Inside Out

I’ve long been fascinated with the power of nutrition and the effect food has on our health. I love stories of boiling herbs and drinking strange teas for an afternoon till that pesky bladder infection is gone. I’m seriously intrigued—but from afar. I’ve never quite taken steps to apply it to my own life.

I woke up the other day feeling stressed and anxious—which, by the way, sucks big time to wake up this way. I feel like I’m still missing a few pieces of my wellness puzzle, so that when stuff happens—and it does—I’m not prepared to handle it in that elegant, tossing-my-hair, casual way I envision. I can’t say I had a vision or heard an ethereal voice whispering my name, but a phrase did pop into my head: “You have to heal from the inside out.”

So I’m exploring this. I want to learn about what the food I eat can do—how it can help me, how it can hurt me. All along, I’ve felt I knew what to do to get healthy, I just couldn’t quite make that happen. Now, I think I need to dig deeper. I suspect this change in mindset will be a good one: instead of focusing on what NOT to eat, it’s time to consider what I should be eating. We’re all looking for that magic potion, it seems, to cure whatever ails us. What if it’s been right in front of me all along?

I’m going to treat this as a personal project, because I tend to rock that stuff. Maybe I can dive into nutrition and functional medicine like I dove into refinishing a couple tables last summer (distressed finish—very cool). I found it easier to sand tables endlessly versus cooking healthy meals on a regular basis.

A friend once sent me a card with a picture of a baby on the front. Her head was on the ground and her diaper-clad butt was in the air—an early attempt at Sirsasana, perhaps, but that’s beside the point. Inside the card read, “Maybe it’s time you looked at things from a different point of view.”