WELLBEING - Achieve true happiness with Primary Foods

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Summary - 

Don’t be fooled, this episode has nothing to do with food (as we know it!) and everything to do with happiness and how you can achieve true happiness by introducing more ‘Primary Foods’ into your own life. 

Things I Mention - 

  • What are Primary Foods and how they impact your happiness. 

  • What is happiness and what factors contribute to your happiness.

  • The 12 areas of your life that fuel you more than any food can. 

PLUS, we do a little exercise together which will show you which areas of your life are thriving and which areas might need a little more attention to bring about more happiness. 

Links & Helpful Resources - 

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Another new food group I hear you ask and what timing given that you know, my last podcast was all about helping you ditch the confusion & overwhelm surrounding food!? Not to worry though beauties because this episode actually has nothing to do with food as we know it even though the brown, chocolate-flavoured kind does make me extremely happy! 

First, let’s have a quick chat about happiness. For most of us, the ultimate goal is life is pure, un-filtered happiness right?! And I don't think it matters who you ask, we all more or less want the same thing. Happiness can be a very loose & confusing term though because it can look so different to every single person. It can come in many forms and can be experienced in a stack of different ways - contentment, bliss, joy, satisfaction, peace and so on. What most people don’t know about happiness though is that - 

  • 50% of a person’s happiness is determined by genetics. 

  • 10-20% of a person’s happiness is determined by life circumstances (your health, income, education, marital status)

  • 30-40% of a person’s happiness is determined by the way we choose to think & act. 

Simply knowing and understanding that we are in control of at least HALF of our overall happiness (which has the potential to override that of our genetics) is absolutely HUGE and should give anyone struggling with unhappy feelings a big dose of hope. 

So what do Primary Foods have to do with any of this? Primary foods have nothing to do with what we would typically recognise as “food” (think fruit, veg, meat, grains etc). In fact, everything we consider to be nutrition (ie the food we eat) is really just a second source of energy - this is a totally different way of thinking which I really want you to consider from this point on. Primary foods are the things that really fuel us as human beings and help to nourish us off the plate. 

There are 12 Primary Foods - Joy, Spirituality, Creativity, Finances, Career, Education, Health, Physical Activity, Home Cooking, Home Environment, Relationships & Social Life. 

If we were to stop, and take a minute to check in with ourselves, we’d recognise that the excitement & happiness of daily life, when life is going really well, feeds us so much more than any food possibly could. As a matter of fact, many cultures practice fasting to reduce their intake of secondary foods, which then opens up the possibility to receiver greater amounts of these primary foods. 

When you’re happy & content with each individual primary food, you’ll thrive and actual food stays secondary, providing support to be healthy and to do the things you love. 

So having said all of this, let’s do a little exercise together if you’ve got the opportunity right now. If not, perhaps come back to this episode when you get a spare few minutes but I’d love to explore your own balance with primary foods which should give you a really clear idea of where you might need to spend some more time to bring about more happiness in your life - 

I’d love for you to grab a pen and a piece of paper or you can just jot this down in the notes section on your phone so you have it handy to refer back to every so often - 

Down the left hand side, write a list of the 12 primary foods - As I said, we’ve got Joy, Spirituality, Creativity, Finances, Career, Education, Health, Physical Activity, Home Cooking, Home Environment, Relationships & Social Life. 

Now beside each primary food, write down how happy you currently are with this area of your life. Let’s give it a % out of 100. So for example, Spirituality means to have or be working towards a regular practice and this can mean different things to different people. For some it could be religion and attending church, for others it could be having a regular yoga, gratitude or meditation practice or it could be self-care or spending time out in nature. Think of spirituality as working towards having a regular practice that makes you feel connected in your life. 

If you’ve got some sort of regular practice currently in place that you prioritise and make time for most days of the week, then you’d likely feel quite satisfied with this particular area of your life, so perhaps write down 80-90% beside spirituality. 

If on the other hand though, you rarely cook food at home. You eat out a lot and buy take-away most days for lunch, you’ll likely feel a lot less satisfied with the area of home cooking so you might write down 20% beside this one. 

Once you’ve given a % to each primary food, have a look and see if you can identify any imbalances or any areas that are quite a low %. These are the areas of your life that could be causing more unhappiness than you realise. 

The absolute best way to improve on an area of primary food, is to take small, achieveable steps using what is known as the SMART approach to goal setting and we’ll chat about that in our next Wellbeing episode but for now, just sit with what you’ve uncovered, let all of this sink in and trust that any feelings of unhappiness are there for a reason and we have got a plan in place now to overcome those feelings. 

That is it from me, I hope you enjoyed this one and perhaps had a few really exciting light bulb moments.

Elisha CasagrandeBrisbane Health Coach, Brisbane Personal Trainer, Womens Confidence, Confidence, FEEL BE LOOK, Happiness, Primary Foods, Womens Wellbeing