Welcome to another delicious week
at Pathfinder Produce! We hope you’ll join us on Thursday, July 18, at our
fresh veggie and fruit market at the Village Commons, open from noon to 5 p.m.
Our friendly and courteous staff is eager to assist you with your purchases.
Life is always full at Pathfinder,
and we want to share some dates with you: Our Summer
Concert Series is in full swing, each Saturday
evening at the Pavilion, starting at 7 p.m. We have some great bands
lined up; learn more at our Facebook Event page.
In addition, we’re planning for our
annual American Red
Cross Blood Drive on Tuesday, August 6, starting at 10 a.m. If you are not
near us, the Red Cross organizes many community drives throughout your area
this summer -- it takes just a short time to make a big impact, and your
donation can help up to three patients.
***
Lately, I’ve been hooked on podcasts, listening to NPRs Life
Kit. There was a recent segment on Intuitive
Eating, and I was intrigued: While it isn’t a dieting tool geared
to weight loss, it is a technique people may use to understand their eating habits
and move toward healthier eating. It is the opposite of restricted dieting and
encourages people to be in-tune with their hunger.
Dietician Aaron Flores of the National Eating Disorders
Association explains: Intuitive eating is about trusting your inner body
wisdom to make choices around foods that feel good in your body, without
judgment and without influence from diet culture. We are all born with the skill
to eat, to stop when we are full, to eat when we are hungry and to eat
satisfying foods. … When we filter out the noise and influence that diet
culture presents to us as false truths, we can then truly listen to what our
body wants and needs from food … Intuitive eating is a peace movement. “
Many of us eat “three squares” because we are taught to eat
at breakfast, noon, and dinner. But these, I suspect, are artificial
constructs that came about as we transitioned from being hunter-gatherers to
farmers and herders in pre-history. As basic primates, we expended lots
of energy wandering in search of life’s necessities (food, water, shelter), and
our ancestors would eat sporadically as they found food.
Cooking, the one process that differentiates us from other
primates is thought to have become widespread among our
species some 250,000 years ago. For neo-lithic farmers who grew plant-based foods (23,000
to 12,000 years ago), edibles required more preparation, and meals
would’ve been more efficient if they were held at set times. And thus, I
theorize, we scheduled our eating times to dovetail with our work hours (and to
cement
familial and communal ties). We were hungry at mealtimes because of
the physical demands of agrarian work.
Our eating habits held relatively steady, and later became
influenced by increases in yield and improvements in transportation from the earliest
major civilizations (5,000 to 3000 BCE) onward. Food
production increased greatly with mechanization,
improved farm methods, and food
preservation techniques during the Industrial Revolution. Food
marketing came to the fore in the late 1800s, and by the mid-20th
century, popular media and dieting fads increasingly
drove our ideas about beauty and body image. Today, people struggle
with maintaining healthy weights, self-image, and a host of food-related and
obesity rooted illnesses.
Intuitive eating seeks to rebalance our relationships with
foods, body types, and promote better eating. Click
here
if you wish to learn about the ten principles of Intuitive Eating.
Until next time, listen to your hunger, respect your
fullness.
