Last week, I found a recipe for an “anti-cancer soup” that had pretty much everything you could think of to ensure that the best quality nutrition was getting into your body and also to help keep your immune system “happy”. It was chock full of many types of vegetables, several types of beans and cashews. It sounded amazing. I could “feel the health” just by reading the recipe will all of the beautiful ingredients. I showed the recipe to my husband Jim, as he is the main cook in our household, something he enjoys doing very much. I help with some of the prep work and do the cleaning up afterwards, which is how I can best contribute. Jim was also looking forward to trying the recipe.
We started our day at our local farmer’s market, looking for the best quality produce we could get for this special soup. We found a number of the ingredients but not all so we then had to go to the supermarket to find the rest. After bringing everything home we had to prep all the ingredients, juice some of them to put into the soup and then start the cooking process. It was extremely labor intensive, even with the two of us.
The soup then had to be cooked for two hours on a pot in the stove and then pureed through a blender afterwards. We made the full recipe – which ended up being quite a large amount for ourselves, and to share with others.
From start to finish – it took us 10 hours to complete this soup – most of our day. Between procuring the fresh ingredients, prepping and cooking – it was our main activity. Granted this would give us a number of meals and so it would save us time during the week after we came home from work. But our whole day was devoted to making this one item.
I thought – it is time consuming, expensive and requires a lot of planning to live a healthy lifestyle. It is not easy. And we don’t have children so we have more free time than many who have families. I can see why so many can’t or don’t. It would’ve been much easier to spend our day doing many other things and then pick up a pizza on the way home or go through a fast food drive thru. These were things we used to do when we were younger. This was how my life was growing up and for the next 30 years. My body received poor nutrition for most of my younger life so that it was the perfect place for cancer to start.
You know what else is time consuming, expensive and requires a lot of planning? Having a serious illness. Going for chemotherapy. Going to doctor’s appointments. Gong for tests and procedures. Staying in the hospital. Trying to do the most basic activities of life, when you can barely get out of bed.
Living a healthy lifestyle is 24/7. Being sick is also 24/7. Of course not every healthy meal will take this long to prepare and cook. But the time put into sourcing fresh ingredients and cooking at home will pay back dividends in good health for you and your family. I will make soup all day long every day with Jim for the rest of our lives to never experience cancer or any other chronic illness again.
