Crunchy, fresh lettuce; ripe, red tomatoes; dark, green cucumbers; topped with goat cheese, red onions and chopped dates; drizzled with olive oil… That’s how you make, a scrumptious, waist trimming salad.
The deeper I study Islam, the more I realize how easy it is. Taking care of your body is an important part of religion. The fact, that I could simply set my intention and turn everyday activities into acts of worship is just, amazing. We could transform our every meal into a form of worship. Ever notice all the foods mentioned in the Qur’an? These foods definitely weren’t mentioned by accident. It requires no extra effort, just redirect your intention and every action, every bite you take, can translate into an act of worship! Olives, onions, dates; these are all foods that are incorporated within the Quran and sunnah (teachings of the Prophet peace be upon him) just to name a few. If I could make my own nutrition labels for these foods, right under ‘calories from fat’ I would add ‘good deeds from sunnah.’ Why would you not want to incorporate these foods into your daily lives?
So I’ve got my day job and my night job, civil engineer by day, health and fitness guru by night, sometimes they overlap. Here’s the engineering nerd in me about to come out: so as civil engineers, we deal a lot with the soil that’s underneath everything we want to build. The more I learned about the characteristics of soils, clays, and sands the more I understood the human body. We were all created from clay, I don’t want to get too nerdy here, but if we came from the earth, wouldn’t it make sense that the place to get our nourishment would be from, well… the earth. In a society where manufactured and processed foods are the norm, it has become more and more challenging to eat healthier foods, you know, the kind that grow from the earth! This stigma surrounding salads and vegetables has gotten the majority of people thinking that anything healthy can’t taste good! Wrong! A chemically processed, mystery meat concoction is more appealing to us that a balanced salad, filled with food items the Prophet (pbuh) himself used to eat?!
From a larger perspective, health is a part of religion. God gave our bodies to us. We are entrusted with our bodies, and only we can control what we do to them. No one is holding up french fries and candy bars and forcing us to eat them, no matter what’s served in front of us, at the end of the day we’re the ones who control what our hand picks up to place in our mouths. We are eating way too much and our food selections, simply said, aren’t the best. It’s time to take drastic action before we further harm our bodies and teach our younger generations the same unhealthy eating habits. So what do we do?!
Here we are almost a month after we’ve established our new year’s resolutions, I can almost bet that if you’re a female, ‘losing weight’ or ‘working out’ were probably up there on your list. Whether you’ve lost sight of these goals or you’re still continuing strong, I hope this has rejuvenated you or opened your eyes to a new way of looking at being healthy.
Sunnah salad for dinner anyone?
