Daily Gratitude Challenge Day 18: Food

In an effort to inject some positivity into my daily mindset and the online world I have created a Daily Gratitude Challenge and I am inviting everyone to participate. If you have missed my introductory post that explains the challenge and maps out the daily post schedule, visit here.

Daily Gratitude Challenge What food are you grateful for

Day 18 of the Daily Gratitude Challenge focuses on food. Food is a necessity and possibly the thing that is taken for granted the most by those who have unlimited access to it. Do you stop before a meal and consciously give thanks for what you are about to eat?

What I Am Grateful For

Daily Gratitude Challenge Food you are grateful for

As someone who has always enjoyed their food, I am an emotional eater and am highly motivated by the prospect of my favourite meal. I console myself with food if I have had a bad day, I reward myself with food when I have achieved something and I celebrate with food when I’m feeling good. I’m the Carb Queen, preferring the savoury over the sweet and I love anything that involves bread, potatoes, pasta and cheese. I adore Sunday roast dinners, Toad-in-the-Hole, pizza, stew and dumplings, toasted sandwiches. I love making Italian, Chinese and Mexican dishes and having picnics in the park on a hot day. Most of my social activities evolve around eating – I often meet friends for lunch or dinner in our favourite restaurants. I will happily go out of my way to travel somewhere if I know that there is going to be amazing food at the end of my destination, and I have been known to laugh with sheer joy when I’m eating something that is beautifully cooked.

However, it is rare that I take a step back and actually acknowledge just how lucky I am to be able to do this. If I’m hungry, I go to the cupboard and get something. When the cupboards are beginning to look empty I order food online and get it delivered. During the pandemic I have taken to finding takeaway options from local independents as a Friday night treat and I spend the rest of the week looking forward to it.

I’m a fan of baking competition programmes and the other day I watched several teams of chefs make hundreds and hundreds of desserts set to a specific criteria. The judges tasted one of the desserts from each team and at the end a winner was crowned. This was followed by an advert from a charity pleading for aid to help feed the hundreds of thousands of people that are starving in a refugee camp in a war-torn country, and then a post on Facebook from our local food bank with a list of all the things that they desperately needed. The extremes were enormous.

Since then, I have mindfully expressed gratitude for everything that I consume. Having so much, particularly when so many have so little, makes me so lucky.

Want to participate in the Daily Gratitude Challenge?

There are lots of ways in which you can participate in the Daily Gratitude Challenge:

Write a blog post about the advice that you are most grateful for and share it in the comment section below.
Share your posts in my daily link-ups on my Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #DailyGratitudeChallenge.
Share your images for the topic of the day on Instagram, tag my Instagram account (@suzie81speaks) and use the hashtag #DailyGratitudeChallenge and I will share as many as I can on my Instagram stories.
Join my Pinterest Group Board and share your Daily Gratitude posts.