Tips to a Healthier Lifestyle

The newest in our Healthy & Whole series is a fantastic longer-form article from Sara Cornelius of the illustrated food blog Cake Over Steak. We are huge fans of her work, which features hand-drawn illustrations of her culinary creations.

Sara has a huge passion for wellness–not only physical, but mental and emotional. Her tips on how to make a healthy lifestyle work for you are approachable and entertaining, and we couldn’t agree more with her philosophy. The side-by-side photos and drawings you’ll see below are Sara’s own, and the remainder of the photos are shot by her husband Robert, himself an incredibly talented photographer. (The talent of these two!) Without further ado — here’s Sara!
Hello there! I’m super excited to be talking to you guys today. Alex and Sonja are a major inspiration to me in the blogging world with their fresh recipes, gorgeous photography and heartwarming personalities. They’ve been supporters of my blog from very early on, which means so much to me. I also feel as though they are kindred spirits, being design people like myself and a creative couple like my husband, Robert, and me. Their Healthy + Whole series is one of my favorite parts of their blog, and it’s a topic I haven’t covered too much in my own space. I’m delighted to be able to share with you a bit about my health and fitness journey, a subject that’s near and dear to my heart.
Fitness Early On
My interest in health and fitness came about quite naturally. I’ve always been active – I started participating in organized sports in second grade, and by middle school and high school I was playing three sports year-round. In high school, these constant exercise habits led me to being curious about how to eat healthfully. It was kind of out of necessity; I needed the right food to fuel my body all day long while I was at school and then at sports practices and games. I could tell that eating junk and “empty calories” were doing nothing for me, leaving me hungry again as soon as fifteen minutes later.
Living an active lifestyle and eating healthy foods can sound easy enough as the key to being a healthy person, but it’s not always that simple. Figuring out what works best for my body has been one thing, but finding a healthy mindset about diet and fitness on an emotional level has been a whole separate journey.
Due to my involvement in sports growing up and being blessed with a somewhat insane metabolism, I’ve been fortunate enough to maintain a very steady weight my whole life. Give or take a few pounds, at 26 years old I’ve been the same weight since I was 15. But because of this, I’m very sensitive to changes in my weight. I started running “for fun” (instead of just for my sports) in tenth grade because I had begun to gain weight. I must have hit one of those age walls where I couldn’t eat whatever I wanted anymore and expect my body to stay the same. Naturally, I freaked out. I began running in the evenings for extra exercise, and in my diet I cut back on portion sizes and reduced fatty foods. It worked! The sad part was that I was doing it out of a fear of becoming “fat,” not necessarily to have a healthy body.
Honestly, this was probably a good experience. I learned to love running, and to this day it remains one of my favorite forms of exercise and stress relief. It also helped me to develop some basic healthier guidelines for how to eat. The more I learned about diet and nutrition, the more I came around to the idea of just eating a healthy, whole foods “real food” diet. For example, I no longer avoid fat like the plague because I understand our body needs it. I now focus on consuming healthy fats, like nuts and avocados, etc.
My Approach to Food
I believe in finding a balance within my food choices. My blog doesn’t claim to be a whole foods blog, a baking blog, a special diets blog, or anything like that. Healthier Lifestyle

My goal is to have fun with food, and I hope to inspire others to have fun with food as well. I want people to get excited about being in the kitchen, and I want cooking to feel like a worthy investment of our time. I believe the practice of making your own food can only lead to healthier eating choices.
So on my blog you’ll find everything from indulgent sweets to salads to cocktails to crazy things like dessert sushi. It’s all fair game, but you’ll find that 95% of my recipes start with real, whole ingredients as much as possible, because that’s how I eat. It’s been a process of getting to this point with food. I feel like I’ve finally found my “home” in the food world, and I’m getting a better sense every day of what my body prefers.
Body Image–A New Mindset
Recently, I hit another road block with fitness and body image. In the past few years my body has changed more than it ever had before, which has been startling for someone who’s grown accustomed to having the same body for the past decade. I’d like to attribute a lot of that to age, but I know there have been some other factors. First up is what I might call my “post-college dark days” – that weird transition period into the real world when uncertainty and life changes abound. Somehow the anxiety of that lifestyle caused me to lose several pounds without even trying. Overcompensation for that led to the weight returning, and then eventually the stress of planning my wedding caused me to hold onto weight no matter how much I exercised. All of this resulted in me feeling the least confident in my body that I’ve ever experienced. It’s been a whirlwind.
After the wedding last year, the stress practically melted off of my body, and the extra pounds along with it. My husband and I cleaned up our diet a little more, but I also became obsessed with working out. I would say I’m still obsessed with working out (because I truly love doing it), but I had become obsessed with the idea of being “skinny” again. While I was going through this phase, I went through another transition. I realized I was working out because I wanted to feel skinny again, and I noticed that I didn’t like how that felt. But through that process of getting my body back into shape, I started to love my body again. I noticed that I wasn’t working towards a certain number on the scale or a certain look in the mirror anymore. I simply loved knowing what my body was capable of, and I wanted to keep it that way. I liked that reason for working out much better.
There is no end goal for me with fitness now: Every workout is the goal – that feeling I get after a workout and knowing what I’ve just accomplished is the daily reward for treating my body well. I love exercising because I love having a strong, healthy body that I’m proud of. Perhaps I needed to go through the desperate quest to feel skinny in order to get to this point, but I know now that the reason I want to work out is to be healthy and strong. I enjoy feeling confident in my own skin, and I know I won’t look like a supermodel, but I’m also not trying to. I have to believe that I am my own brand of “beautiful,” and it has to do with a lot more than just how I look.
That being said, keeping myself in this mindset is still a daily struggle, and I’m nowhere near 100% there yet. I have days where I don’t feel great in my body at all, but at least I’m working on it. I have to remind myself about what’s truly important to me, and sometimes I need my husband to verbally whip me back into the right mindset. (That always helps.) Some people might think I’m crazy for even talking about this (seriously – a few pounds?!), but it comes down to being more about how I felt in my body, not really about the extra few pounds on the scale. It had to do more with my perception of myself rather than my pant size. I wanted to share my experience in hopes of reaching someone who might be going through something similar.