Nourished founder Kathy Napleton said a healthy diet can help ward off chronic illness and disease. "All these methods that we use are an opportunity for the body to get back in balance," she said. (Jim Slonoff photo)
Much is made of the search for work/life balance. But what about body balance?
Hinsdale's Nourished wants to be your guide.
"That's what we're about - trying to get people to a state of homeostasis, which the body likes being in," said Nourished founder and wellness chef Kathy Napleton.
From hosting Wellness Workshops to serving up a selection of organic, nonprocessed foods, her business, Napleton asserted, promotes a positive alternative to settling for S.A.D - the Standard American Diet.
"Real people need to eat real food if you expect to have real health," she said. "We're actually overfed as a society, but we're undernourished."
Napleton launched Nourished five years ago, operating out of a 100-year-old farmhouse at 111 S. Vine St. that embodies its return-to-simpler-times ethos. She said the pain of family and friends learning they had cancer or other diseases compelled her to explore ways to proactively care for one's body based on well-documented best practices.
"If you don't follow (the laws of health), it's just a matter of time that you're going to get a diagnosis," she said. "We truly use food as medicine, which is how it was always intended to be,"
To ensure its quality, Napleton said Nourished's in-house kitchen is used to make its products from scratch in small batches. As an example she described the method of nurturing beans for the veggie burgers and other menu items.
"We basically just took a dry heirloom bean from a dormant state and, as it sprouts, we just turned it back into a plant," she explained. "You've now made the bean more digestible and the nutrients more bio-available."
Among the most popular offerings is the one-day soup cleanse.
"You're basically souping for the day," she said, noting the broth regimen avoids the sugar content of a juicing cleanse. "It's a way of giving your digestive system a rest. It's very light form of digestion, but at the same time you are still consuming nutrient-dense foods."
Indulgent weekends help fuel demand for her products.
"We're busy on Mondays," she quipped with a laugh.
The more intensive three-day detox takes practitioners through the trio of liver purifying stages with foods that are low in sugar and sodium.
"Everything goes through the liver. It's the workhorse," Napleton remarked, likening the organ to a furnace filter. "If you're not changing that filter, it gets clogged, and then you build up toxicity in your body."
Both the soup cleanse and detox kits, which can be purchased frozen, were inadvertent beneficiaries of the pandemic as people were looking for pathways to better health they could do from home. The in-person Wellness Workshops had to be put on hiatus, however. But they're back on the schedule, with weekly 90-minute session covering topics such as "The Anti-Inflammatory Diet" and "Healthy Gut, Healthy You."
Moderation is better than extremism, Napleton cautioned.
"If 80 percent of the time you are at home doing well with your diet and lifestyle, your body can handle a little indiscretion," she said.
But getting into shape cannot be exclusive of eating right.
"You can't out-exercise a bad diet," Napleton said.
- by Ken Knutson
