Primary and Secondary Foods
I’m excited to bring you another guest blog. This time from Lorilee Hamann, an amazingly vibrant and dynamic retired school teacher, who reinvented herself as an integrative nutrition health coach. I love her holistic approach to our health.
Untangling the Mystery of How We Nurture Ourselves
Our world presents many challenges, and life can be hard to navigate. Anxiety, depression, and chronic ailments burden us with pressure, fear, and sadness given the responsibilities that come with the demands of our day–to-day lives.
Many of us do not feel it’s appropriate to take time away from those responsibilities, kick back and enjoy life or connect with those whom we see too little of but who are important to us nevertheless.
The most fundamental areas of life we may most need to shine light on are that of primary foods: relationships, physical activity, career, and spirituality. That is not to say that secondary foods, everything we eat and drink, are not important. Indeed, depending on what choices we make around what we consume, they can worsen an already bad situation or enliven our energy. Primary foods, however, feed us at a core level. The people we keep as company, our daily exercise, our jobs we invest so much of our time and energy in, and the ways in which we connect with nature and all living things are the pieces of our lives that contribute the most to whether or not we feel happy and fulfilled in our everyday lives.
If we can create a lifestyle that brings us an intimate understanding of ourselves, people, physical activities, career moves, and connections we make, we will be more likely to be able to maintain those choices when the going gets tough. Each of these areas contains an emotional component. We come to know ourselves better by reflecting on the good our choices are bringing us that help us to manage inevitable conflicts and fatigue in any of the multiple primary food areas. As we do so, we will be more likely to make wise choices and changes regarding what we put on our plate to sustain our needed energy. Our primary foods feed our mental and physical capabilities and our secondary foods help us to harness our motivation to stay with or make changes to the primary food areas of our lives that need attention.
In essence, there is a synergistic exchange between primary and secondary foods.
This synergy will either reinforce the positive feelings we experience or will eventually create enough negative in our lives to demand our attention, impacting our relationships, health, and potentially every aspect of our lives.
As a highly trained Integrative Nutrition Health Coach, Lorilee, empowers women to take on their life’s challenges and use their voice to make a difference in the world by improving the health of their mind, body, and spirit. You can learn more at http://lorileehamann.com/
To get more Positivity Tips like this delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Tina Hallis, Ph.D. is Chief Positivity Officer of The Positive Edge, a company dedicated to helping people and organizations increase their positivity to improve the quality of people’s work lives and the quality of company cultures. She is certified in Positive Psychology, an authorized partner for Everything DiSC®, and a Professional Member of the National Speaker’s Association.
