How to Create a Joyful Nourishing Plate, Rediscover the Magic of Food, and Fall Back in Love with Eating

Welcome to the Satiated Podcast where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation, and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor. Something I have not addressed as much here on the podcast is when you start to feel safer to be in your body on your eating recovery journey, you will enter into a new phase of healing. This is where you can rediscover the magic of food, experience pleasure with it, and enjoy nourishing your body with meals that resonate with your unique system. A joyful relationship with food is possible for you. I remember when I started to really slow down with my food, I would imagine where all the pieces of my meal came from to end up on my plate to support me in feeling vibrant in my body. Consuming a meal present in your body can bring an immense joy in feeding your body, respecting it, and giving it exactly what it needs. Plus, the spices, herbs, tastes, and textures you created or someone created for you can bring a sense of aliveness as we connect with the natural world through the vehicle of food. When food decreases in being something to keep you away from yourself, food invites you into deep connection with yourself and that you're alive here in this moment. It is a step that comes further down the healing path and I find it's an important one to deepen your relationship with food as this is a relationship that is going to be a part of your entire life while you're here in this body. At times, you may need to neutralize food to feel like you can eat a meal and move on with your day and experience that it is food and not good or bad or right or wrong. You ate, you gave your body what it needed, now onto the next thing. And, at some point, you may want more from your relationship with food. A study done in 2014, showed that on average Americans spend 67 minutes per day eating and drinking which comes out to be around 32,098 hours total in a lifetime. That is a LOT of time in your life you're going to be spending with food and so you can also start to assess what you want that time to be like. You can create an eating experience with tons of care and intention just like you would planning for a meeting, assessing what present you want to buy a friend for their birthday, or crafting the best vacation. This is time of your life that you can make deeply nourishing. Today, I chat with Lia Huber author of Nourished: A Memoir of Food, Faith, and Enduring Love -- and Founder/CEO of Nourish Evolution. She's been on a mission to inspire women to live a richer life through real food by becoming a more competent, confident home cook. She's the creator of Cook the Seasons, Home Cooking School, and the Real Food Reset. Over the last 20 years, she has been widely published as a food writer and recipe developer for Cooking Light, Better Homes and Gardens, Eating Well, Prevention and more. We discuss how changing her relationship with food led to her healing years of body pain and low energy, her nourished evolution phases, and the power of eating seasonally. One last note, you may not be at this point in your healing yet. If you've been in a place where food has still been labeled as good or bad, where there's still a lot of fear around food, you may still need to work on neutralizing all foods before focusing on eating seasonally. An eating recovery journey is a long one with many phases and stages and you're exactly where you need to be. Now, welcome Lia! I'm so excited that you're here and to dive into talking about just the magic of food that we sometimes can forget that we can have, especially when we've had such a maybe conflicted relationship with food. So I'd love to hear more around your history and how you got into the work that you're doing today.

Lia Huber 04:50

Definitely, first of all, I have to say I'm so excited to be here because I listened to your podcast all the time and I always want to jump into the conversation myself and so I'm really delighted to be here in conversation with you and inviting others into ours. So just wanted to start with that. So I had a very interesting relationship with food as we all have, you know, we've all had these journeys, but I started out as a meat and potatoes girl through and through brought up in the Midwest. When my mom would make a pot roast, I would pull out literally the meat and the potatoes and eat that and like hide the peas and the carrots and things on my brother's plate, and was the poster child of junk food, I used to just down, come home from school, and down a bag of Doritos and then follow it up with an ice cream sundae. And I never thought about it, I never thought about it, it was just what I wanted to eat and it's what I ate. And I went about most of my early childhood that way or mid childhood, and then got into high school and college. And you know, as many of us do started to gain weight. And then what do we do when we start to gain weight at that age, we start to diet. And so then it was the ups and downs of diet. I grew up, you know, it kind of came of that age during the low fat frenzy. So it was everything was low fat. And what happened was I got on that seesaw of deprivation and guilt. I would eat like I thought I should be eating and I thought would lead me to this wonderful weight. And I would be eating those plain salads with lemon juice, and you know, just awful. And the pretzels, I would eat bags of pretzels thinking I was being so virtuous because I was eating fat free, and plates of white of white rice and of mashed potatoes with nothing on them and all of that all of that horrible, boring stuff. And those would last for you know, a day or two or three. And then I would fall off it just like so many of us did, because it brought me zero joy and I felt completely deprived, so then I would fall off it but the only thing I knew was to go back to where I'd come from. And then I would feel horribly guilty for days on end and feel like there was you know, something wrong with me, and why can't I stick with this. So thus it went for many years, with the exception of I spent my junior year in college in France in Paris, and I started to see glimpses of how it could be in a different way, you know, I would see these beautiful women, confident, radiant women going into patisseries and eating baguettes and eating cheese, you know, my god cheese of all things. And there was no guilt there at all, you know, it just was part of their lives. And I didn't get it, I didn't understand it at all. So I would be eating my plain green beans dipped in Dijon mustard. That was that was my diet. And then I spent the summer in, in Greece for a few months. And that was that kind of took that learning even further where it was, again, I would see these people just so joyful, and they'd be eating feta and olive oil, and all these things that just made me cringe because I was to me, they were sort of evil, you know. And I was in this constant battle with my body, I had no idea how to bridge all of those, bridge the food and the joy and the health and all of that I had no idea how to do it. But I witnessed it, I'd seen it. So that planted a seed. And when I came back to the United States, and I went totally back into my old habits and back on the seesaw, the difference was I started to feel pain. And sort of what would kind of hurt a little bit before became in my early 20s really debilitating pain. I would be limping as I walked down the street because my knees hurt so much. And I would be you know, hunched over at my desk at work because it just my whole body ached and hurt. And I was going to doctors all over Manhattan. And they were saying we can't find anything wrong with you. And they'd be looking at me like I was making it up and they would be shooting me up with steroids and my shoulder and my hips and my knees. And it was awful. Awful. And when I moved to California met my husband, married my husband, we moved to California, I went to a new doctor, and that doctor diagnosed me with lupus. And so for the first time I had an inkling of where that pain was coming from and like, Oh, it is real. But the other thing that happened at that at that diagnosis was he looked at me and he said if you don't change the way you eat, and if you don't change the way you live, you could die. Like, this could get out of control and you could die. And I was like, what, but as so many people that have been in a situation like that sitting down with a doctor who says that, they leave you hanging there, they don't tell you what to do or how to do it. You know, they just leave you hanging there. So I realized that what I had been doing and all of those diets that I had been on were not the answer and they were literally killing me. In fact, a year later, I was diagnosed with this very rare form of precancerous cervical awfulness that led to a hysterectomy. So it was really awful. So that was I literally turned the page into 30 and was like, What's going on? Why is this all happening to me and to my body and what can I do to turn this around because I feel like I feel like my body's already like, you know, 80 and and I'm just 30. Like, how do I how do I nourish myself to help my body thrive throughout the rest of my life and to bring that peace and joy in that I had seen, but never could get my hands on, you know. So at the time I was a fledgling writer, I was ironically a food writer, but I was writing recipes that were all about, you know, the light this or the low fat this or the fat free cheat on this. And I started to ask my editors for more nutrition focused assignments. And it happened to be during a time this is the late 90s, early 2000s, when a lot of very long term nutrition studies, very long term wide scale nutrition studies were coming to fruition. And so I leaned into my writing credentials and went to experts around the world and basically asked them, What should I be eating to nourish myself? And the short answer is, across the board, every single one of them said, some form of fill your plate with seasonal veggies made yummy with healthy fats, and then fill out the rest of your plate with wisely sourced protein and whole grains, legumes, that kind of thing. But what really got me was, there was a caveat literally to every single one of them that I spoke to, and this is again, around the world, every single one of them would sort of pause, and then add this caveat. And the caveat was always around joy. And sort of magic that you talked about the magic of food. You know, there was a time I was talking with Antonio Coppola, who is a food researcher out of the University of Athens. And I was writing an article about, about olive oil, I guess. And I was really trying to get a sound bite on like how olive oil was the magic ingredient. And she kept dodging and dodging and dodging. And finally she was like, Lia, it is not the olive oil that makes it magic. It is the scent of the olive oil as it heats in the pan and the sizzle of the spinach as you add it and putting it to a boil and putting it on the table and sharing with those you love. That's the magic. And it was like, Oh my God. And then Eric Rim at Harvard, I was doing an article on whole grains. And he was explaining to me how you know, it's the three parts of the whole grain, you know, the endosperm and the bran and the germ and that the endosperm is primarily starch. And the other two are really where the the goodness lies. So I was like, oh, okay, so you can buy like bags of wheat bran and bags of wheat germ, and you can eat that, and that'll make you healthy. And he kind of pause, he goes, well you could but not, doesn't really work that way. He's like, um, there's something like magical and kind of unexplainable that happens when we consume a whole grain in all three of its parts. And I was like, what I'm like, you're a scientist, like we're talking about magic and like, you don't know. It was it was just it blew my mind that these hard baked scientists, and Walter Willett. He would talk about like, how it again, he always brought the table in. So we talked about what a nourished plate looks like. But then it was always also about how you can how you put it together. Like how much joy did you derive in getting those ingredients on your plate, you know about how you source them and how much joy you had in making them. And then then the joy in sharing it, there was always joy attached to these parts of the plate. So that was a big aha for me. And it was definitely starting to get to the key of what I had witnessed when I lived in France and in Greece. But then my big shift my big my next sort of part of my quest was I still hated vegetables.

Lia Huber 13:20

So I gave myself the gift of a year to say, How can I learn to love what's on my plate? You know, we talked about loving food, how can I learn to love these ingredients that I've been told will be the key to really nourishing my body in a way that I want to, and caring for my body in the way that I want to, how can I fall in love with these rather than feeling like a should, you know. And so I gave myself a year and I experimented and experimented and experimented and did a lot of interacting as well. Like a big turning point for me was actually I went to the farmers market one time in spring and this farmer held out a pea with this little pea pod. It was open with these little peas lined up it was beautiful. He's like, do you wanna try a pea, they're, they're gorgeous. And I was like, Oh, I hate peas. And I was hearkening back to the days that my mom would add peas, little mushy canned peas to everything. Yeah, I would make a tuna salad and leave it in the fridge and she would and it would have peas in it the next day. So adamantly against these peas. And he was just so kind and sweet and I finally just gave in and took a pea. And it was like like spring exploded in my mouth and I was like what just happened? And I bought a pound and I went home and started to experiment and you know found some books that helped me understand what these seasonal foods were and started to find the joy in making these seasonal and shopping for these seasonal foods and then making them and like asparagus boom loved it. Beets boom, loved it. Roasted carrots, like all these things. My world just came alive, you know, and about three months into that process, the 20 pounds that I had spent years and years and years trying to lose, and fighting with always fighting with, they just were gone. I was not on a diet, I wasn't thinking about dieting, I wasn't measuring anything. And none of that. It just it was like my body just went ahhhh. This is the way it was meant to be. This is what I'm meant to be eating, you know. And so I just I got to what I call a comfortable weight, where I just felt in my skin and really good, I started to feel much less pain, to the point where I went to my doctor, and I was like, I don't think I have lupus, I think what I feel is much more consistent with fibromyalgia, I think I have fibromyalgia. He's like, well, I do too. I was like, well, I don't think I should be on medication for a disease that neither of us think that I have. He's like, well, I don't think you should go off it. And I was like, but I'm gonna go off it and I went off it and I felt better than ever. And then continued down the path where a couple of years later I stopped even having any Fibro flares. So it dramatically transformed my body. And the way, you know, all of a sudden, I had a body that felt good and energetic and deeply nourished. And I had joy around food in every way. Like it just massively transformed my life. And I find that food is so much more than just what we put in our mouths, or what we put on our plates, right. And so when we shift our plates and our bodies start to feel that difference. And it sinks deeper into our souls. And then it ripples out into our families and into our communities. And all of that I then had the energy to become a mom, we ended up adopting our daughter, I started a business Nourish Evolution to really help share with others what I had learned along the way. I eventually wrote a book Nourished, and all these amazing things that I never had the energy or the focus to do before. But then when I became a mom, I kind of hit another wall, where all of these wonderful things that I had learned to do with food, I had no time to do anymore. So I would go to the farmers market with a child on my hip and then come home and have somebody clinging to me and have to get dinner on the table in 20 minutes. And that was something completely different that I had to contend with. So that was kind of the part three of my quest was then how do I create structures and frameworks and a rhythm, to be able to feed myself and my family in the way that I know that I want to amidst real life, you know, and the real life time constraints. So when I started nourish evolution, I based it on I was recognizing that I had gone through this journey. And there were distinct stages along this journey. And the more people I started talking to and working with, and people coming into my fold and having conversations with they were experiencing this too. So I actually ended up kind of labeling the stages of what I call the Nourish Evolution, where we start out in that sort of blissfully blind place like I was when I was eating the Doritos and the ice cream sundaes, and we have no idea what food is doing to our bodies, and we don't care. And then something happens when we do start to care oftentimes we'll start to gain weight, or we will start to experience some kind of a health issue. And so we try to solve it with the diets. And that's when we're on that teeter totter of the guilt and the deprivation. I call that the pinnacles of should angst because you're just going back and forth between should and angst of guilt and all of that stuff. And then most of us will hit a wall, and most of us will hit what I call the hump. And that's like, for me, it was my health crises where it's like, you realize that what you've been doing in the past isn't going to get you where you want to go. And you're really not clear where you want to go, you know, what does it even look like? Where am I trying to end up? And so you give yourself the time and the patience and the grace, to be able to learn where you want to go and how to get there, you know, and by the time you kind of get to the top of that, like, I got to the top and I learned all of this from all of these experts that I've talked to and they describe to me it's like nourished plate, you know what that looked like. And I knew what I wanted it to look like. But then I still was faced with the fact with A, I hate veggies. So how do I get there, and then B, I became a mom, I don't know how to do this, when I'm so pressed for time. So that's the peaks and valleys of practice, where it's really is something that it's almost like a yoga practice or a spiritual practice where you have to commit to time and patience and practice to get to the end result and not expect it all to happen overnight. And I think a lot of us get stuck there, you know, where we feel like cooking should just be something that is innately known that we just are born knowing when in reality, it's a set of skills and the set of know how instead of knowledge that in other cultures is sort of passed down generation to generation and here in our culture, it just has not been and then there's a big gap there. And so I recognize that there were a lot of tools and a lot of teachings that I can share with others to help them move through their nourish evolution more smoothly and more quickly than I certainly did. So once I became a mom, and I was faced with that crunch of time, I did a lot of experimentation with what was working at that point, I was writing recipes for national, lots of national magazines, I knew how to cook and I knew how to cook well, and how to cook those ingredients that I wanted to learn how to love, but I had to figure out the time thing. And what I discovered worked was when I would make multiple batches of a few simple dishes over the weekend, which I ended up calling core dishes, a having my first meal be kind of a mix and match of this and that on the plate, and then stash away the leftovers. And then throughout the week, use those leftovers as building blocks for new dishes, which I call reinvention recipes, that those come together really fast. But they're based on this core of really nourishing, awesome ingredients. And that worked so well. For me, it was like finally, day after day and week after week, and month after month, I could eat the way that I wanted to, the way I wanted to feed my family, I named that meal planning approach, nourish 123 and created a meal planning program called cook the season's around it and have now have over 10,000 people that have gone through and it's just transformed their lives. And then I discovered that there were people coming in to cook the seasons, who were brand new to cooking with real food and they were overwhelmed. They would you know, go and get the Swiss chard to make double batches of sauteed swiss chard with garlic and chili and just be like, What do I do with this, I have no idea. So I put together kind of a quick start video series called the nourish real food reset, that helps people quickly get what they need to to be able to feel more comfortable cooking with real food. And then the pandemic hit. And I had all these people coming to me and saying I thought I knew how to cook, but it turns out I have no idea how to cook. And they recognized that they were missing that foundational skill set. And so I actually ended up creating a really awesome course called home cooking school. And it's a four week in depth course that really takes you from, you know, looking at your pantry and your kitchen tools, all the way to, you know, knife skills and stovetop techniques and oven techniques. And by the end of four weeks, people come out with a solid foundation that completely bridges that skills gap and that knowledge gap that you know that is there for so many. So it's been amazing and Nourished came out of it along the way. And it's just incredible to be able to be on the journey with everybody.

Stephanie Mara 22:32

Thank you so much for sharing all of that. Something that I'm really hearing in that is the you know the saying we teach what we need to learn. And that along the way, all the little pieces that you felt like you needed to learn to have this joyful, nourishing relationship with food, you then went and wanted to teach that to other individuals. I'm curious, just coming back to the beginning of your story in the interviews you were doing and what you had been witnessing, because you know along the way, I really hear you trying to have this very different relationship with food in general of wanting to you know, enjoy the food and wanting to nourish your body and noticing how do foods feel different in my system. But then there's this piece like we were talking about of, of loving the food. And it's not just always about the food itself. It's also about how we're eating it and who we're eating it around. And even the environment that we set ourselves up internally and externally. And I'm wondering what you saw along the way in your journey as you were, you know, making the peas and the beets and all these things in how you were eating it and how that made such a big difference for you and those you've worked with.

Lia Huber 23:50

Totally, you know, I will say that I think one of the gifts that eating seasonally gives us it's twofold. One, the beauty in the seasons, part of finding that joy in the food is recognizing how amazingly beautiful especially vegetables like vegetables, they're gorgeous, you know and when you're going to the farmers market and you're buying heirloom tomatoes and you come home and you're making a Panzanella or something with it. It is a radically different experience than if you were to go to the grocery store in December and buy tomatoes that you know are mealy and awful right? It's like two different foods. Like, I often find when I'm in the airport and they've got like apples at the Starbucks in whenever February or whatever you know that the fruits and the veggies and things that you're sort of finding in mass produced areas like that are just they don't have any taste I still don't like them I still really don't eat them. But when you're eating in season, the joy is just it's like overwhelming. You know, the way they look, the way they smell, the way they taste. That all goes into making the whole experience so much more enjoyable and so much more like deep, you know so much more rich and deep that it just permeates so much deeper and that is is, I think a big way that it goes from I should eat a salad, I should eat a salad of iceberg lettuce and December tomatoes, you know, that came from the tip of South America 8000 miles, right, I should eat that salad with some lemon juice on top like, that's horrible should on all kinds. And then we could talk about all kinds of the ripple effect of that salad, right versus I'm gonna go to the farmers market and buy those heirloom tomatoes that are so beautiful from that farmer that I really love, you know that you know their family story, and coming home and kind of bringing that whole interaction into your thinking of that, you're living that as you're cutting up those tomatoes and preparing that meal. And then when you bring it to the table, there's a continuance. There's a thread that's kind of coming through there, you know, to the table, and you're sort of threading through that joy to the table. And then to be able to share that with those around you. You know, it feels completely different. A lot of people who sign up for cook the seasons, the parents are like, well, my kids hate vegetables. And I'm like, Honey, let me tell you I understand, like I was that person until my 30s. You know, like, of course, you're gonna hate vegetables, if you're used to those December tomatoes, you know, like, who wants to eat that. Nobody wants to eat that. There's a wide conversation to be had around, like, I don't like vegetables like, well, you might not like these and good for you because they have no taste. But these are incredibly rich and wonderful and multifaceted. And then the other thing about eating seasonally is there's a natural rhythm that we plug into when we're doing it. And this I think helps us get more in tune with our bodies. Also, that whole talk about satiated, right? That whole idea of like celebration and moderation, you know that that's a that's like a breath, like a rhythm that goes through life that we're meant to live, that there are times for celebrating with our friends and family. And that's not a time when we should be, you know, thinking oh, I shouldn't have that piece of cake. It's a time when we should just be enjoying the people around us, the foods around us. And really being in that moment, you know, and then on an everyday rhythm that's more about really finding the sort of deeper home and the deeper joy of those nourishing foods that you know, everybody had told me that all the scientists, all those those researchers and said, this is what a nourished plate looks like. And finding that deep hum of joy in those. The season echoes that rhythm where it's, I'll go back to tomatoes, you know, tomatoes, where it's like, if you're eating seasonally, you're waiting for tomatoes to come into season in, you know, June, late June, July, and you're so excited when the first tomatoes finally come out and you can't stand it!!!! And you just like gorge on tomatoes, you know, and you eat tomatoes here and there and tomatoes and you just cannot wait, you know. And then by the time October comes around, you know, late October and you're like the tomato season is just winnowing down and you're kind of at that point, you're sort of done with tomatoes, it's like your craving of tomatoes has been satiated, you know, and then you can move on to the next season. And it feels very natural, it feels like your body just sort of moves very naturally through that. And it's an arc that leaves you feeling satiated at the end and builds anticipation and sort of wonderment at the beginning. And it's a beautiful arc. I just feel like that's a deeper rhythm that we lose touch with in our modern world and in our modern grocery stores and everything that once people plug into that rhythm, it's very enriching, it's really so nourishing.

Stephanie Mara 28:23

Yeah, something I'm hearing in that is how connecting it can be to just the larger world. I remember when I was first starting to have a more satiating and healing relationship with food, of looking at my plate and just taking time to look at it. And imagine where all these pieces of food came from the sun, the you know, water, the soil, all of the pieces, the seeds that had to go into this food, being in creation to then be on my plate. And we're so removed from that process that it makes a lot of sense that we could pick up a bag of whatever and say, Okay, this is good enough. And it is good enough for anyone who's listening, you can always pick up a bag of whatever and be nourished by that. And what I'm also hearing in that is that it's both connecting to yourself to the larger world. And this piece around eating seasonally that you're picking up is also that it's paying attention to how things are feeling in our body and what our body is needing which, you know, we explore a lot here for anyone who maybe doesn't have the experience like you were talking about of like, I'm so excited about the tomatoes and wanting to eat all the tomatoes and you know that experience, it's kind of like when it gets to summer seasons, you naturally want to eat more maybe raw, crisp, cold foods, because you're being warmed from the outside in. Whereas during winter, you naturally want to eat your soups and your stews and your chilies because you need to warm yourself from the inside out. So we all naturally kind of feel that. And what I hear is you're kind of taking it one step further to really get curious about, oh, how does it feel in my body when I eat foods that are being grown at this season, and not just being manufactured to be able to have that food all year round.

Lia Huber 30:31

Totally. And I'm actually glad that you brought it back to if somebody grabs a bag of something that's okay too. Like, and this is where the nourish evolution, it's like we're all at different places on our evolution. And so wherever you are, is totally okay. And so for some people, it might be walking through a supermarket and kind of noticing, actually a great way to notice what's in season at the supermarket, when we have the availability for everything is actually if you look at the prices at the supermarket, oftentimes foods that are in season are the cheapest ones at the grocery store, because they're the most abundant at the time. And so that's actually a great way to see what's growing seasonally. So just even taking a step of noticing, oh, man, you know, cucumbers, it's summer. And cucumbers right now are $1.25 a pound. And I remember in November, they were $6 a pound. Wow. Maybe they're, I wonder if they tasted any different like, just getting curious about where ever you are and seeing where that leads you. I want to be careful not to be like we should be eating in season, we should be eating, because nothing prescriptive. Like this is not about that. But I think what the seasons give us is this beautiful, actually just pictured like a speedboat and waterskiing, right. It's like a tow rope. It's like it gives us this leg up on having that experience of feeling deeply satiated by foods. You know, if we follow the seasons, we're more likely to find that richness. Does that make sense?

Stephanie Mara 31:57

Yes, absolutely. If we could switch gears just for a moment and touching in on the joy of cooking for oneself, because I want to take a also a step back of for anyone who's listening, because it also depends upon where you live, what is financially available to you. And you can still find a joy of cooking, whether you are choosing foods that are not seasonally and you have to buy them in a can or you know, in the freezer aisle, whatever it is, and that anyone can cook with any ingredient and that is readily available. What do you feel like has supported individuals in kind of stepping over maybe that that hump of I'm so scared to get in the kitchen and get it wrong?

Lia Huber 32:44

Oh, I hear that all the time, it's the biggest barrier for people to get into the kitchen is that they're afraid they're gonna get it wrong. And they're afraid of putting all this time and effort into a meal, and nobody liking it, and having it go to waste wasting money, wasting their time, I call it the downward spiral of frustration, because it is it's this spiral that it just feeds upon itself. And really, the first step to getting out of that spiral onto what I call the upward spiral of confidence is to recognize it's not that you don't know how to cook, it's that you've likely never been taught to cook. And this goes back to it's so interesting to me that it's like when you go to France, when you go to Greece, when you go to Mexico and you go to various parts of it. Like all over the world, you have families who pass down from generation to generation, this set of skills and the set of knowledge about food, and we just don't have this here in our modern society, people tend to just think cooking is cooking is cooking, I should be able to turn out like the kinds of meals that I'm seeing on TV, you know, in the Top Chef shows and stuff like that, but it doesn't happen that way. And I like to reframe it, where if you picked up a violin, and you wanted to play violin, do you think you'd be able to play violin in a day, or two, or five, you know, if people would automatically know that they would have to find an instructor to teach them how to play violin, they would have to learn how to like hold the violin and hold the bow and tune the strings and and then eventually they'd start to play it would probably sound pretty screechie in the beginning, you know, and and then they would keep going back though and keep trying because they would know that eventually they'd start to sound pretty good. And it would feel good, you know, but there's a sense of commitment to that, there's a sense of patience to that, there's a sense of allowing yourself the time and committing to the practice. And cooking is very, very similar, I think is that anybody, anybody can learn how to cook. And it's that starting place of just recognizing that maybe you just haven't given yourself enough grace to recognize like, oh, it's not that I'm a bad cook. It's okay that I'm afraid that something's not gonna turn out because I've never been taught to cook like, I'm entering this blind, you know, but none of this are skills or techniques or knowledge that I can't learn and I can't attain, you know, everybody can do and you look again, across the board around cultures around the world, the techniques, the foods that families have used to nourish themselves and nourish their families are very simple ones. You know, it's in Italy, they call it cucina povera, like peasant cooking. And those are, that's they're really talking about what's on a nourished plate. You know, in Italy, it tends to be a lot of like greens, you know, Swiss chard, and kale and things like that. And a lot of legumes, you've got a lot of like chickpeas and beans and yumminess there. And then depending on where you are, in Italy, you've got a little bit of fish, or a little bit of pork, or a little bit of chicken, that's what they've been eating forever. And with really good health, you know, and lots and lots and lots of joy, and like, kind of the glue of the family and the hearth of the home. And that didn't cost a lot. You know, these are not foods that are like gourmet foods, these are not cooking techniques that require a lot of expensive tools and things like that. Like these are very basic cooking techniques, and basic foundational skills and know how that people have used throughout the centuries around the world.

Stephanie Mara 36:06

Yeah, yeah. First, I think, you know, when I'm talking to someone about getting into the kitchen, I think it's just first reflecting on what was your parent's relationship with the kitchen growing up? Because that was your first role model for what it was like to have a relationship with the kitchen. So if there was a lot of takeout, if there was a lot of and whatever it was, that was your family, there's nothing wrong or bad about takeout. Sometimes we all need to do that. But it's just whatever you saw, there was you know, a lot of using of the microwave or you know, reheating things that it's, it just gives you this, oh, that's what you do with food. Like you just get something in the freezer aisle and you heat it back up, or oh, we just have a drawer of menus. And we just always open the drawer and we would like choose something in the drawer and we would take out that's what you do. And just starting to get curious about that. Not that anything that you grew up with was wrong or bad. It was just, this was the original experience. Or let's say you had a parent who was an amazing chef, and they never invited you into the kitchen. And so it also can give you this experience of well that someone else's job, I don't know how to do that. And that feels so scary and overwhelming and daunting to approach because mom or dad or caretaker, whoever you grew up with didn't invite you into the kitchen to give you the experience of you've got this and you know, I love the example of the violin that absolutely it's, I can't even tell you how many things I've burnt. And also, like getting used to being disappointed in the kitchen of like, Oh, darn, like I burnt that. And I just spent a really long time making it and now I need to find something else to make myself. It's just going into it with that of checking in on even a potential inner perfectionist that could show up. And utilizing it as like, okay inner perfectionist, you can be in the kitchen cooking with me, and I'm still going to take steps forward to play. I think that's an important part of bringing in that that childhood like play into the kitchen, that you literally can't get it wrong.

Lia Huber 38:28

Totally. And creativity. When you're allowed and able to sort of unleash your creativity, I actually like to talk about increasing competence in the kitchen, in order to increase confidence. Because when you get to that place that becomes this upward spiral and you get to a place where being in the kitchen kind of unlocks that play unlocks the sense of creativity, there's a quote that talks about, like there is no failure. There's just learning. We are so charged around food. And food is so different. I mean, you know this, this is what you're in day in and day out with your clients. But it's we're so charged around food in ways that we are just not with other things you think about again, with the on the violin kind of a similarity. If you started learning another language, would you beat yourself up if you said something wrong? Or if you conjugate a verb wrong or something? No, you just would be like, Oh, okay, alright, so it's this, and you would go on with your day. But with food, it's like, "Oh, my God, I burnt them and I put all this time, I'm such a bad cook. I don't..." It's just it's this like exponential reaction to it. Whereas if we can kind of just remove that emotion and just recognize that we're on a journey, you know, and then every time we enter the kitchen, it's like entering the ring. You know, it's like, here we are, again, if you practice yoga, it's like stepping back onto your mat. You know, it's a fresh practice and I like to call it a cooking practice actually, because it is it's that same like you're you're reentering and each time you walk into the kitchen and if you could bring that fresh mindset and that that sense of of new and that sense of playfulness. It really, really makes a difference. Our society, whether we recognize it or not, we are bombarded by these messages, these like sort of subterranean messages of, oh, cooking well, it's just for chefs, ya know cooking well, eating healthy, it's just for nutritionists. And so there's this divide, where it's like, you either have to have this like nutritionist letters after your name to make smart choices about food, or you've got to have like a white chef's jacket to make food taste good. Those are just lies. I mean, that's just not real. And so there's this huge area that people can can kind of walk into and wade into and claim for themselves, where they can make smart choices about what they're putting on their plate, not from what they feel like they should do, but from what we kind of know that our bodies want and need, you know, and then also that they can absolutely make those foods taste delicious, without spending oodles of time on it. Without having to be a trained chef, it's available for everybody. For real, it's so pervasive, those messages of you have to be a foodie, you have to be a chef, you have to be trained, you have to be this, like I think it was McDonald's, you deserve a break today. Right their ads? You know, the sense that like a home cooked meal is out of reach for the average person, a home cooked meal is you don't have time for that. You don't have to, it's too much work. That I mean that we're bombarded with those messages. And so we just start to internalize them. And when we start to like, recognize that that's what's going on in our heads and where it's coming from, and all of that and start to sort of debunk it and demystify that and be like, hold it back up and be like that that's not true like this, actually, I can. This is easier than I thought. My aunt came to stay one time several years ago. And she and some friends came over. And it was like six o'clock, I think I started dinner at like six it was a really busy day. My daughter was young, I got a chicken, I like you know, rubbed it down. And I'm a lazy cook also. So like I'm not going to be flipping a chicken three times while it's roasting. I like do my thing, stick it in the oven, and we're done. So I did like five minutes of prep of like chopping up some some root vegetables and rubbing down the chicken, popped it in the oven. An hour later, I take it out, it's delicious. Everybody loves it. And my aunt said, Oh, well, you must have spent hours on this. I'm so sorry. You spent so many hours on this. I know you're busy. And I didn't want you to spend all this time on dinner. And I was like, No, I spent five minutes on it. And then somebody else chimed in. They're like, well, you're a foodie. You know how to do this because you're a foodie. And I'm like, no, actually, I know how to do this because I learned how to do it. And I burned some chickens. I made some dry chickens, I've served some raw chicken. But now I know how to roast a chicken because I've done it a lot, you know, and it was just a great example of how you know my aunt is what, 30 years older than me. And she even has that paradigm that a roast chicken with root vegetables is beyond her reach. And so many people I encounter have that and it's just it's you can pick apart at that and recognize that that's just untrue. She too has the ability now, now she knows how to roast a chicken, I taught her. But you know, it's it's doable for everybody. It's just, it's just really setting those gremlins aside and reshaping your paradigm.

Stephanie Mara 43:16

Yeah, so I usually like to offer a baby step that individuals can take. Someone's listening to this, they're actually getting maybe a little bit excited about getting back into the kitchen or getting into the kitchen for the first time. And they're like, okay, I don't even know where to start. What could even be a baby step that you would offer of where someone would even start to rediscover the kitchen and rediscover this joy with connecting with food and getting their hands in it and on it for themselves.

Lia Huber 43:50

I think that the most important ingredient for the beginning of your journey is curiosity. And so it's something that if you can just go about your day and be curious about your reactions to food and your reactions to cooking and recognizing that intermingling of the emotion with the reality, if you can recognize those intermingling and start to tease them apart and start to take baby steps towards learning what you need to learn to be able to fill your plate that you want in the way that you want to and really feel that deeper connection that we've been talking about. That's really a great start. And I actually have a couple of awesome resources that I would love to share with listeners, one of them is conveniently located at nourishevolution.com/start-here. And I've got a little three part miniseries there on what to eat and why and how to do it in real life, how to make it happen in real life. So it kind of covers that whole spectrum of like, what a nourished plate is and why without coming from a restrictive place but really from an expansive place and then looking at what kinds of skills and know how that you need to accumulate to be able to make those things taste really, really good. And then what are the you know, the time management and the the meal planning frameworks that really work to help you make it happen in real life. So that sort of a start to start to finish. And then I've got another really good resource that is my free training called How to Plan, Prep and Cook Easy Weeknight Meals. So any listeners that are struggling with, you know, knowing that they want to get more veggies on the plate, want to eat more seasonally, but but struggle with time and struggle with consistency, this is an awesome training, and that is at nourishevolution.com/ez-weeknight- meals.

Stephanie Mara 45:35

Awesome. I love that recommendation. I think curiosity, we talk a lot about it here, it's so so so important. I would add on to that of also get curious with someone else, like you referenced before finding a teacher. Don't go on this journey alone. Ya know, when we think about like you were talking about getting individuals into the kitchen and cooking and together and, you know, I think about like, I feel very lucky that I grew up in a family that had a love for food and a love for cooking, and got me into the kitchen and you know, taught me how to make my first omelette. And that was the first thing that I ever made. And just that experience at a really young age, made the kitchen an approachable place for my entire life. And so if you didn't have those experiences, then find a significant other, find a friend, find someone that you can get into the kitchen with so that also you don't have to be on this curious journey alone. Because it also is easier when you're in community with others learning how to cook.

Lia Huber 46:51

1,000% and find a guide also to teach you, you know, it's so much more enriching to go on the journey with others, as you're saying, and I would also say, your kids, like it's okay to be vulnerable with our kids around like, Hmm, you don't like that veggie dish that I just made. I don't either. You know, it tastes like crud. But hey, how can we learn to make that, you know, taste really, really good and find a guide that can teach you there because that can take you there, because that will shorten the length of the journey and the angstiness of the journey, a million fold. You know, it's amazing, the students that I've had in home cooking school, some of them start out, and it ranges in their 20s, in their 80s. And it's just, they're all coming because there's this, there's this gap, you know, that they are recognizing that they've never been taught to cook, or some actually are coming with, you know, a higher level of skills, but they feel like they've gotten gaps in their skills. But as we go through the four weeks, it's amazing that it's like four weeks, that's all it is. And they come out the other end and they're a changed person, then they've got the full skill set, and they've got the know how, and they've got all of that, that especially for parents, that then they can share that with their kids, you know, and they can then provide their kids with the foundation, like you're talking about your parents did, you know, so if you're a parent out there, highly recommend, like, do gain these skills for yourself, not only so that you can reap the benefits, but also so that you can pass on the benefits because it's enormous, you know, it's all generational, right. And it has the reverberations, and to be able to pass those skills on to the next generation, but then also pass like that sense of curiosity, that sense of openness, that sense of a healthy relationship with food, on to the next generation is huge.

Stephanie Mara 48:38

Yeah, so beautifully said. I know you already started to list some of your resources and is there any other way that individuals should know about that are listening to this, that ways that they can keep in touch with you?

Lia Huber 48:50

If you go to nourishevolution.com and if you sign up, actually, for any of my trainings, we will get you on the email list that we do a weekly email, that's pretty awesome. And keep you in the loop that way. And then we've got our courses cook the seasons, which is our online meal planning program that really puts seasonal veggies at the center of the plate, great community there as well. And then our real food reset, if you need help, just even dipping your toe into cooking with real food. It's a terrific resource. And also we use the nourish 123 meal planning framework that we've built, cooked the seasons around in it, so you're really immersed, like I'm showing up in those videos with a bag of groceries. It's not like, here's this beautiful diced onion that I'm going to put into this previously heated pan. It is the beginning to end walking in the kitchen cooking with you. And I know people feel really at ease with that because they're seeing that it's like, oh, okay, she's doing that. And she's doing it in this amount of time. I can do this too. It's not, there's no bells and whistles. And same thing with home cooking school where it's really if you feel like you're at a place where you want to plug in those holes, or you want to start from the beginning and get a foundational really solid core where really you can cook anything with confidence and really feel comfortable cooking seasonal veggies and trust that they're going to be delicious and feel really confident even cooking recipes and knowing recipes mean you know so many people are like I don't know what it means to sear or sautee, to carmelize, or to, that's okay, that's totally okay. Most people don't. So I'm there to teach, you know, that's what we created home cooking school to do. And it's really amazing. So you can find all of those on nourishevolution.com and my book Nourished: a memoir of food, faith and enduring love with recipes. That's really the deeper story and the bigger, richer scene to this whole journey. That is, is my story. But what gives me the most joy is when people read Nourished and they come to me and they go, Oh my gosh, this reminds me so much of when I that, that that and it's I think all of us when we are going through our own nourish evolutions, it's not a linear path. It is a very windy, twisty road that has many, many chapters to it. And everybody has their own story of their nourish evolution. And so I love my book Nourished because of what it serves in other people too and I just love hearing those stories as well.

Stephanie Mara 48:57

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing that and I just loved this conversation. Thank you for sharing your passion and your excitement for food. I share that with you. For everyone who is listening, as always, if you have any questions, reach out anytime. I will leave our contact information in the show notes and I hope you all have a nourishing rest of your day. Bye!

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Book: Nourished