Love to Eat: 75 Easy, Craveworthy Recipes for Healthy, Intuitive Eating [A Cookbook]

INTRODUCTION: MY FOOD PHILOSOPHY

EAT FOOD THAT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD

My food philosophy is simple: instead of counting calories and macronutrients or eliminating food groups because we've heard they are bad, how about we enjoy ALL foods, stop demonizing them, and instead, let our bodies decide what we want to eat based on what makes us feel our best? At the end of the day, the food choices we make give us information, and it's up to us what we decide to do with that information.

For instance, if you wake up in the morning and decide to eat a donut from the corner donut store for breakfast, cool. Your body will give you information shortly after consuming it. You might feel happy in the moment (who wouldn't? I love donuts!), but there's a high probability that you'll start to feel a little tired, lethargic, and perhaps even as if there's a rock sitting in your stomach. You likely won't be super excited to get a morning walk or run in right after eating. You might even start to get irritable because you feel uncomfortable. None of this means that donuts are bad-they aren't. Nothing is. It just means that if physically feeling energetic and ready to tackle a workout is your goal, then you might consider eating a more nutritious breakfast the majority of the time.

For me, I feel my best when I start the day with a protein-packed smoothie, so I'm feeling energized and ready for a good sweat. Come Sunday, I am ready to say "F***" it to physically feeling my best, instead trading that smoothie for donuts from the corner store and lazy day snuggles with my boys. That decision-to ditch the smoothie and grab a fried donut from the corner store instead-makes me feel good in a different sense-emotionally. The smoothie and the donut are both perfectly acceptable choices because optimal health is about balance, not extremes.

But Nic, are you really saying that donuts are healthy? What I am saying is that this concept of "healthy" is more complex than a simple yes or no, and it depends on how one defines that word. Many people think they are eating healthy by purchasing foods labeled as low fat, low carb, or guilt-free-all of which are terms created by the diet industry to trick people into thinking that they are doing better for their health by purchasing them, when in fact, they are often filled with ingredients that really aren't nutritious at all.

On the other hand, there are people who consider themselves healthy because they meticulously (and oftentimes obsessively) read nutrition labels and avoid all foods made with processed and artificial ingredients. While it's certainly healthier if we look at it from a purely nutritional standpoint (foods made with real, whole food ingredients, mostly plants, do make our bodies thrive; that's science), over time this approach can lead to orthorexia, which is another kind of eating disorder that involves an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. And even if it doesn't, I believe that making food choices based on nutritional labels alone misses a huge component of the definition of health, which is eating for emotional fulfillment and joy. There may be one or two people out there in the universe who are truly satisfied on all levels (physical, mental, and emotional) by eating a completely real, unprocessed foods diet. But for the majority of us, myself included, we want to leave room in our lives for Donut Sundays with our kids.

In my world, health is about finding a middle ground: prioritizing foods made with real, whole food ingredients because we want to feel like rock stars, but it's also about eating that donut sometimes because it tastes great and makes us happy, even if it's just in the moment.

In this book, you won't hear me refer to food as "good" or "bad" or say things like "this is a recipe made with clean ingredients" or that this recipe is "guilt-free." Food isn't good or bad; it has no moral value. Food is food, and that's that. By the same token, food isn't clean, because clean implies that other food is dirty, and that's simply not how it works. And finally, the term guilt-free that we often hear means nothing. It's just a marketing label designed to make people think that certain foods are better than others, but in reality, all food should be guilt-free. In fact, the word guilt shouldn't even be part of the equation at all.

Instead, you'll hear me refer to foods that are nutritious and foods that are less nutritious; this takes into account only the nutritiona...