My Ten Rules for Healthy Eating and Cooking

Last night I finished teaching a six week class on Healthy Cooking for the Community Education program of our school district. It was great fun and forced me to truly examine my own beliefs about healthy cooking.

Let’s first toss aside a few incorrect assumptions.

Healthy cooking is not about losing weight, although if you truly cook in a healthy way your weight will naturally find its way to a healthy number that works for your body.

Healthy cooking is not about using “light” ingredients. It’s about using real ingredients –the kind that heal and grow your body. Many times these ingredients are anything but light.

Healthy cooking does not mean bland, boring food. On the contrary, it means exploring all kinds of taste sensations. It means cooking fabulous food that you LOVE to eat.

At last night’s class I shared my ten rules for Healthy Cooking. I’ll share them with you now. (and if you want to learn more about these rules, be sure to sign up for my class in the fall!)

Ten Rules of Healthy Cooking and Eating:

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or How to Make Your Sock Drawer Look Like Mine!

I’ve just finished reading a book, I have to write about. Even as I made notes and underlined and laughed while reading it, I thought, “I can’t wait to blog about this….”

I need to qualify all that I’m about to write by saying, this woman is nuts. But it’s a good nuts. Pretty much every chapter had me shaking my head and muttering, “What a lunatic,” but I said it with a smile on my face. I adore this woman and her ideas. I just wouldn’t ever want to live with her.

The book is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese art of decluttering and organizing by Marie Kondo. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s been all over the news lately. It’s a small book that’s selling like hot cakes.

Most of us are enamored with the idea of organizing our stuff, but this book goes beyond that. It preaches that you get rid of huge amounts of your belongings – anything that doesn’t “spark joy.”

I loved this concept that we should only wear clothing that sparks joy for us and we should only keep things in our home that spark joy in our lives. Sure, there’s the stuff you need that maybe doesn’t spark a lot of joy – a spatula, the paper-towel holder, the sheets for the guest room bed – but it’s something to strive for. My teenage daughter has a ladle on her Amazon wishlist that is shaped like the Lochness monster. She loves it. It sparks joy. Maybe it will grace her kitchen someday. She also has a tea infuser that looks like a shark swimming around your cup as it makes your tea. My kid definitely gets the sparks joy concept.

I’ve been trying in recent years not to bring anything in to my house that I don’t really love. No furniture to serve a purpose – it needs to be something that makes me happy.

Our living room is large, there’s room in there for lots of furniture, but currently there is only a couch (it sparks a tiny flicker of joy only because my mom recovered it for me and I remember that fun weekend, but it’s filthy and it’s days are numbered, but it’s the only real seating left in the room, so there it is.), a coffee table (which does spark some joy because Nick refinished it and it’s functional, simple, and pretty), and the dog’s recliner (an ugly, worn out, hand-me-down recliner that our incredibly untrainable dog sleeps on most nights – we hold on to it so that she won’t get on the other furniture.). I know we need some seating, but I’ve yet to find anything I can afford that even remotely sparks joy.

We moved the screened porch furniture in for the winter, so for now there’s lots of seats, but as soon as it warms up that room will be barren again. No matter – I’m not buying anything until I find the furniture that speaks to me. Kondo backs me up on this and I love her for it.

When it comes to clothing, Kondo spends almost half the book on her system.