Healing through food: Be like a child

Read how to enjoy “Healing through food” series of blogs here.

This is a story from this summer when my husband and I ate a bit too much at lunch time and were still pretty full when the dinner time came around. We both somehow felt like having a dessert so that’s what we ended up having it for dinner and made an adventure out of the whole thing. This whole experience made us very happy and we giggled like a child the whole time.

Going out of our norm

We really didn’t know where a good dessert place was so we searched on the internet and found a place in downtown that looked good with good reviews. So we went. While it is a downtown of the city we live in, we don’t typically go there since we both hate driving around to find a parking. But we did, to be adventurous. We pretended like we are out-of-towners on a trip. It was interesting to see how little we know about our own city and even a trip there could make us feel like we are on a little trip.

Who said we have to do things a certain way?

As a child growing up, I rarely ate dessert after dinner. When we did, they are on occasions like birthday or someone brought gifts for coming to visit us. We often ate them for afternoon snack so we can eat these with people who brought them to us rather than consuming after dinner.

After I came to US, I got accustomed by the rule of “you eat dinner before you eat dessert.” So, somewhere in my mind, I felt “I’m doing something wrong if I eat dessert before having a dinner.” But if I think about it, if your mind is already set to eat dessert that night, what’s wrong about eating it before dinner? I often overeat when I eat dessert because I’ve already eaten sufficiently by the time I indulge these extra food. Doing it other way around would make me eat less dinner! Makes logical sense but not a social norm…

That said, I’ve never tried reversal of order other than occasionally eating dessert for dinner. And this was my first time doing that purposefully (not accidentally), and it made me feel free.

Listen to your body

Morale of the story here is that I’m much happier when I listen to my body rather than doing things just because that’s how things ought to be done. If the body is hungry, I should eat. If the body craves dessert, I’m happy to eat dessert. However the key is not over do it, though… That’s sometimes tuff when the food is good!!

I feel in our society, we often stop ourselves from doing things because it is out of norm, or people might think you are strange, or what-else. We have been conditioned to “stay in the box.” While there’s a line that you should not cross, such as doing something that would harm others, but I feel we will be much happier if “we lighten up a little” as a whole.

  

The healing I’m sending with this image is to just for today, pick one little thing that would make you truly happy and just do it. Don’t think about what others think. Just take care of yourself for just one moment today.