Here at SRP, we’ve been thinking about an old proverb. You know the one: Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime. Dixie Lee Huey’s The Nourishment Mindset is a bit like that proverbial fish: Nourishment can sustain you. But with a nourishment mindset, you can sustain yourself for a lifetime.
With lofty aims to end American diet culture (because hey, someone needs to do it), Dixie doesn’t just challenge our conventional thinking about food—she dares us to radically change it. And change it we must. Americans have become divorced from the pleasure and nourishment food is meant to deliver. Our nourishment mindset is mindless, obsessed with convenience, and to anyone paying attention, really unhealthy.
Let’s look at the stats: as a society, 75 percent of us are fatter than we’ve ever been and fatter than we were ever meant to be. Rates of chronic metabolic diseases, including prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, have been exploding for decades. Yet we are given nothing more than wildly shifting guidelines, profoundly stupid advice, and drugs. And what is the general response to this all-out destruction? Not much more than a shrug and a meh.
Selene River Press doesn’t like this state of affairs. Hell, we hate it. But we love The Nourishment Mindset because it gives readers a clear-cut primer on metabolic healing—which begins in the kitchen and happens at the table. With wisdom, compassion, and occasional (if just) brutal honesty, Dixie guides readers through some important revelations:
- Calories are a meaningless food metric. Metabolic health is about nutrient density and natural dietary fat.
- We’re overweight. We’re sick. Over the past several decades, the food we eat and how we eat it has changed drastically. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, these issues are related.
- Keep toxic, fake, inflammatory foods out of your mouth, away from your kids, and nowhere near the table.
- Eat whole, real foods with mindfulness and joy. Eat with all of your senses and teach your children how to do the same. Need inspiration? Look to France.
There’s more, of course. Among the recipes and practical tips for traveling, nourishing the kids, and staying on your healing journey, Dixie offers something more personal. At least one reader here at SRP (ahem) found Dixie’s account of disordered eating as a young girl a complete heartbreaker. Learning how to heal is a journey so many of us must make, each in our own way. By sharing how she left that unhappy place and found healing with food, travel, and community, Dixie shows us that we can do the same.
The Nourishment Mindset will help you discover—or rediscover—the elemental human pleasure of enjoying a meal. Not just any meal, but a meal composed of real, whole foods absolutely bursting with everything your body wants and needs. They come in every color, flavor, and texture. They elevate our health and imbue us with vitality. They bring us together, to eat, to enjoy, to share. By taste, by sight, by smell, by touch. With people you love. With strangers. Happily alone. Al fresco, candlelight, weeknight. Breakfast in bed. Peaches over the sink. Avocadoes and tiny silver spoons.
Of all the foods we get to enjoy over the course of our one and only lives, our opportunities to enjoy them are finite. Let’s not waste our precious time eating “food” that does not grow, that does not perish, that does not satisfy, and that nobody can pronounce. Let’s not eat mindlessly or hastily simply because we are stressed or tired or sad. (Hey, we’ve all been there. No judge. Let’s just remember: finite.)
Get the proper mindset instead. Learn how to improve your metabolic health by returning to the pleasures of the table—and embrace the absolute enjoyment of real, whole, nourishing food at every opportunity.
Image from SRP.
