Heather Aardema explains how to eat well when dining out by thinking of food as energy, information, connection, and medicine. Call ahead to find clean protein and greens, skip seed oils and sugary dressings, use lemon instead. For road trips, pack hard-boiled eggs, raw vegetables, fruit, nuts, and avocados.
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Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's Boost. Do you connect the foods you eat to how you feel? Are there days where you wake up fine, but by noon you feel like you look like you're five months pregnant? I've been there. In the functional medicine world, we look at food through four lenses. Food is energy, information, connection and medicine. Let me tell you about Dr. Terry Wahls. She is an MD with Ms. She was wheelchair bound for seven years. Conventional treatments were not working. She decided to dive into the world of functional nutrition, making nutrition work for her. She is now riding her bike 20 miles at a time. Pretty amazing. Food can be medicine. Now, it's a lot easier to control what you're eating at home than when you go out. But we all want to go out because it's fun. So two tips that I recommend are to, number one, call the restaurant ahead of time and see what they would recommend for somebody with your dietary restrictions. And number two, do the best you can. Just do the best you can and don't be too hard on yourself. So, for example, when I go to a restaurant, I always try and get some clean protein and I get some greens instead of the salad dressing, which is full of industrial seed oils and sugar. I ask for lemons, and then I squeeze the lemons on top of my salad. Good enough. It works. Now, what about road trips? So we love a road trip in our family and we do a lot of those. We don't stop by the fast food restaurants because we know that if we eat that kind of food, we're all going to be whiny and feeling icky and it's going to be pretty awful. So instead I pack a cooler. What do I pack? I pack hard boiled eggs, all kinds of vegetables, celery, carrots, cucumbers, even raw cabbage, which is really, really yummy to crunch on. We also pack fruit, and I'll bring a loaf or two of cashew bread. And we do avocados, also some nuts and seeds. And with that, we're doing really well. Everybody's pretty happy, pretty chill, nobody's whining, and it works. So my recommendation to you is when you are on the road or eating outside the home, no matter where you are, just do the best that you can. There you have it. I'll see you at the next boost.
