We will get you your inspired healthy hedonism food tips for your trips, but first things first. What the heck do we mean by “healthy hedonism”? Skya defined it beautifully in our last post, “What is healthy hedonism?” Basically, it’s the antidote to the popular lie that we have to give up pleasure to be healthy. It’s the antidote to “No pain, no gain.” That’s just a bunch of horse puckey!
In short, there is more and more scientific evidence that you can’t live a healthy and otherwise optimal life without pleasure. Lack of pleasure and play raises stress hormones and insulin (fat storage hormone that can lead to heart disease and cancer). It stresses out your beneficial microbes and keeps them from thriving and making you thrive (they are key for nutrient absorption, tissue health, immunity, mood, cognition and too many other important functions to mention). No pleasure also keeps your cells from functioning optimally because your cells can be in fight or flight just like the whole of you can.
So, let’s get this straight: Pleasure is not a luxury. It’s a necessity and your birthright.
Here is where we see people get confused: short term thinking.
Example: I love junk food. It feels good to eat sugar.
Question: How long does it feel good when you eat sugar and other junk? It causes inflammation and makes you sick. It causes pain hours, days and years down the road. If you add up all the pain from each serving of junk and subtract the pleasure, you still have a lot of pain left over. No one in their right mind would run a business like that. So, why do millions of people every day run their body like that?
That’s more of a rhetorical question, but we will answer it ever so briefly. Obviously, so many people don’t get the link between what they eat, how they feel and their medical issues. Even people who want to be healthy get so much misinformation that they eat foods that they think are good choices but end up shooting themselves in the foot and getting just the opposite (this makes us feel sad). Then, there are the addictive properties of junk food and other processed ingredients in so-called “healthy food” that make it appear hard to give up (that’s just the addiction and brain fog talking; it’s not actually true). Finally, we have money concerns and feelings of unworthiness. Add all that together and you have a lot of pain, not hedonism at all!
There are a lot of scenarios where short-term thinking becomes an issue for people, and figuring out what to eat when we travel is a big conundrum for a lot of folks, whether on the road for business or vacation.
So, you’re going on a trip. Yay! You want to experience as much rest, relaxation and pleasure as possible. Do you?
a) Go on a bender and eat anything and everything you “want,” because, hey, you’re on vacation and should be able to do whatever you “want.”
b) Eat a bunch of crap to feel “free,” but then feel guilty and alternate it with a lot of salads to try to make up for it.
c) Figure that to get the most pleasure possible out of your trip, you need to be nice to your cells. You endeavor to find the healthiest food you can possibly eat for each meal so that you give your cells and self what is truly “wanted” and allow yourself freedom from pain and guilt. Real food is actually MORE pleasurable long-term, and you will have extra energy to boot!
Obviously, you are biased and want you to pick “C” even if you normally do “A” or “B.” This post is to try to convince you that “C” is not only possible, it is the best most pleasurable free and hedonistic option.
Let’s take a little trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai…
When dear friend, fellow healing chef Nicole and I arrived, we were completely committed to option C.
We got on the internet and searched for farmers’ markets. There was one at Kealia Farms starting in just an hour or so. Woohoo! We soon found ourselves there and met the loveliest people who grew all the food locally, organically (even the corn, papaya and pineapple were non-GMO and organic, which is rare in Hawaii). There were also cricket farmers selling cricket flour (Shout out to Sustainable Boost)! We experienced such joy meeting the folks who grew our food. Hedonism was already starting, and we hadn’t even eaten yet. Well, we did have a local raw honey sweetened hibiscus ginger tea, though. That was delicious!
Then, we stopped by Hoku health food store just along the coast in Kapaa to pick up some olive oil, a little more produce and some local grass fed meat and eggs. Happily, we discovered that they carried Lulu’s chocolates, all organic, no crap and sweetened with coconut sugar, which wreaks less havoc on people’s immune systems. Score!
We then searched “farm to table restaurants” and had dinner at a farm to table converted plantation called Gaylord’s. While we waited for our table, we caught live music in the lounge and the bartender made us mocktails with tangerines and limes from their orchards, topped with frothy aquafaba (chickpea water). Score!
They gave us their gluten free menu and accommodated our no cow dairy or sugar request with a couple simple tweaks to each dish.
Thanks to our generous friend Shea, we got to stay in a studio at the back of a Taro patch just outside Hanalei. It had a hot plate and serving ware, but no cookware. Like good little Girl Scouts, we found out ahead and came prepared with pot and pan in our luggage (the legal kind of pot with a lid). We also slipped in plastic cutting sheets and some Himalayan sea salt. We couldn’t carry knives on the plane, so we ended up cutting up all our veggie with a butter knife. We don’t always do this when we travel, but we were being adaptive to the particular circumstance. We’re committed to nourishment, yo!
The next morning, with relatively little time and effort, we made a fab breakfast and prepped lunch to go (the parts that needed to be cooked, at least). We decided to take supplies to make our salad on site.
Breakfast was a pastured organic egg scramble with our farmers’ market treasures of fuscia and green amaranth leaves, green onions, baby tomatoes and the cutest little green turning to red bell peppers. We also enjoyed some white pineapple with a gorgeous country mountain view.
Our breath-taking lunch picnic ground was the side of a cliff at Waimea Canyon. You can’t take a picture of the feeling of being there. Our homemade special of the day was grass fed burgers (no bun), our clean corn, avocado and other salad fixings, including a Meyer lemon dressing. Our only not local ingredients were the extra virgin olive oil and Himalayan pink salt.
Here’s Nicole gettin’ busy with the butter knife making salad by the canyon. It didn’t cost us a lot of time, money or effort, what a hedonistic experience: natural beauty, loving friendship, being silly, yummy food and happy cells. You can’t beat that!
Nicole and I agree that the only good use for fast food on the go is a place to use the bathroom. I figure these places do enough harm that they can offer some good. Note the red Mustang rental car. It’s not exactly our style, but it was that or wait another half hour for a car. So, we are willing to make concessions about the car we drive, but not the food we eat.
We choose the good stuff! In the process, we had a blast, tasted food, saved lots of money and supported local farmers and small health food store owners. We met locals, connected with the earth and respected ourselves from cell to soul. Pleasure on all levels!
Check out these healthy hedonism tips for your trips!
We’re not here to tell you exactly what to do, but we hope to inspire you. It may not always work out to get everything organic and local and we may not always have the heads up or ability to pack cooking gear, but the important thing isn’t the specifics, it’s this: we are committed to nurturing and nourishing ourselves in the most uncompromising way possible. This means being unwilling to eat things that hurt our bodies, whether home, out and about for the day or traveling. It also means food must be supremely pleasurable, so it must both taste good and work with nature to make our atoms, cells and biochemistry happy both short and long term. This is fundamental to nurturing and nourishing. That combo is the essence of what we like to call healthy hedonism.
With that clear and passionate intention set, we take each scenario as it comes and it always works out. We are willing to plan ahead, be spontaneous, get creative and the solutions always come. This doesn’t mean making it heavy or burdensome. Joy, inspiration and creativity are crucial to this way of living. Even in our daily lives, when we are committed to love over fear, the solutions always come.
We are so grateful that so many friends, clients and we ourselves have come to the place that we are willing to treat ourselves as the precious beings that we are. We do that by making choices that lovingly and pleasurably honor our nature, all of nature and our connection to that which is larger than ourselves, the reality into which we are intricately woven. When we do that it feels so freakin good!
Healthy hedonism. Try some today. Better yet, make it your life.
Need help? We’d be honored to! Check out our coaching courses that are pleasurable, inspiring and radically healing from cell to soul.
Are you living on or visiting Oahu and want some healthy hedonism done for you? We offer two tiers of healing personal chef services, cooking classes, small scale catered dinners as well as joyful yoga and fitness for everybody.
Join us next time for more inspiration as we meet up with Skya and Michael doing the healthy hedonism thang on the road in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Joe
Loved hearing about Kauai. Spent the first 24 years of my life there. Knew all the places Traci and Nicole visited. And Gaylord’s was around way back then as well. So caught up in the past that I forgot to say kudos to the creation of food while there. Best island (oldest in the chain) to find good stuff.