Suddenly it is true: you have a chronic disease. An experience lots of people have to cope with today. Only in the Netherlands more than 5 million people out of 17 million living in the country are chronic ill (+-30%).

Chronic

A chronic disease does not come out of the blue. It is like a straw that breaks the camels back. I was thinking of this expression during the talk with my friends on what kind of food and drinks I give my boy.

Iceberg

I believe that making the right food and drinks choices during your life is one of the essentials in keeping your health and staying away from chronic disease. So, the question that turned up to me already years ago is: what is the right food to eat that contributes to your lifetime health? I have been trying to answer this question for approx 15 years now and I am still working on it. The answer until now is that for me food is like an iceberg. Little is know, the tip of the iceberg that sticks out above the water. Most is unknown. That part of the iceberg that is underwater. I do not know everything about the effect of food on my health. And I have, until now, not found anybody who knows that either.

Tip

So being short of knowing everything, I decided to look at the tip of the iceberg. What is it that I do know? I created some principles I believe are right, to life after. These principles are based on my gut feeling, an innumerable amount of books I read about food in the last 15 years and they are based on the lessons learnt when following  a course of being a health food chef (the main focus of this course is to create food that helps your health). My food principles are:

• CHANGE at least the products, the cooking style and the cutting style on a regular basis;
• ATTENTION TO DETAIL makes the food you prepare tastier (and that makes it more easy to create healthy food habits that last), makes you only want to buy the best quality products, helps you being aware when eating home made food, etc etc.
• RELAX, especially the mind, on how to deal with food.

(I use the donkey bridge: “CAR” to keep my principles a life).

Habits

I used CHANGE and ATTENTION TO DETAIL already for a couple of years. I added RELAX only after becoming a parent. I did so after I learnt that I do not want to be the food police in the upcoming years when raising my boy. I do not want to ignore the present time where the western diet is available to us everywhere either. I do like to close the gap between awareness of the influence of food on your (families) health and action to choice the right food. Remember, chronic illness does not come by eating one time something that is not supposed to be healthy. Chronic illness is created more easily when having wrong diet habits during your life.

ACTION TIP

• Learn to cook tasty food by using the CAR principles (CHANGE, ATTENTION TO DETAIL and RELAX).

Do you want to know more specific what food choices I make? Please contact me here contact@carolinevanbemmel.com.