Some news… last weekend I got married!!! 🙂 It was a magical love-filled night in nature with our incredible friends and family present. And- we had a beautiful black wedding cake*, part of which I was able to eat!
You see, my now husband and stepson have very different eating habits than me, and when it came to the wedding cake, my husband wanted to make sure I could eat it too. So we asked our baker to make a top tier that was sugar-free. She used almond flour and monk fruit as the sweetener, and came up with a delicious chocolate cake that topped the red velvet layers for everyone else to enjoy. It was a great compromise:)
The three of us have been living together for a few years now, and as a very health-conscious eater (I am a health coach, after all), it has taken some patience for the three of us to find a rhythm with food that serves us as a family, and each of us individually.
Oftentimes when I work with clients, they’re also struggling to honor their own body while living and eating within a family, especially since every body is different (my entire bridal party was deathly allergic to peanuts, while I eat peanut butter almost every day!).
So, how have we managed over the years?
Here are a few tips that have worked for us. I hope you find them useful too.
1- We find the commonalities and take advantage of them. We love to share meals together, so we take stock of what we all like. The three of us love vegetables, so we heavily incorporate our favorites into our meals (roasted brussel sprouts, steamed broccoli or bok choy, sautéed peppers and onions). We’re major fans of Mexican food, so we make our own healthy guacamole (props to my husband for this) and tacos with either organic corn or Siete cassava tortillas, and shrimp or Abbot’s chorizo for the filling (since I don’t eat meat). We make our own homemade coconut milk ice cream in our ice cream maker. And we all love it! There are a number of foods we all like, so we share those.
2- We allow each other to add-on or exchange ingredients that don’t work for us. When we make our brown rice pasta dish (which they have kindly agreed to) with vegetarian sauce, the meat lovers in the house make homemade meatballs to add on top. And although they’re willing to eat my Ezekiel bread sometimes, we keep Dave’s Killer Bread in the house too. We have two different crackers to eat with the homemade hummus I make. I cook myself a side of black beans or tempeh when they make chicken with our roasted baby red potatoes. And sometimes, we simply make different dinner choices altogether so we can all have what we like.
3- We respect each other and our different choices. This one’s the hardest and requires kindness, compassion, and strong boundaries for yourself. It’s very easy for me to be non-judgmental with my clients; this has always come naturally. But it’s a little more challenging when it’s your life partner whose health you have a front row seat to in a very personal way. Likewise, it can be difficult not to cave on your own needs in order to please other people or try to make things easier for them. Here’s what I’ve learned when it comes to food: To each their own. It’s really as simple as that, if you can do it. To some degree this is a throwback to my childhood, where we had three different kinds of orange juice in the fridge at all times (some if us did not like pulp!). People have different likes, needs, health goals, ideas of what healthy choices even look like. We react differently to different foods, even the ones one might deem ‘healthy.’ While I have a lot of knowledge and expertise in the area of nutrition which I can share, I do not have control over what someone else puts into their body (nor should I), and I am not the authority on other people’s health. Anyone who has ever attended an Al Anon meeting knows this sometimes hard truth.
These principles are what the three of us are striving towards, day by day. And in the meantime, I have some yummy chocolate wedding cake in the freezer to remind me how sweet this win-win compromise can be:)
Looking to make a change in your health? Reach out for a free consultation!
*Baker for Wedding Cake: Little Bees Cakerie
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