Revealed: How Real Food Appreciation Can Change Your Health

ROCHESTER, N.H. - Nov. 13, 2013 - PRLog -- These days, if someone’s inspired by a blog or cooking show, they can find any ingredient they need pretty easily at the local supermarket. Our culture is inundated with options for how to eat. Farmers markets have popped up everywhere and people are willing to spend a sizeable part of the paycheck at stores like Whole Foods. There's a new appreciation of the value of food.

But one crucial ingredient is missing from this food revolution . . .

Most meals are missing one ingredient that really helps food taste exceptional - work.

“See, food is really part of a simple equation: You work to produce calories . . .  and then you burn those calories to work,” says family fitness expert, Sarah Clachar.  Clachar recalls first experiencing this equation firsthand during a farming apprenticeship. After working hard in the pouring rain planting broccoli seedlings in the field, she remembers coming in cold, wet and tired, to eat the simple but hearty farm lunch the farmer's wife had prepared for us. “It tasted so incredible. That day I realized that I had recovered an experience fundamental to human existence that I had long been divorced from. That sweet, very tight cycle of working hard growing food to sustain yourself.”

Clachar asserts that the loss of this close connection between breaking a sweat and eating factors heavily into Americans unhealthy relationship with food.

Americans are surrounded by a wealth of calories and titillating tastes. Sure Americans exercise. Sure Americans all try to eat more healthily. But most people still battle growing waistlines because they have lost that very close relationship with our food.

Clachar says it’s simple: “When you work for something, everything tastes that much better. And when we eat food with this deep enjoyment of what it's providing, how we eat changes. Simple foods become gourmet. But even more importantly, we savor food for more than just its flavor or documented nutritional value. We feel how good it is to eat after all that work. I swear your body uses the calories with extra care, extracting every bit of nutrition. And in turn, when you eat food with this understanding each bite becomes magnified in its value. You don't just chew and swallow. You really eat it fully and you feel a real satisfaction in just a few bites.”

In contrast, when the full value of the food has been lost . . . people keep eating - never quite satisfied. Never really tasting the food fully and enjoying its total value.

People eat food with limited appreciation. And it doesn't nourish or fill the belly in the same way anymore. So people eat and eat and eat. Tastes no longer connect with the food in the same way. New flavors excite but the deeper, richer nuances are lost. And that craving to eat food with meaning never quiets down.

Clachar offers her own children as an illustration. Since they own a farm, her children 13 and 16 help store food for winter. Recently, they picked apples together and turn it into apple sauce. Clachar notes that her children will eat applesauce like most children down chocolate ice cream. After all the hard work, the sauce tastes like heaven to them.

To start shifting back to a healthy relationship to food, Clachar acknowledges not everyone can be farmers like her family. But she offers a few suggestions for rekindling the connection between work and eating, ranging from cooking more to raising food in a garden.

To find out more or to read the rest of the article and find out what she recommends, please go to http://fitfamilytogether.com/real-food-value

About Sarah Clachar and Fit Family Together

Since the birth of their first child . . . From Brooklyn’s mean streets to the wilds of northern New England . . . Sarah and Cassius have been making family fitness and health an integral part of their family life. Sarah is a knowledgeable nutritionist and health educator. Cassius is a wise and innovative personal trainer. Together, they create a powerful mix of family health know-how. Ready to get started with family fitness but not sure where to start? Sign up for our FREE family fitness ecourse. Go to http://fitfamilytogether.com/ready-family-fitness-part-family-life-2 to sign up. Or join us on Twitter @sarahclachar or follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CasAndSarahClachar.