producing his dog food in large quantities in America, calling the company Spratts Patent Limited. Some years later a brand of dog food called Ken L Ration was created and sold in America, just after the First World War, that was in fact horse meat. The American government had seen it as not only a cheap but even a profitable way to dispose of dead horses.

Up until this point, the only pet food available had been marketed at dog owners. However, in the 1930s the company Gaines Food Co realised that almost as many people kept cats as dogs and so they introduced the first ever canned cat food. At the same time they also introduced dry meat meal dog food, which was longer lasting. At the end of the Second World War sales of pet food in America had reached 200 million dollars, so with such a popular product it is a wonder that no one thought of it before.

In the fifties Spratts became a part of General Mills and in the next decade it was bought by Spillers, a dog food company based in the UK. Even to this day, Spillers make bone shaped biscuits very similar to Spratts original ones. Companies such as Quaker Oats and General Foods saw pet food as a way of making a profit from leftover ingredients that they would otherwise have had to dispose of, so more pet food companies sprung up. Many of these companies paid vets to endorse them who advised against feeding their pets anything other than this pet food, to make as much profit as possible.

Today, vets and pet owners now realise the importance of a full and balanced diet that requires more than dry pet food alone that provide. Many of the soft, moist pet foods sold today are excellent and provide almost all of the nutrients that your pet needs, although occasionally supplements are also recommended to make absolutely sure that they are not missing out on any vital vitamins or minerals. Over 5 million kilograms of pet food are now produced every day, for common pets such as dogs and cats but also for small animals and for horses, which are now kept more as pets than for manual work.

Recent years have seen a new understanding into the benefits of natural and organic food for us humans, but now food experts and starting to realise that this has advantages over standard foods for our pets as well. Normal pet foods are highly processed and currently ingredients for pet food are still allowed to come from animals that are dead, dying, diseased or disabled and items not allowed for human consumption such as cow brains are still permitted in certain pet foods. It is therefore wise to always check the label to find out if your tin of natural cat food is made from fresh cuts of meat, or if it is made from ground bones and offal. There are however many brands that have latched onto this growing desire to feed our pets healthy, wholesome food and it is now possible to buy dog, cat and other animal food that is made from prime cuts of meat and vegetables.

Over the years there has also been a fantastic development in the range of equine supplies that are available, such as hoof care products that were not around a hundred years ago, and in small pet supplies too such as dedicated food for hamsters and guinea pigs. You can even buy special milk for kittens as there is debate over whether it is healthy for them to drink milk from cows. It is also now possible to buy pet food online which gives everyone access to a huge variety and choice of pet foods and lets you search for the best brands at the best prices.