Episode Overview

When you think about food, do you think about love? For many of us, food has been tied to love in so many ways—celebrations, family dinners, meals made when someone is sick, or those special recipes that hold cherished memories.

But somewhere along the way, food also became tangled up with rules, restriction, and even stress. That shift can put a block on healing and metabolic health.

In this episode, I share a new perspective on food—not as discipline or willpower—but as one of the most powerful ways we can love and support our bodies. When you reframe food as love, eating and nourishing yourself stops being a chore and starts becoming a source of freedom, connection, and healing.

Listen in for a gentle but powerful shift in how you see food and how you see yourself.

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• Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership: https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/lifecoaching 

• Creating a Life You Love in 168 Hours a Week: https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/168-hours-sp 

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome to episode 426 of better than before breast cancer. With me. Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, so I want to share a little something with you. Want you to think about maybe you're this person. Maybe you know some people like this I have known, I'd say I could call to mind this fast, maybe four people in my life that I've known who just don't care about food. They just don't care

1:03
I get hungry, but not really, or if I never food is just something I have to do, you know, to live. And I sit here, I remember the first time I heard that, like, I don't care if I eat or not. What? Who are you? This is not the world I grew up in, right? I come from a family of people who love to eat. I come from a family of good cooks, people who love food. People love to eat good food, people who are eating their lunch and fantasizing about the fantastic recipe they're going to make for dinner. Okay, that food is love in my family, and food is love for a lot of us, which is why the way that we think about food, and the way that we connect food to love, and the way we think about love can cause a lot of struggle when it comes to nourishing our body. So on the surface, this sounds very simple, food is love, but when you really lean into it, it can transform your entire relationship with your health. This idea that food is love, because we think about love in a regular life outside of food, we think about love. Are there healthy loving relationships and unhealthy loving relationships? Are there loving relationships you have with other people that are without boundaries? Right that over set boundaries, right? Relationships are relationships. So I know that this phrase food is love might spark different thoughts, depending on your experience and depending on your relationship with food. You might be thinking about celebrations where food is the center of everything. What's the cake gonna be like? You know, holiday dinners, what do you mean? Auntie Donna didn't bring her green bean casserole. Like, oh, Thanksgiving is canceled. Like, that's a mandatory dish, right? Sunday meals with families, maybe you think of something comforting, like, what your mom made when you were sick. Was it chicken soup? What was your favorite meal? You would come home from school, you could smell it cooking. You knew what your mom or dad? My dad was probably the primary cook in our house. Well, it depended. My dad did a lot of cooking in the house, but when you come in that house and you'd smell something, or we'd walk into my grandma's house, and the smell in grandma's house, and you could recognize a certain dish, like, oh my god, we're having a taco night. We're having a spaghetti night, whatever it was, right? So food can be loved because we share it, and when we share it, we express love when we make it, when I make it, right. It is an act of love when we make it. We want to celebrate. We bring it when someone's hurting. We bring it when someone is struggling. We want to support them right. Food has so much meaning to it, but somewhere along the way in this sacred relationship between this life sustaining substance, food and the way we use it in our lives. Instead of it being a loving thing that we do for our body and love for our life, we've started to condition, or we've been conditioned to think about food as a pleasure, a reward, or maybe even as a discipline and pleasure reward are different from food is love, right? Hopefully we're clear on that by the end of this episode. And in our modern world, this view of food as a pleasure or reward often translates into loving foods that are designed in the lab to be hyper palatable, loaded with sugar, salt, flavor enhancers, flavor colors, rather than foods that actually nourish us. So I was talking with a client of mine recently about this very thing, and she is so cool, and she has this deep connection to her garden and to nature. And she. Loves growing her own food, touching it, smelling it, watching it grow from seed to fruit, something I can so appreciate, because it's to me, just a meditative experience of all these colorful foods that I'm chopping and slicing and dicing and putting together. And I love cooking, but then, when it came from my client to this, taking this beautiful experience of connecting with her food and then logging her meals into a food trucking app, she hit a wall because this felt tedious. And in her mind, she had the story. It says, this takes away joy from my food. This is like a chore. So I asked her, could we reimagine this? What if, instead of looking at tracking food as this tedious, restrictive process, you saw it as translating love into data? What if you could take this beautiful energy from soil, from the sun, from your care and connection and you turn it into something that you can now measure and use to support your body and healing. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it amazing to look at these things? I put a seed in the ground, sun shone on it, water was put into it, nutrients were absorbed into it from a soil. And if I put that in this app, I can see exactly what nutrients it'll show me what's in this food and it'll show me what's nourishing my body, where the gaps are, and what I can do differently to nourish my body even better. Because let's be very real, sometimes food trucking matters. Okay, when you have an active disease or you are feeling sick, or there's something you want to change, we've got to know what is going into your body, and we don't know by guessing, because human brains are really bad at guessing, really bad sometimes we must track our food if we are very focused on changing the experience of our health and supporting our wellness and Our healing. So there are studies actually that show people who increase their awareness of what they eat through journaling or tracking are more likely to meet their nutritional goals, manage their weight and improve their metabolic health. No kidding, a 2017 study that was published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that consistent food tracking was one of the strongest predictors of long term success in lifestyle change. And my friends, that's not about restriction. It is about awareness. What I tell my clients all the time is the first step is awareness. If you can create and build awareness, you are making change. So when we step back and we ask ourselves, how does this body that I love more than anything? Because let's admit it, when we say I love my life, well, you can't get through it without a body. So you better learn to love your body, right? Because this is our vehicle, and as long as it's healthy and well, we gotta have this life. So when we sit and say, I love this body, what does it need? What do I need to feed it? Right? This body that I love is telling me what it needs through certain things through blood, work, through genetics, through sensations, through energy levels, through appearance of my skin, this body is telling me things. Are you listening when we start to shift our perspective and food becomes love for this body with trillions of different little microscopic cells, all with their own little worlds of organelles and organisms in them, and we understand what they need to function, we can approach them with love, and then cooking doesn't have to be a burden, and tracking doesn't have to be a punishment. It all becomes a conversation with your body, and it's saying, I love you enough to notice what's going on. I love you enough to make sure you're getting what you need. And this perspective is not new. If you look back into the ancient system of Ayurveda, 5000 year old system food was always seen as more than cat. It wasn't even calories. Food wasn't calories. Food was connection. It was connection to the earth. It still is. It's connection to the earth, it's connection to the elements. It's connection to the cycles of nature. Food was energy from the sun transformed through the soil and the water into something you could hold, you could taste, you could share, and when you ate it, you were connecting to all of that. And we still are, but we forgot, you know, we forgot about it, and if we can get back to connection, what could change? But somewhere along the way in this very modern, very busy life, we started looking at cooking as something to get done or avoid entirely. We rush through meals. We outsource food to factories. We treat nourishing our bodies as an afterthought. We pull through a drive up and someone hands us a bag out the window, and then when we need to eat it in a way that supports our healing, like especially after a breast cancer diagnosis, we start to think of it as restrictive or boring or more work. But what if we went back to the truth that food is one of the most profound ways you can love your body.

10:46
It doesn't mean that it has to be an indulgence. It doesn't mean overeating. It means pausing and asking, What do I need right now to support my healing, my energy and my joy in this body that I get to live in today, one more day, right? Every bite you take becomes you goes back to that old you are. What you eat, right? I remember speaking to more than one doctor, but there's one that stands out in my mind. It doesn't matter what you eat, and I know we hear this from our oncologist all the time. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? How if I didn't eat, could I live forever with no food? I don't think so. Why not? Why? If I chose never to eat food again, would this body die? Because the cells in this body are built from food. The functions in this body are propelled by nutrients, vitamins, vitamins and minerals. So don't tell me what I put in it is not going to affect the way it functions. Because if that were true, I could put nothing in it and I could still live. It's bullshit. The protein you eat becomes your muscle, the vitamins and minerals become fuel for your cells. The phytonutrients from plants literally talk to your genes, turning some of them on and turning some of them off. And that is love at the deepest level. That is the kind of love that says, I want you to thrive, and I will give you whatever you need in order to do that. So when you cook, when you sit down for a meal, when you open a tracking app, you're not just doing a task. You're practicing self love. You're affirming, I am worth feeding Well, I am worth taking time for. I am worth connection. And the more you can shift your mindset into this perspective, the less it will feel like discipline, and the more it will feel like freedom. Because freedom comes from knowing you can trust yourself, you could trust your body, you can know how to nourish it, and you can partner with it in your healing. So it's empowering, right? You have the choices, and choices are freedom, at least in my opinion, they are. So I want you to think about some things this week. All right, I want you to try to pause at your meals. Don't try to change anything right now. Just eat what you're eating, but pause when you do eat. Touch your food, play with it, smell it, take it in, look at the colors. I think about where did this food come from? How did this food get to my plate? And then check in with your body before a meal, ask your body, what does it mean, and then give it that gift of food. And if you are in a place where tracking your food is vital information, information that could support the way you nourish your body and the way you support your healing and the way you support the effectiveness of your medications. If you're in that spot and you're tracking, see if you can reframe it and never, never, never is food tracking about judgments like, Oh, God, I'm so bad. Oh, you know when we're working to get someone into ketosis. And one of the tools, one of several tools, is a ketogenic diet, and they're looking at like, I can't get all the fat, I overeat the carbohydrates, and they build a bunch of self judgment into that, and then they don't want to do it anymore. Remember, it's never about judgment, and self judgment never is going to make something better. It's all about awareness and curiosity and love, right? It is about looking saying, Well, that is so interesting. I really had no idea that I was eating that many carbohydrates. Wow, that's fascinating. I really had no idea how much effort. It would take to get more fat into my diet, or I, oh my gosh. Look at all the blocks that come up when I think about eating more fat. Look how long I've been trained that fat is bad, and we start working through the thoughts on it right. There's so much awareness and growth that's available to us when we begin to shift and we look at food not as a reward, but an act of love, right? So people go, Yeah, well, those French fries are an act of love. Okay, then we're not being honest with ourself, right? If we want to indulge in something that we know is not going to support our health, and let's be honest with ourselves. Let's say, I know this isn't doing anything great for me, but today I choose it anyway, because I do live life and 90% of the time, or 80% of the time, or whatever it is, you're doing something that is supporting your wellness goals. And right now, I'm going to pick that food just because, dang, it tastes good, right? Sometimes we do that. We're only human. Give yourself a break. So when we reclaim that truth, that truth of food is love, what I put in my body is an act of love. When we really look at that and we embrace that, it can become one of the most joyful parts of healing and of life. I think that for me, when it when we talk about connection to food, I just want you to think about that a little bit. I really realized last year, Akasha, it's coming. So this podcast comes out in August. I don't know which date it's coming out the end of August, and in September, I will be doing a VIP weekend where some of my original clients will be coming out, will be spending a weekend together. Last year. We did that as a retreat, and you can look forward to a larger retreat coming up in May of 2026, but my point in just bringing this up is that when we did that retreat a year ago in September, I just did not realize how much the person to person connection was going to impact me, and when I when I did that retreat, was just weeks after coming back from having attended a retreat with Dr nation winters and her team with my sister and my husband in the Maldives, and that, the whole setting, the food, everything about that retreat, when we were talking about we left, I just said, I've never felt so connected, ever, I think, to the island, to the food, to the people, to myself, to just the nature. I mean, it was remarkable. And then a few weeks later, I got to have this group of eight women come, and we had this retreat on the beach, and it just made me think, and has still been very profound for me throughout this year, on just connection is everything, and sometimes we can really struggle with that. And I think especially having gone through the pandemic and the lockdowns that created a huge separation. So maybe just considering where there is an opportunity for more connection in your life, a connection with your own body, a connection with your own food, you know, maybe just plant a pot of tomatoes or poblano peppers or lettuce in your flower bed, something like that, and you start to just make it take a simple step to reconnect your food, or go to a local farmer's market and just really take it in and see how food can be an act of love for this miraculous body that you're living in and that you want to feel good and live as long as it can, feeling as well as it can. All right, my friend, so hopefully, a little shift in perspective, hopefully that helps you when you come to any struggle that might come up with, what's the best way to nourish your body, and why? Sometimes we look at it as a chore or discipline or willpower, because it is my firm belief willpower will run out. So if you cannot find a way to nourish your body and your life from a place of love, from saying, I'm doing this because I'm worth it, then you're doing it with willpower, and willpower will run out. All right, so connect to that why, and that power of knowing that you deserve that kind of and that kind of connection. All right, I'll talk to you again next week. Take

19:27
care. You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door. Searchers at the door.

19:44
Give it all you got no hesitating.

19:49
You've been waiting all your

19:56
life. This is your moment.

20:15
This is your moment.