Often times, we are told to eat a “balanced diet.” What, exactly, goes into a balanced diet? Lots of nutritious, nourishing noms for sure. Fruits and veggies a-plenty. Whole grains and protein galore! Peanut butter? Tell me more.

“Balanced” is not synonymous with “boring.” Eating a balanced diet certainly doesn’t mean restricting ourselves to the cleanest of the clean. Food is fuel – both physical and spiritual. We eat not only to nourish our bodies, but also our souls.

As such, our fuel should not be a carefully titrated solution of black and white, “good and bad.” Rather, it should be a colorful (balanced, if you will) mix of pinks and greens, reds and blues, oranges and… you get the picture. With the ever increasing pressure to look and eat a certain way, it’s easy to get stuck with a monochrome mindset and boring fuel.

So what’s there to do? We at Spoon Yale believe you should love the food you eat and eat the food you love. To prove our point, we dove – tummy first – into the realm of food positivity.

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Photo by Sarah Strong and Wendy Sun

You may be wondering: why the scale? For us, it symbolized letting go of judgement and guilt. To eat a balanced diet, we don’t need to put ourselves – or our food – on any sort of scale. Now, onto the food porn. Our self-love food-love session started off with…

Donuts

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Photo by Sarah Strong

Square donuts from none other than Tony’s Square Donuts.

Cookies

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Photo by Sarah Strong

Insomniaaa.

Toppings

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Photo by Sarah Strong

Including, but not limited to, chocolate peanut butter hearts, au natural freshly made nut butters from Whole Foods, ice cream and the fluffy goodness from above that is whipped cream.

Then came the imagination and prowess of seasoned foodies. Behold:

The Donut-insomnigumminator

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Photo by Sarah Strong and Wendy Sun

The Fountain of Youth Donut

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Photo by Sarah Strong

After the noms, to quote our social media manager, we were all “kind of dying inside.” But it was a good, sugar-infused #noragrets kind of dying, you know? So, from our hearts (and stomachs) to yours, please do treat yourself. Balance is not to stress over – you deserve good food, and your food deserves your love.

Hugs and donuts,

Spoon Yale

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Photo by Sarah Strong