Slice And Dice Therapy Boosts Glucose Control And Mood

It’s easy to argue that cooking meals from scratch two or more times each week should be on everyone’s diabetes treatment plan.

What makes the argument an easy one are the many health benefits of preparing, and eating meals made with fresh whole ingredients. So, even if spending time chopping, dicing, and stirring have always seemed a snore, chore, or bore, it might be time to give meal preparation a fresh look.

Slice and Dice Therapy

Food can, after all, be our medicine in more ways than one:

• Stress Alleviator. Cooking may alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression since preparing a meal can be grounding, and meditative. Cooking grounds us because it’s a tactile pursuit that puts us in sensory contact with the food we will eventually take into our body. By giving our attention to the colors, shapes, textures, smells, sounds, and tasks of cooking it become a calming meditative, or mindful endeavor.
• Mood Booster. Cooking can boost our mental and emotional health as it's a positive, goal-oriented activity with tangible, mostly edible results that we can enjoy, and share. Though cooking will always be more pleasurable for some people than others, it still provides each amateur chef with a sense of accomplishment—or in the event of an inedible disaster, a lesson learned.
• Appreciation Opportunity. While slicing tomatoes, or peeling potatoes we can occasionally remind ourselves how much we humans rely on one another. For instance, somebody plants and cultivates the tomatoes and potatoes in our pantry. Individuals harvest the produce, others pack it, and somebody loads the crates onto trucks or trains driven by men and women to stores and markets. The food is finally unloaded, priced, packaged, and shelved by folks in our own community.
• Nutrition Upgrade. By cooking from scratch we know, and control what goes into our meals. It helps us avoid the added sugars, salt, unhealthy fats, and additives that many processed foods are full of, and allows us to better control our carbohydrate intake. By cooking with whole grains, and fruits, leafy greens, and other fresh veggies, we know we’re getting the nutrients our brain and body needs. Plus, cooking from scratch allows us, if we choose, to be picky about the origins and processing of our meat and dairy products.

We can also recruit our spouse, one of the kids or grandkids, or a friend to make cooking a social event. Fun and conversation often flow when people work together preparing a meal.

If you are careful…if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. ~ John Irving, The World According to Garp

Sources: Linda Wasmer Andrews/Psychology Today; Clean Plates; Jennifer Baker, Ph.D./Psychology Today
Photo credit: Cristian Bortes