Health

Food for Thought
Over my past twenty years as a nutritionist, I have grown to appreciate food as an amazing metaphor for love. In fact, there is a strong research-based case for the connection between health and spirituality. It is well recognized that nutrition plays a primary role in most major disease conditions, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. What we eat is not the only behavior that impacts our health, but it is one of the few behaviors that we are dependent upon for life — and one of the few that we engage in multiple times a day until the end of our days. And yet, while 95% of Americans profess to believe in God or a higher power, this aspect has been highly underutilized as an essential tool towards helping people to eat well.

Soul Food
Far beyond providing us with macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), food feeds our souls. Beginning with some common and familiar expressions, we can see how food and eating convey emotion:

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
It was a piece of cake!
He chewed me out.
She's a peach.
I can't stomach the idea.
He's nuts over her.
He's been waffling over the decision for weeks.
They went bananas over the new proposal.
What are you chicken?
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
What's your cup of tea?
Wake up and smell the coffee!
If life is a bowl of cherries, why am I stuck in the pits?
That's the next best thing to sliced bread.
What's eating you?

Looking more deeply, we can ask 'What foods did the universe set on the table for us? Are these foods compatible with the newly released US Dietary Guidelines and Food Pyramid? How does our culture of fast food and super-sizes reflect our spiritual lives? How can food help us to transform our individual and communal relationship with a higher power? And how can an active relationship with a higher power help us to transform our relationship with food?'

There's no question about it; what we eat has short- and long-term consequences to our individual, communal, and environmental health. When we can accept that the foods we eat impact our bodies, we can begin to make choices that support the lives we want to live. In some ways, by giving attention to what and how we eat, we free ourselves from the dis-ease that tends to occupy our thoughts when we are not well. After all, dis-ease is the attempt of the body to communicate that some conscious shift in our habits and patterns must be made. SacredBite helps us to re-discover the tools that are naturally present within us to help inspire and improve our eating habits — and help pave the way to a healthier expression of life!

 

 

Testimonials

"Lisa Ota touched me at the core and transformed my way of thinking about food. Coupling her deep understanding of nutrition with God's word, Ota simplifies the incredibly complex choices presented to us today when deciding how to feed ourselves and our families."

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"Lisa Ota really showed me how to enjoy food and not be afraid of it. She is a great motivator and could really relate to everything that I said."

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"Lisa is an amazing resource for nutrition education, counseling, and advice. Every time she's presented to parents at our school, it's been followed by glowing emails about how helpful it was and how we need more information like that. She has an enthusiasm and friendly, non-intimidating style that everyone seems to appreciate."

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"Working with Lisa was wonderful! She motivated our family to make healthier choices for snacks and meals and provided us with delicious recipes that added greater variety to our diets!"

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"Lisa not only armed our college bound daughter with the right tools to eat successfully at school, she also taught our younger children how to make better choices without feeling deprived. Our field trip to the grocery store was by far the best thing we have done for our family's overall health."