Good Books
Karen Schacter, contributing editor (www.dishingwithyourdaughters.com)
Book Review: Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being
Book by Marc David
I know this section is typically saved for books that are great for kids, or books that focus specifically on parenting. And this one doesn’t fall into either of those categories.
What it does, instead, is offers insights and tools and ideas about one of the most important aspects of your life: Your Nourishment. And that, fellow moms and dads, trickles down in a most important way to your children.
For when we are in conflict about our own eating, when we are unsure how to nourish our bodies or our lives, it is very hard to teach our children how to do so. And as I wrote in the article this month, we as a culture must overcome old, outdated ways of treating our bodies with food, so we can pass on a healthier legacy to our children.
This book is an absolute gem in the field of nutrition, eating, diets, etc. Marc takes a completely different view and instead of focusing on what to eat, he looks at how to eat, why we eat, and sees our relationship to food as a metaphor for our relationship to our life. He places nutrition in the larger contexts of spiritual and psychological development.
But why, you may be wondering, doesn’t he just tell us what to eat? Why go into the deeper aspects of eating?
The answer is simple! Knowing what to eat is simply not enough for many people. Knowing what to eat is completely different than knowing how to experience nourishment from our food so that it sustains us physically, emotionally and spiritually.
Although Marc’s book is not long (about 190 pages), it is deep. He takes us through many of the patterns that we, as eaters, struggle with and helps us reconsider. For example, as we label foods good and bad, he notes, we also label ourselves good or bad for eating them, inducing guilt and shame in ourselves. For some, this contributes to the urge to overeat and sneak the bad foods.
Marc also discusses how we use food as a substitute for something else we might desire, but feel we are missing. We use it for companionship, to erase feelings, to escape, and for love. He notes that although many people say they LOVE food and feel some addiction to it, it is not necessarily the food they love, but the escape or the soothing that the food provides.
Each chapter in Marc’s book ends with Key Lessons from that Chapter. The questions that are raised and reflections are excellent ways of bringing the points that Marc is making back to ourselves, and provide a beautiful opportunity for us to reflect on how we might move into a more loving state with our eating and our bodies.
Although Marc’s book is filled with gems throughout, my favorite section is at the end, entitled The Eater’s Agreement. The Eater’s Agreement is a beautiful letter written by Marc, but for each of us as eaters. It affirms our hungers, our rights to a well-nourished body, and an acknowledgment of the sometimes-confusing relationship, like any relationship, that many of us have with food.
Highly Recommended.
