A Theology of Food (and 11 baby steps for a real food lifestyle)

Clean eating, real food, and whole foods are buzzwords these days. It’s popular and has been deemed social-media-worthy to share how and when we create nutritious recipes or work out at the gym. But, of what benefit is “eating clean” to the Christian wife and mother, the single college girl, or the retired empty-nester? I want to offer to you our own clean eating journey in the hopes that it will help and inspire you to enjoy good food and make healthy choices for yourself and your family.

Most important things first.. Is a mom who wakes up an hour before the kids to prepare and serve them a nutritious, whole foods breakfast honoring God more than the mom who wakes up when the kids climb in her bed and then feeds them corn flakes? Maybe she does honor God more, and maybe she doesn’t. But it has nothing to do with breakfast and healthy food, because “the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” Romans 14:17.

To let you know where I’m coming from, I’m a fan of clean eating and real food. But I also want you to know that almost all of the most godly and Biblically-sound people that I know don’t eat nearly as healthily as I do. 😉 I believe that the Bible’s teaching on food is that food is good, food is made and given to us by God, food is to be received with thanksgiving, and it’s not nearly so important what we put INto our bodies as what comes OUT of them (our speech and actions). {See also Psalm 104, 1 Corinthians 8, and 1 Timothy 4.}

I cannot find any scriptures that tell us to stay away from junk food. I’ve heard 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 quoted to encourage people to eat healthy and exercise since their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, but that passage simply is not talking about clean eating (it’s talking about fleeing immorality). The truth that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit may very well affect what I put into my body, but citing this scripture as a reason to tell others to drink more water, cut out sugar, or exercise more is to take the scripture out of context.

And as for exercise? Paul admits to the young man, Timothy, that exercise is of a little profit, but that godliness is profitable for all things. The Proverbs discussing gluttony? I have to agree with this article by Kevin DeYoung over at The Gospel Coalition that the glutton of the Proverbs is a man (or woman) with no restraint, a drunkard, and sexually immoral. It’s not the PMS teenage girl who gorges on chips over the weekend.

So, why does clean eating matter? Why do I personally spend so much of my time and energy searching for and preparing healthy food for my family?

My answer is two-fold:

• (1) Simple and sort of unspiritual-sounding:
  I feel better, maintain my weight, and have completely eradicated my IBS-diagnosed symptoms with clean eating. I love it, it TASTES good, my husband likes it, and it works for our family.
• (2) On a more philosophical note:
  God created the world and everything in it. He is so loving and so wise, that He even designed for the fallen earth to yield food and sustenance for His people. He created our bodies, and then He created fuel for our bodies. If you use the fuel that God created for you to use to fuel your body, your body simply works better. He is a Master Designer, and He knows what He is doing.

Here is an analogy for what I am talking about:
Jim builds a car. He designs it to run on biodiesel. His buddy, Tom, drives this car and initially uses biodiesel in it, but he discovers after a while that if he instead uses some used motor oil to fuel the vehicle, he doesn’t have to spend the time and energy it takes to create biodiesel to run the vehicle. Sure, the vehicle doesn’t run as well, go as fast, or last as long running on motor oil, but Tom ain’t got no time for this. 😉 He’s going to keep on using old motor oil. Tom does not take into account that this car has a designer and creator whose original intent and plan was wiser and better than his knockoff, cheap, imitation fuel.

I use this analogy to demonstrate what we are doing when we fuel our bodies according to the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.). It’s cheap, quick, and initially seems to work. However, you’re simply not fueling your body with what God made to go in it. You’ll limp along and get a little further down the road, but you’re not a well-maintained machine.

So, is it sinful to eat a Standard American Diet? No.
Are Big Macs and Frosties signs of a spiritually immature Christian? No.
And does this girl have a weakness for Chick Fil A’s peach milk shakes? Yes. {sigh}

However, you are responsible for fueling your body and, if you have children, fueling their bodies, and you can educate yourself and make smart choices to discover “Designer-fabricated fuels.” I have learned an INCREDIBLE amount from Stephanie Langford’s blog, Keeper of the Home. Stephanie’s blog was the springboard to convert me from a three-Diet-Cokes-a-day-and-a-bowl-of-ice-cream-before-bedtime girl to pursuing real food and clean eating.

Making the change has been HARD and WORTH IT. I was so overwhelmed when I first started wanting to make changes to the way I ate, and someone encouraged me to just do ONE thing at a time. Educate yourself, and choose ONE change a month (or one change a week, or 3 changes for this year, etc..). Really, I think people just don’t realize how their quality of life would improve if they changed the fuel they put into their bodies.

I have been brainstorming what the “me now” would tell the “Diet-Coke-me then” when I needed to start making small changes, and I have come up with 11 small changes that I would encourage women to consider for themselves and for their families. These are baby steps to begin towards a more real food lifestyle. I made these changes over the course of years until things just snowballed, and then I realized that we had “turned the corner” into a real food lifestyle, and there was no going back.

I hope these ideas will be helpful for you! If you typically eat a S.A.D., please don’t be overwhelmed by this list. Just pick one thing for this month to work on. Next month, you can choose one or two more things. Who knows, by the end of the year, maybe you’ll be asking for intermediate steps! 😉

I offer for you (in no particular order)…..

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11 Babysteps For a Real Food Lifestyle

• 1. Change the type of salt you use.
  Not all salt is created equal. Now that we have been using “Real Salt” for a couple of years (I buy it through Redmond Trading or Amazon), I can taste the difference when I eat regular ole table salt. Changing which salt you use is a really healthy, super simple change to make. To learn more about why unprocessed salt is good and necessary, check out Wellness Mama and Kitchen Stewardship.

 

• 2. Buy a jar of coconut oil.
  Not only is this a healthy, nutritious oil for baking, frying, and cooking, but once you become addicted to coconut oil, you just can’t keep enough of it! Not only do I cook anything and everything in it (or in homemade butter), but I also use it as a facial moisturizer, baby oil, essential oils carrier, and on and on. It’s fantastic stuff.

 

• 3. Can the Cokes.
  This was probably the hardest thing for me to do. I would stop drinking Diet Coke, and then I would still get me one every few days. As I was eating less and less processed foods, the canned cokes would make me sick, so I swapped to fountain cokes (desperate!). I would treat myself to one fountain Diet Coke a month, but I came to a point that they made me sick, too (I would ache and go to bed sick on my stomach for the rest of the afternoon).To make this change I swapped my afternoon Diet Cokes for coffee. Yes, I was drinking too much caffeine, but coffee is hands down a better choice than any soda (pop? soda?? — I’m from Mississippi — we call all soft drinks “Coke.” 😉 ). After I had swapped over to coffee, I backed down on my caffeine consumption.

  Exercising forced me to drink more water, and if I drank Cokes the day before a big workout, the workout was so much more difficult for me. You’ll also find that eliminating coke purchases will help your grocery bill, and you might find wiggle room in your budget to explore organic and local options that you haven’t thought you could afford before now.

• 4. Ditch processed sweeteners.
  It’s worth an hour of your life to watch this video on the poison called processed sugar. It’s bad stuff. I have the world’s biggest sweet tooth, but after a period of weeping and gnashing of teeth 😉 now I can “fill” that sweet tooth with fruit, honey, maple syrup, and other natural sweeteners.The Bible says that, if you find honey, eat “just enough” (Proverbs 25:16). We usually read scriptures like this and say, “Hmm… I wonder what that means?”
  Well, I really don’t know all of what it means, but if we take this scripture at face value, then we eat honey and sweeteners in small amounts. Eat them, enjoy them, and savor them with thanksgiving to God for such a yummy gift from Him, but maybe He really meant that sweet things are given by Him for special treats.
• 5. Choose ONE thing to buy organic.
  Are you familiar with the Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen? I decided that I wanted to begin to buy more things organic, especially foods on the “dirty dozen” list, but it was overwhelming and pricey to just suddenly make the change from conventionally-grown produce to organic by my next grocery trip. So, I decided to begin to buy organic with ONE item — blueberries. I usually buy them in bulk at Costco (frozen, organic, wild blueberries), or I buy small bags at Aldi. As time went on, I swapped more and more of our foods to organic or locally-grown, but initially I just swapped one item. Yes, organic blueberries cost more than conventionally-raised blueberries, but if you just make this ONE change for the whole month, you’ll only spend an extra $2-$5 and can probably swing it.

 

• 6. (a) Know the source of your meat.
  “You are what you eat, and I think that probably you are what you eat eats.
  This video, produced at White Oak Pastures with cattleman Will Harris, really inspired me a few years ago to begin seeking out quality sources of meat. Does your chicken peck at bugs and seeds or eat quality feed? Or does she eat gmo-corn and soy-based feeds? Is your beef raised on grass? Corn? Grain? In a pasture? In a feedlot?God makes animals to grow into food for His people — and His people are invariably consuming whatever the animal consumes (whether it’s grain, hormones, chemical-laden feed, or grass and bugs).

  As an alternative to grain-fed, hormone-laden meat, why not try grassfed beef, wild Alaskan salmon, or pastured, organic chicken.

 

(b) Find a farmer and buy a whole pastured chicken for your crockpot.
Depending on where you live, this is either really simple or hard to find. It took me a while, but once you make the right connections, you should be able to find locally, humanely raised, organic (or better-than-organic!) meats.

I used to be really squeamish about cooking a whole chicken, but now I like the fact that I buy a product that looks like a…..chicken.

My tips for handling a whole chicken: rub it down with oil, season it up, and cook it in the crockpot on high for much of the day. Serve “whole chicken” for supper. (It should just fall apart.) There are only 3 of us for supper most nights, so I make my husband a lunch with a piece of the chicken, and then stick the whole crockpot with the leftover chicken in the fridge so that I can wait to debone the rest of the chicken the next morning. I like to prepare my supper in the mornings, right after breakfast, so I pull my crockpot back out when I first wake up and turn the crockpot back on warm for an hour or so to “melt” the fat before deboning it. After breakfast I debone the chicken, save the bones in a container in the freezer for bone broth for later, and then I have shredded chicken ready to serve for lunch or to create into supper for the evening. I wash up my crockpot, and I’m done.

*Note: I timed myself Saturday morning when I deboned a chicken: 10 minutes. It took me ten minutes to debone the whole chicken (and I’m slow!), and then it took me five more minutes to put the bones and leftover chicken-stuff in a ziploc and scrub and clean out the crockpot. After 15 minutes total, my crockpot was clean and back on the shelf under the counter. It really won’t take as much time as you are dreading that it will!

• 7. Learn to cook dried beans.
  Dried beans are the frugal real-foodista’s best friend. They need to be paired with other fats and protein to balance out the carbs in the beans, but they help those expensive organic meats and veggies to go a lot further, and they are a go-to lunch for my two-year-old and me. They can be turned into mock tacos, paired with leftover chicken for a chicken and bean soup, made into a bean dip, and used in so many ways. Find out more about preparing dried beans from The Healthy Home Economist. (The only thing I do differently than this tutorial when I soak my beans is to cook them in the crockpot instead of on the stovetop. Set them on high with plenty of water….and cook them ALL day or all night!)

 

 

 

• 8. Find a source for local, pastured eggs.
  You can take a minute and check out the nutritional differences between these pastured eggs from Joel Salatin’s farm and a typical USDA grocery store egg. The difference in folate levels alone about make me fall off my chair — the incredible, edible pastured egg. Eggs, cheese, fruit, and smoothies are our go-to breakfast, and even high quality, pastured, local eggs are a cheaper source of protein than most breakfast meats you would buy.

 

 

 

• 9. Experiment with a variety of grains and flours.
  Just because you don’t consider yourself “paleo,” “gluten-free,” or “low carb” does not mean that you would not benefit from some variety in your diet as well as cutting out processed grains. In the U.S., we eat lots of wheat. While an exposé on wheat is beyond the scope of this blog post, refined flours are definitely to be avoided, and even whole grain flours can be prepared in ways to increase their benefits and decrease their possible negative side effects.

 

If you want to keep the refined flours in your food pantry, at least add some new grains, flours, or pastas to the mix: quinoa, spelt, oat flour, non-gmo cornmeal and cornflour, organic popcorn, almond flour, coconut flour, buckwheat (buckwheat is not actually wheat), brown rice, and barley (we put it in soups). Choose one or two new ones to try this month! My favorite “easy-peasy” supper helpers are quinoa noodles or leftover brown rice (prepared like this) for a stir fry.

 

 

• 10. Choose grocery purchases that do not contain High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) or MSG.
  Label-reading can be really frustrating and overwhelming, but when I first started making the transition from packaged foods to stocking a real-foods pantry, I decided that I would scan labels at the store and at least not bring HFCS-containing “foods” into the kitchen. If you’re interested in learning more about HFCS in our foods, you’ll find the documentary King Corn informative, fascinating, and entertaining. To learn more about MSG, check out this article by Dr. Mercola.

 

 

 

• 11. And, last but definitely not least: ditch American “cheese,” Velveeta and processed “cheeses,” and margarine. These food-like substances are loaded with who-knows-what ingredients that nobody can pronounce. Real cheese and butter are made of things like…..milk…salt…cheese cultures. And if you are really ready to dive in head-first with butter, go find you some grassfed butter! Find out more at Holistic Squid.

 

 

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A last note: If you don’t identify with feeling poorly when you eat junk food, it’s probably not because your body is healthy and strong and can handle junk food — it’s likely because your body has quit giving you signals that it cannot handle the fuel you are feeding it! Your body is doing all it can to turn the fuel you are feeding it into energy for you, and your body is in a sort of “shock mode” if it’s not receiving fuel that it can efficiently process. Until you let it heal a little bit, your body may not be able to give you signals that you’re feeding it sub-par fuel. If you begin eating a real food diet, your body will start to let you know when you give it a fuel that you were not created to use!

And another last note: Oftentimes friends tell me that they could not afford to eat the way my family eats. While I will readily agree that we spend a lot of time, energy, and hard-earned money eating the way that we do, I would counter that we probably do not spend much more on food than most of the people that I know. In general, we do not “eat out,” and we spend on real food purchases what other families would spend on cokes, packaged snacks and chips, alcohol, Starbucks, and dessert items. So, in general, I haven’t seen where our family’s choice to eat healthily is cost prohibitive as much as a matter of educating myself on the best choices for my family and changing my lifestyle to create time to prepare real food meals and snacks for my family.

When you spend time procuring and creating healthy food for your family, you are serving God as you offer your time and energies to gather food from afar and minister to the bodies and minds of those God has placed in your care. Debone chicken, read about coconut oil, and look at the labels on cheese products as an offering of yourself, your talents, and your energies to God, acknowledging that the Great Creator has blessed you to be able to prepare and consume the fuel that He created for you.

{{UPDATE 02/16: My husband and I completed a “Whole30” last fall, and it was one of the best things we have ever done! I hope to write more about Whole30 soon and how we’ve adapted it for our lifestyle.}}

I hope that the tips I offered in this list are helpful for you! What is the most overwhelming real-food change that you need / want to make? What tips and ideas would you add to this list?

<3, amanda

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Resources and Links

Fabulous Health and Nutrition Info, broken into bite-sized chunks (no pun intended 😉 ) from Keeper of the Home:
..Nutritional Foundations — It all begins with the right ingredients
..First Steps to Real Food
..Good Fats, Bad Fats, and Why I Eat Plenty of Butter
..7 Foods to Avoid

..Real Food Basics: an interview conducted by Nina Nelson of Shalom Mama with Katie Tietje of Modern Alternative Mama.

..You are what you eat, eats. Always lots of helpful tips and info from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship.

..Follow Bless Your Heart and Home’s pinterest boards for whole food and clean eating recipe and kitchen ideas!
Follow Bless Your Heart and Home’s board real food kitchen on Pinterest.

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