Reconsidering Our Number One Priority. Protect Your Body + Thai Tofu Larb

Maybe this happens to you too, but I go through a particularly rough few minutes right before I go to sleep each night.

It’s always just before I leave my awake state and start to nuzzle up to sleep when it hits me – a flood of heavy shit going through my brain.

• The thought of my parents dying and how I fear that day so deeply that I feel it in my bones.
• The profound love that I have for my nieces and nephews and how I want them to always be safe and protected in a world where bad things happen all the time.
• My brain is then filled with all of the babies and kids in the world who don’t have homes, families or even food. And my heart literally aches.
• The next thought is about the earth and how it’s dying. And I wonder how long it’ll be before life as we know it is wiped out.
• Then I think about my own death and how unimaginable it is that my reality doesn’t keep going. And how we all just have to be okay with this and go about our day like everything is fucking dandy.

All of these thoughts are compiled into a 2 or 3 minute span during which my heart races, my stomach aches, and then exhaustion carries me into a turbulent and intense dreamland.

But when I wake each morning, the heaviness has been lifted and everything feels as if it were reset during the night.

There’s a clarity and peace that I can’t describe. In the moments just before I wake, this is when things come to me.

Ideas, solutions, sometimes messages from dead people, epiphanies, sentences that come out of nowhere that I have to write down and eventually build around, recipes, photo ideas – it’s like my creative mind wants to squeeze in a chat before my judgment, fear and ego wake up and crash the party.

A few years ago I had an exceptionally powerful experience one morning during this time of clarity and peace. Allow me to sound like a whack job while I try to explain it to you.

I was laying in bed, hovering between awake and asleep, when all of a sudden I felt like I was completely covered in warm, soft, gentle light. I melted into it because it was a cold morning and the warmth felt delicious. But it wasn’t just warm light, there was a message that came along with it that I can only describe as being “transferred” to me.

The message was this:

The number one job of humans is to love, nourish, respect and protect our bodies. And the reason why this is so important is because the body is what temporarily houses the soul. We’re given this temple, this beautiful miracle of a machine that works tirelessly to ensure that our soul experiences life from the vantage point of our body.

So our number one responsibility in this life is to take care of that body.

This was the message, and when the message was over, the warm light disappeared as quickly as it had washed over me and I was wide awake in my bed in the cold, dark Oakland morning.

I don’t know if it was God, but probably not since I don’t believe in God in the traditional sense of the word, but it was definitely intense and transcendent.

This message was so lucid, so powerful and so obvious that from the moment it happened, my life’s work has been crystal clear.

And even though I had yet to protect, respect and take care of my own body to full capacity, my heart was broken that we live in a world that makes it so easy to trash our bodies and so hard to love, respect and accept our bodies.

With that, here’s to:

• More vegetable gardens and less fast food.
• Less body shaming and more seeing everyone’s body for the miraculous thing that it is.
• More prevention and less prescriptions.

Can I get a fuck yeah for less energy spent on trying to be perfect and more energy spent on being balanced.

• Salud to less restaurants and more time spent in the kitchen.
• Cheers to less alcohol and more self confidence.
• Here’s to more sack lunches and less lunch trays.

Can I get a virtual fist pump for less guilt about eating and more pleasure from eating?

And finally, here’s to giving less power to what other people think about our bodies while flooding ourselves with compassion, love and respect.

Today’s fuckery is another example of how powerful and necessary it is that we all take responsibility for ourselves.

When you take responsibility for yourself, YOU get to decide how healthy you are, YOU get to decide how you want your body to work for you, and best of all, YOU get to decide that your body is beautiful and miraculous.

Focusing your diet around healthy food is a necessary step in taking responsibility for your health. And one of the greatest outcomes of taking responsibility for your health is that you inadvertently start healing the relationship that you have with your body.

Here’s how that works:

When we eat mainly clean fuel, there’s no additives, preservatives or chemicals that get in the way of the connection that we have with ourselves, both physically and mentally.

When we’re not flooded by unnatural stimulation from additives, preservatives and chemicals, we can easily tune in and trust the body to tell us exactly what it needs to keep doing it’s job beautifully.

Our body will tell us when to eat and when to stop eating. It will crave different foods based on the nutrients that we need. It’ll help us to get the perfect amount of sleep each night. It’ll go into self repair mode and make necessary repairs for us to be healthy.

The human body is designed to work for us, not against us, and when given the right fuel, we can trust that’s exactly what it’ll do. And when we experience the quality of life that comes as a result of this, we can’t help but to be filled with love, respect, gratitude and compassion for our body.

And when we’re filled with love, respect, gratitude and compassion, it will overflow to everything and everyone around us.

And that my internet friend is how the world starts to heal.
(and now I’m going to go work for Hallmark)

My life’s work is to help people love, nourish and take care of their bodies through healing their relationship with food. Having a healthy relationship with food isn’t about being perfect, it’s about doing your best and forgiving yourself when you’re not perfect.

Plant Based Thai Tofu Larb

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Author: Molly Patrick of Clean Food Dirty Girl

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Ingredients

Dressing

• ▢ Juice from 1 lime
• ▢ 2 tablespoons coconut aminos
• ▢ 1 teaspoon soy sauce
• ▢ ¼ teaspoon dried red chili flakes
• ▢ 1 teaspoon dulse flakes
• ▢ ¼ teaspoon sea salt
• ▢ ¼ cup shallots 30g, chopped
• ▢ 1 tablespoon fresh red chili 12g, chopped - take the seeds out if you don’t want it as spicy
• ▢ 4 garlic cloves minced
• ▢ 1 green onion cut off the stem and use the whole thing, sliced
• ▢ 1 box of firm tofu use the tofu that's in the refrigerator section at the store, liquid pressed out and then crumbled with your hands

Other

• ▢ Romaine leaves
• ▢ Thinly sliced red onion
• ▢ Sunflower seeds
• ▢ Cilantro

Instructions

• Make the dressing by adding all of the dressing ingredients into a small bowl and stir to combine. Set aside for now.
• Heat a skillet over medium heat and add the shallots, fresh chili, garlic and green onion. Cook for 3 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding 1 tablespoon of water at a time when the ingredients start to stick.
• Add the tofu and the dressing and stir until everything is combined.
• Cook for an additional 3 minutes and then allow to cool.
• To assemble, place tofu mixture in romaine leaves and top with red onions, sunflower seeds and cilantro.

Notes

This is a Thai appetizer that’s full of flavor. It’s handy to bring to a potluck or get together because it’s best eaten at room temperature.

I hope that you have a happy week. May you look after your body like the precious gift that it is.