Health and Wellness Treats to Be Proud Of

Treats to Be Proud Of

Health & Wellness

BY JACK KIRVEN Qnotes CONTRIBUTOR

Happy Pride Month! It’s that time of year to celebrate being you — although you should be doing that all year, now is the time to do it in droves at an epic scale. It’s especially true this year, given that Pride events have been curtailed since the beginning of the pandemic. And although I don’t want to be a Mopey Myrtle, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you to keep your nutrition priorities straight (even if nothing else about you is).

Here are some other wellness reminders: Wear sunscreen. Drink lots of water. Keep a healthy snack in your pocket. Look both ways before you cross the street. Ignore the homophobic trolls who bring megaphones. Etc.

Back to the food.

The colors in fruits and vegetables are an important part of what makes them beneficial to your nutrition strategy. As with everything else at Pride, keep your food colorful, too. Get as much variety as you can. I have been telling clients for years to eat what I call a Rainbow Diet. It’s easy. Be sure to include one serving each day of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. You can combine them however you like, and the choices of fruits and veggies can change as often as you wish. Ideally you would have four or five colors as vegetables, and two or three as fruit. Mix and match to your heart’s content. Here are some colorful ideas for your Pride banquets.

Fruit Smoothie (You are what you eat!)

You will want to blend each of these into a purée, and then half freeze them separately: Strawberry, Orange, Pineapple, Kiwi, Blueberry, and Blackberry. Once they are relatively solid, they can be slowly poured into layers into mugs and then set to harden. Pour each layer without stirring them. The separate colors will sit in a stack, and will be a refreshing way to eat healthy while it’s so hot. Let this thaw for 20 minutes before serving. Garnish with fresh mint.

Spectrum Salad

Your food should be beautiful. When you look at it, it should be pretty as a picture. One way to make salads beautiful is to treat them like a painting. Once you have your base layer, add colors throughout. Use a spring salad base, as this will include several shades of green and perhaps even some purple, depending on the mix. Include sun dried tomatoes, shredded carrot, diced yellow pepper, fresh berries, shredded purple cabbage, and whatever nuts or seeds you and your guests can tolerate. Flavor it with a handmade dressing, using a base of avocado oil. To this, add fresh minced basil, garlic, salt, black pepper and a hint of clove.

Charcuterie Platter

Fresh finger foods arranged tastefully on a serving tray or platter can add lots of color to what might otherwise be a nutritional desert on your table. In place of crackers, offer celery, radishes, carrots, and sliced cucumber. In place of heavily processed condiments, offer hummus. A variety of cheeses is great for those who aren’t vegetarian. In place of processed meats (especially those preserved with sodium nitrate), offer cold cuts that have been cured only in salt. Prosciutto is an excellent example, and it pairs fantastically with cantaloupe.

There will likely be an overabundance of junk food at many of the events you will attend over the course of Pride. Consider ways in which you can participate in the festive atmosphere while also creating a reprieve from unhealthy snacks. These naturally colorful types of foods are not only good for you in general, they also help you recover from celebrating in the heat. This is especially true when the heat is mixed with alcohol. Having healthy snacks available will also promote hydration, and the phytonutrients in these treats will help you and your cohorts detox. : :

What Pride Means to Me

by Clark Simon (he/him) Charlotte Pride President

I can still feel the excitement. The newness of it all. The sheer overwhelming positivity I felt inside. It was a joyous and enthralling day. One I’ll never forget — the day I saw with my own two eyes just how large, how diverse, how powerful my community was. If your first Pride experience was anything like mine, then at least some of those emotions ring a bell. I’ve been involved in LGBTQ community organizing since I was a teen, and I’ve been actively involved in Pride organizing since 2008. In all that time, at least once each year, I hear the story of a newly out person who got to experience what I experienced more than two decades ago. There’s nothing quite like your very first Pride.

Mine was in the fall of 2004. I was a college freshman and our LGBTQ student group took a trip to Durham to march in what was then the state’s only Pride parade. I’d return to the NC Pride festival and parade for several years, even after I moved to Charlotte. It will always have a special place in my heart.

The world two decades ago was a different place. Same-sex sexual activity had just been legalized by the Supreme Court. Massachusetts had just legalized samesex marriage, but the prospects of legal marriage nationwide was, in many minds, still a very long way off. A growing, but still very small, community conversation on the need to fully include and protect transgender people was just bubbling up. It would reach a fever pitch when trans folks were excluded from a draft of the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act just a few years later.

It’s no coincidence that I’m reminded of laws and court cases when I think back to my first Pride. Our movement for equality is inextricably bound up in what Pride has meant from the very beginning. Today’s Pride events can trace their origin to the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day March in New York City. That event — the one-year commemoration of the historic Stonewall Riots in June 1969 — is exactly what made Stonewall so very different. Unlike other LGBTQ uprisings elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s, Stonewall was remembered. It was celebrated. It served as the catalyst for what would eventually become a sustained, national movement for liberation.

That movement — guided by young people, poor people, people of color, transgender people, and more — immediately saw a clear vision for what they wanted their future to look like. Sure, they wanted parties, fun, and celebration. Who doesn’t? That first march in 1970, after all, was immediately followed by a celebratory day in the park. But what was top of mind for our Liberation Movement’s founders was exactly that: Liberation. For me, Pride means liberation, yes. But

it’s so very much more than that. It means service to others and to your wider community. It means standing in solidarity with the most marginalized among us. It means taking time to pause, reflect on, and remember the sacrifices of all the people who came before us — people who, quite very literally, put their lives on the line to secure our freedoms. Pride is more than a single weekend event each year. Without Pride, our community would be a shell of what it is today. Pride to me? It’s us. All of us. Community. Our big, beautiful, diverse, and strong community — and all of the ways each of us, in our own unique ways, fight for liberation every day. I ask you: What does Pride mean to you? How will you make a difference? How will you contribute to our Liberation Movement? SPEAK OUT: Will you be attending your first Pride this year? Charlotte Pride wants to hear from you! Tell us why your excited about your first Pride on Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #MyFirstCLTPride.