Bite into a Healthy Lifestyle: Forest vs. Trees

You've all heard the saying about missing the forest for the trees right? Well, a couple years ago, we took the kids on a family vacation to northern California and one of the highlights was the awe-inspiring redwood forests.  Not surprisingly, there were some pretty gigantic trees.  But that was just part of the charm of area.  The truly amazing aspect that sets these amazing forests apart is not a single or a few spectacular trees, but hundreds and thousands of them.  To walk among such an ancient forest was not to focus on merely one tree, but the ambience created by an entire forest.

So my take on this year's National Nutrition Month theme of Bite into a Healthy Lifestyle is just that - it is a whole, healthy lifestyle, not one single tree (or in some extreme cases one leaf).  In this country especially we have become very adept and conditioned to view food as a package of specific nutrients (trees) and often focus solely on one nutrient labeling it as good or bad, or therapeutic (leaf).  Instead, let's embrace and focus on the whole lifestyle (forest).

Take a step back and instead of agonizing over a nutrition label or the current count on your phone's diet tracker, instead ask yourself if you ate real food (not packaged, food-like products) that you enjoyed and savored.  This month I'll be posting more tips on how to see the forest instead of the trees when it comes to healthy nutrition and healthy lifestyle.