My response to my friend on social media was genuine, not snarky—which I hope came across, but words without vocal inflections don’t always translate well. It was that, no, I really don’t. Unless you count that I made this food with love, and as few processed ingredients as possible.

I’m not a dietitian. I’m not a food expert either. I’m a mom. I’m also a realistic mom that saw many of my pre-kid food dreams fall to the floor with Goldfish crumbs, after having children in real life.

To be fair, I am firm about the food in our household in some ways. For instance, I don’t own a microwave. Well, I do, because it’s attached to the house we live in, but I taped a sign inside that says, “Don’t even think about it”—with so much tape that it would be faster for my husband to make his eggs on the stove.

I was also eating disordered for a decent chunk of my life. It took me years and years to get back in touch with my body—with my hunger cues, with my needs, and, most importantly, with letting food make me feel good.

Food tastes good for a reason—it’s meant to be enjoyed, savored and shared with the people we love. (Just like I showed love to my husband by having his favorite mac and cheese in the oven when he got home from a long work day.)

This all said, my daughters are growing, thriving little people that need nourishment, and, almost as significant as this, is the reality that I want to do everything I can to ensure they grow to love food and their bodies—and to respect and nurture both.

My response to my friend was simple: to me, “healthy mac and cheese” means that I grate my own cheese, and that I try my best to buy organic dairy products, like butter. I’ll admit that I bought these macaroni noodles at Sam’s.

Most importantly to me, this particular recipe is the same one that I grew up eating, and there’s authentic comfort in this for me to be able to cook, share and eat it myself—I’m passing along a tradition of love to them, along with hopefully some protein and calcium.

But “healthy” sometimes means cutting myself slack, too.

It means buying a pizza from Earth Fare for dinner, because making it is out the question if I want to have a stress-free evening—and associating stress with food isn’t something I want to regularly serve up to my kids.

“Healthy,” like many things in life, is relative, and not finite. People from all over the world eat differently, and we’re often lucky to be able to try cuisine from different places, or to have eclectic familial backgrounds that gift us with different comfort foods. (Without even getting into the topics of privilege or money.)

I let my kids eat fruit snacks, and those little bunny-shaped chocolate crackers for their snacks sometimes. I occasionally sprinkle a few chocolate chips on top of their organic, whole-milk Greek yogurt. We also cook a lot in our home, and both my 5-year-old and my 1-year-old love pretending to bake, chop and stir along with cooking shows, or to help me in the kitchen.

Especially as a woman who had the exceedingly difficult task of re-learning how to see food as more than merely medicine that my body needs to function, I want my daughters to know balance.

I want them to eat ice cream at the farm down the street, and I want them to know that we don’t eat it every day, or too much at a time, because it makes us feel bad rather than good. I want them to try a new vegetable, even if they spit it out because they didn’t like it.

I want them to remember how their parents spent much of each night cooking together in our kitchen—talking, laughing, sometimes hollering orders at each other over simmering pots and cutting boards. I want them to understand that our nicked, antique dining table is a safe place to reconnect and hang out, after we spent a lot of our days apart.

Food doesn’t have to be our enemy—it took me probably half of my life to realize this.

Food isn’t “clean” or, conversely, “dirty”—it’s more complex, and special, than that.

Food can be something that brings people together. Food can be fuel for my yoga practice, or my daughter’s gymnastics lesson. Food, these days, is eaten more quickly than I’d prefer, since I’m currently spending most of my time with two demanding eating partners—my glorious, young kids.

My main goal right now—far above being obsessed with idealistically defining or restricting my diet—is to show my kids that I love so much what it feels like to love our bodies, and to love feeding them, too.

It’s showing them through my example that healthy love has nothing to do with fictitious perfection.

The post A Mom’s Response to What Is “Healthy Food?” first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

This is an open rebuttal to an extremely damaging article currently making its rounds via Scary Mommy.

I’d like to first openly suggest that had this original post been written from a “skinny mom’s” perspective that, for one, it would have been a truly sad and unfortunate eating disordered experience of life and, for another, it would have been less of a completely judgmental, destructively stereotypical post-slash-rant.

Moreover, had this article been written about a “fat” mom, it never would have been published.

However, it’s apparently perfectly okay to perpetuate horribly damaging and un-true stereotypes of “skinny” moms.

Because skinny does not equal eating disorders or body dysmorphia, any more than a slightly overweight mom should be seen as lazy or self-hating.

That last part of my previous sentence was cringe-worthy to read, no?

Yeah—had this article been about “fat moms,” it wouldn’t have been birthed.

Seeing women as dichotomously “skinny” or “fat” is not only terribly and obtusely stereotypical, but it’s a shallow portrayal of the depth of women, and of people in general and, in relation to this particular article, definitively equating “skinny” with “eating disordered” is unfortunately wrong, damaging to understanding and healing true eating disorders—and it’s still body shaming.

I’m a “skinny mom.”

I’m not tan, because I just had a baby and her eldest sister has fair skin, so we often hang out in the shade or with sunscreen slathered on. The rest of this could describe me, though.

I lost my baby weight quickly, after both births.

I do still have signs of this, although I didn’t have C-sections–but I bought a new belly ring yesterday and its little blue gemstones are shining alongside my still-present Linea nigra and my fairly chiseled abs.

I do workout a lot.

I began exercising regularly in high school and I never stopped.

I didn’t stop during either pregnancy and I didn’t stop after having children.

I move my body because it feels good, and for that reason alone.

And, no, you didn’t “see” me.

You, apparently, didn’t see how much I love my body.

You didn’t see that I’m proud of the butt that I’ve toned doing squats in my basement while the baby is in her swing and her older sister is at preschool for a couple of hours.

You didn’t see that I’m teaching these two little girls to love their bodies too—I’m teaching them to not sneer at women and judge the way some women do—the way your article did—and I’m teaching them that just because some people don’t love themselves enough to love others, this doesn’t mean that we should be any less kind ourselves.

I am compassionate with myself.

I’m compassionate with my body, too—and I’ve never loved my body more than after it gave birth to my second child.

I felt proud of what it could do and of how my body worked for both of us during my labor and delivery.

I love, equally, the skin that still hangs loosely from giving birth last October, as well as the arms that someone recently called “Michelle Obama arms.”

I don’t shed tears when I try on bathing suits.

Actually, I just tried on bathing suits with my oldest daughter at a store in the mall two days ago—we had a blast.

I left without buying one, though, because, as it turns out, I’m fine wearing my old Speedo one-piece, that I bought four years ago for my daughter’s first mommy-and-me swim lessons at the Y.

Because when I’m running through the sprinkler with her in the backyard, the last thing that I’m thinking about is how I look in a swimsuit. Instead, I’m focusing on how cute she looks in hers, on the way the water goes into my eye and makes my contact lens blur and on her squeals of delight.

I feel sorry for moms, whether thin or not, who can’t experience their children’s babyhood because they are in the throes of an eating disorder.

I’m not.

I’m a thin mom who loves to move my body, who loves to eat healthy food and have a glass of wine and some dark chocolate every night, who loves to sit on the front porch with my husband after the kids go to bed, who loves to read, who loves my children—who, frankly, is a person beyond my physical exterior, and I recognize this.

So, no—you didn’t see me.

You saw either your own fears and demons or a stereotype, or both.

You didn’t see how much more I am than my body and how happy I am living inside of it.

Because if you had seen me, you surely would have noticed my athletic physique—but you also would have taken in much, much more.

Photo: Flickr/Mother and daughter running through the fountain.

The post What You Didn’t See When You Looked at A “Skinny Mom”: A Response. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

I can often tell how I feel emotionally by the foods and drinks that I consume.

Granted, I’m largely a healthy eater.

When I say healthy eater I mean that I’m a balanced eater.

Because this article is not written from the perspective of a nutritionist or a dietitian or a physician or a psychologist, but from the vantage point of a recovered anorexic, who is overly analytical in general, and who spent an awful lot of my life discovering how my previous food aversions and disorder can actually be a helpful guide for self-discovery.

And I’m here to share a few of the most basic things I’ve learned.

1. Food is our friend and when it’s not, we are not acting as our own friends.

The simplest conclusion that I’ve come to on this journey to be a healthy eater or, rather, a healthy individual for whom food is both nourishment and satisfaction, but not an over-indulgence, is this: that our relationship with food says a ton about our relationship with ourselves.

If we are restricting food, we are restricting self-love.

If we are over-indulging in food, we are craving more self-love.

This is an obviously overly simplified version of this concept, but I find it to be true again and again in my life.

2. Craving crap is part habit and part “I’ve given up.”

There’s absolutely scientific research that shows that, especially, synthetic and sugary foods cause us to crave more of these fillers.

I say filler foods because they are loaded with junk our bodies do not need and distinctly lacking in nutritional density.

When we crave these foods and over-dose on these foods we, for one, are in a negatively spiraling habit-cycle that needs, frankly, will power to stop and, for another, we often have bought into the false notion that we are not worth cooking for, that we can’t afford better food, that we don’t have time to eat better food and, let me tell you, these ideas are as crappy as this fare.

3. Being too “healthy” of an eater is not healthy.

Food tastes good for a reason—it is meant to be enjoyed.

Life is meant to be enjoyed.

Often, when we eat “clean” and always avoid “unhealthy”—usually deemed “unhealthy” either by ourselves or current marketing standards—we are neglecting more than a little indulgence—we are neglecting and depriving ourselves of pleasure.

4. Gluttony and over-indulgence are not pleasurable.

That said, over-indulging on a regular basis, with the excuses of “treating ourselves” or “I deserve this” or any other aspect of “love” involved is not the best way to show our emotions—or our bodies—love.

Over-indulgence is not self-care.

4. On alcohol.

I, personally, have a finicky relationship with alcohol.

I’ve seen it destroy lives, alcoholism runs in my family and, on top of this, I want to display for my children a diet of moderation, including—within this dietetic scheme—alcoholic beverages.

That said, I read a recent post by a friend, and she was letting us know that she has given up alcohol for the time being, as it’s become something not good for her.

She said, too, that it was once shared with her that over-consumption or too-regular consumption of alcohol is often a way that we let ourselves fall apart at a speed and rate that we can handle, when we are, most assuredly, falling apart in some way, be it emotionally, mentally, physically, or a combination of these states.

While I am not the person to declare alcohol dichotomously bad or good, I do continually check in with myself, as a drinker, with my intention—for me this is key.

If I neeeeeeed a drink, I practice yoga first. I don’t want alcohol to be something I need, but, instead, something I enjoy.

Because here’s the larger thing:

5. Our choices become our habits become our lifestyle become our days become our lives become our stories.

I want my story to include fabulous meals and company over food, and it’s okay if my story occasionally involves disordered eating in some way, because, for me, I’ve found that I can use my honest relationship with food as a completely healthy, helpful tool for self-care.

I don’t expect to be perfect.

Sometimes I expect my diet to be perfect—and that’s when I check in with why.

Where do I feel a lacking in my life or myself that I find a need to create a pretend-controlled environment.

Life cannot be controlled.

It can be experienced and appreciated, like good food.

It can be regimented, like our diets can be.

But life, whether we like it or not, will never be wholly within our control, and thank goodness—some of the best things in my life have happened because fate took a detour, even with all of my hard work to be on a neatly specific path.

That said, I believe in effort, in both life and in my relationship with food.

Wonderful dinners for both myself and my family will not make themselves.

Writing a book will not happen unless I work on it.

My relationship with my husband also at times takes my effort to feel good because relationships, even when filled with the most soulful of love, will have challenges.

So here’s what I’m offering up today. I’m suggesting that we spend less time judging ourselves and judging others for their food choices and more time learning about ourselves and other people through them.

Because that old saying just might be true: food is—or can be—a display of love.

Photo: Flickr/Healthy Red Tomatoes…

The post What Our Relationship with Food Says About Our Relationship with Ourselves. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

This went viral a little bit ago and I think it’s time to re-share it.

Because I’m not sure about you, but I’m already tired of hearing about how to get “bikini ready”—and it’s technically not even summer yet.

So, how do you get a bikini body?

Like this.

Photo credit: imgur.

The post How to Get a Bikini Body. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

Audrey Hepburn was right to love this quote and we can thank her for helping it soar in popularity, although not for writing it.

Frequently, and incorrectly, credited to Hepburn, she often loved to recite this perfect phrase on beauty by American humorist Sam Levenson, and no wonder.

“For Attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run their fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone.
People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.”

~ Sam Levenson

Now get out there and enjoy life, you beautiful person you.

Photo credits: Gabriel Jorby/Flickr.

The post The Most Perfect Quote on Beauty by (Not) Audrey Hepburn. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

The sky is rumbling again.

Long, quaking echos of thunder emerge from the storm that’s beginning to water my garden.

My daughter and I are cozy inside, listening to Still Corners while she drives around her little Flintstones-esque car.

The earth is already saturated from last night’s downpour, but not so much that it prevented us from heading out onto one of the park’s gravel-lined trails for an early afternoon hike a few hours ago.

The crunch of the ground beneath my feet made my heart start to come alive the second that my shoes hit the stones.

The feel of sweat dripping inside of my tank top and catching on my upper lip instantly woke up my soul.

Exercise really does help me get rid of my monkey mind, of my perpetually moving brain.

I guess some people would call my mental style ADHD, and that’s fine with me. I don’t mind labels—I just don’t let myself be contained by them either.

I look up from where I sit typing now, with the rain and the music providing a steady, thumping backdrop, and I observe my little girl rolling around in her Cozy Coup, looking for the best way to get over the hurdle of gliding from the wood floor and onto the white-tiled hallway.

This morning I felt like garbage.

I woke up and my eyes were literally as red as my small lady’s plastic car. (That supermoon has taken a toll on our household sleep.)

My typical morning coffee didn’t do the trick, and neither did my bath.

Nothing, including getting out of the house for some crack-of-dawn errands, seemed to lighten my heavy spirits and awaken my downtrodden body—until I stole 30 minutes to work out.

My husband’s a cyclist; he rides a single-speed up seriously steep hills, like the bad-ass athlete that he’s always been, since well before I met him at age 14.

I slightly pathetically begged him to take our daughter for me while he finished up his own pre-work routine. (It wasn’t yet 8 am—I told you we’ve been lacking in the sleep department.)

I dashed downstairs to our workout area—free weights, an awesome Spinning bike that was my Valentine’s Day present years ago (diamonds are over-rated) and my beloved Nordic Track, circa 1980-whatever.

Still wearing my dress, I tore off my short-sleeve cardigan and threw on my tennis shoes. I cranked up Incubus on my iPod (I admit to getting stuck on tunes from my youth; listening to the same album repeatedly for a week or a month before moving onto something else)—and I took off (well, kind of, I was stationary, I’m aware).

The music pounded and so did my beating heart.

I unwisely hadn’t made as much time this past week to move my body as I normally do, having had several appointments and being hampered also by this recurrent soggy weather.

I watched the sky grow clearer through the large picture window in front of me as I rhythmically moved my feet along those stationary wooden skis—and I turned the music up louder.

I watched the clock, so as not to make my husband late. (He would almost assuredly rather slightly delay his departure than stop me from making myself feel better.)

The sky opened up and so did my mind—my own mental clutter and debris being swept away, my dress now sticky. (Don’t worry, I changed.)

A little while later, after switching clothes, spending time with friends and having lunch, my little girl and I decided to get out onto our gorgeous local trails before the rain made its now familiar appearance once again (that crunchy hike on the gravelly trail I mentioned before).

She sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at the top of her lungs as I happily pushed her in her stroller, up and down the hilly terrain, listening to her perfectly pitched song and watching her cute hands move in motions that matched her words—and I got deliciously sweaty all over again.

I felt the pebble-littered trail beneath my rubber soles and heard the birds singing along with my tender child, as my thankful eyes drank in the lush greens and emotionally stabilizing tans and greys of the trees and rocks that surrounded me.

Later still, when the rain began to beat my windshield, I saw the steady motion of my wiper blades and listened all over again to my daughter’s singing—this time a tricky medley of Twinkle Twinkle and the Itsy Bitsy Spider—and I can’t help but wonder why we make things so hard on ourselves sometimes.

We watch our brains whirl and go and they don’t seem to wait for us to catch up.

We get irritated with the other people that make up our world. (To be fair, some are more challenging than others.)

We don’t pay full attention to what we’re doing—and multi-tasking is a myth. (I’m guilty even now—handing my daughter a snack while finishing up my thoughts here with you.)

Yet often we don’t have a choice—we have human responsibilities that get in the way of our more primitive needs.

I did it just this week by allowing my hurried schedule, and my subsequently tired but needy body, meander myself away from my usually disciplined workout routine.

And here’s the thing—if we expend only a microscopic amount of additional time and energy paying attention to what our bodies are asking us to do (eat right, move around, and get some sleep for Godsakes), then everything else becomes easier, naturally.

So while I won’t pretend to know or even fully understand your own personal situation, I do have compassion. Because I, too, have a child who doesn’t prefer to sleep as much as I (or not really much at all, if I’m being completely honest).

I also have a life that requires my attention, money and resources—usually outside from where I’d prefer these things to be—and that’s life.

Life means having things to do that you wouldn’t necessarily place first, but life should also mean making sure that you’re fitting in some of that other good stuff along with it.

We don’t need to be weekend warriors—what a waste of an opportunity if we save everything that we desperately want to do for a rainy day inside of a bucket list of dreams.

Do something every day that you would maybe only consider appropriate for a Friday night. Try it. Just once.

You might discover a different world—a better one—that’s been waiting patiently for you all along, you’ve had only to notice it.

My daughter’s singing trails off, and the rain is really coming down now.

I’m so glad that we went for that walk outside.

Not because I’m glad that I took advantage of the sunshine—although I am—but because now I can sit back and enjoy the cleansing sounds of the driving cloudburst, since I’ve already purified myself from the inside out—and I hope I’m teaching her to do the same.

I hope I’m showing my daughter that life isn’t made of weekdays and weekends, rather it’s made of opportunities that we take or let slip by. I hope I’m showing her, too, that inside of her human form lies an eternal well of energy, one that she can tap into at anytime, if she chooses.

Possibly I’ll also help her understand that more often than not the solutions are right there in front of our faces, and that they aren’t as complicated as we think they should be.

For me, my mental chatter needed a break, so I took my body for a walk. That’s it. That’s all I needed.

Life is difficult enough,and then we have to go and make it even harder.

I look back out my big front picture window and notice a clearing sky and patches of beaming sun and I’m grateful knowing that I’ll sleep well tonight.

“If a man achieves victory over this body, who in the world can exercise power over him? He who rules himself rules over the whole world.”

~ Vinoba Bhave

 

 

Photo: David Salafia/Flickr.

This article was first published by elephant journal.

The post Exercise & Opportunity: Why You Should Throw Away Your Bucket List. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

Beauty is not only skin deep—beauty radiates from the inside out.

Don’t believe me? Think of the people that you’re drawn to or find attractive, and likely there’s something beyond physical beauty drawing you in.

Charisma, happiness and a warm personality absolutely help boost physical attractiveness. So here are five ways to feel more beautiful—and look more beautiful—(almost) instantly.

1. Exercise. Exercise has physical benefits for your body that show up and help you shine. Working out helps your skin—and inner light—glow (thank all those mood-boosting chemicals). It also helps with weight management and improves self-esteem. Sounds like a good beauty fix to me.

2. Smile. This one is instant. Your heart lightens and it shows on the outside the second you turn up the corners of your lips. Give it a try.

3. Cleanse from the inside. I’m reading a wonderful book about the Yamas and Niyamas in my yoga training. One of the important beauty-related lessons here is that our society is obsessed with outer cleanliness and sadly pays little attention to what’s going into our bodies to keep us clean and pure. Pay attention not only to what you eat and drink but to what you read and who you listen to—and then pay close attention to what you’re saying to others in return. There’s a deep inner peace that comes from living a life of cleanliness—and I’m not talking about stocking up on expensive skin care products.

4. Dress well. I know it probably seems shallow to move from the last tip to this one, but it’s true no matter how you want to count it. Dressing well helps you look and, more importantly, feel better. I remember my twin telling me in high school that on days I was feeling less than stellar I shouldn’t throw on a baggy old t-shirt, I should put on my favorite, form-fitting dress and rock it—and she was absolutely right.

5. Confidence. Wow, this one’s extremely hard to tell you how to accomplish. Still, if you’re confident in yourself (and in more than just your outer appearance), it will show and it will make you more attractive. Again, think of someone you find attractive. I guarantee that physical perfection isn’t part of it, because none of us is perfect. Yet, these quirks, these individual little traits that make you you, actually make you more endearing.

Step 1 in boosting confidence (let’s start one step at a time): stop saying nasty things to yourself. Trust me on this one. Thoughts become words and words become actions. Talk to yourself the way that you would a child—with patience, kindness and love. Developing this sort of soft inner voice will help your outer voice resonate more beautifully—and your outer appearance too.

Don’t get frustrated if you wake up and roll out of bed, and don’t feel at the top of your game. We all have down days. Instead look in the mirror and focus on what you love. Spending time focusing on the positive reinforces these attributes and helps them radiate out into the world. You are beautiful.

So go ahead and hop on your yoga mat to get those endorphins flowing—and give yourself permission to share your beauty with the world today and every day.

Photo: Nikos Koutoulas/Flickr.

This article was first published by elephant journal.

The post 5 Ways to Be More Beautiful (Almost) Instantly. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.