Two Springs: Feeding the Body You Actually Live In

I’ve been craving bitter greens for a couple of weeks. Sharp, astringent, alive things. And, if I’m paying attention, I realize my body has been asking for vinegar and fermented vegetables and the kind of food that cuts through heaviness. Something in me wants lighter broths, sprouts, green and growing things. I want to chew on something that tastes like the earth waking up. Mmmm….

And then I look out my window where it is still under the pall of winter. The ground is frozen. Snow is still piled along the fence line. The animals are still on hay, there is nothing yet to scrabble out of the earth. It most certainly does not feel like Spring yet even though we are just past the equinox.

But something inside of me does feel like Spring is here.

This is what I find so extraordinary about the body. It reads signals the conscious mind hasn’t registered yet: the shift in light duration, the angle of sun, subtle changes in barometric pressure and electromagnetic frequency. My cravings aren’t random. They’re my metabolism preparing for a season that hasn’t visibly arrived, doing what it has done for thousands of years before I had any opinion about it.

Right now, as the light shifts and the days stretch open, your physiology is responding to the same ancient signals. Regardless of where you live, enzyme activity is shifting. Hormonal rhythms are recalibrating. Your microbiome is reorganizing itself in response to changes in light exposure, temperature, and the subtle electromagnetic shifts of the season. This isn’t metaphor. This is your metabolism doing what it has always done, reading the landscape and responding.

Here’s what I think is the most interesting with conversations about “spring eating”: your body isn’t just metabolizing this spring. It’s metabolizing a much older one.

The Spring in Your Cells

Your metabolic intelligence doesn’t just begin and end with you. Yes, it’s 100% true that your vibrational/metabolic signature is unique to you and you alone, but it is still shaped by centuries of specific landscapes, specific growing seasons, specific fats and ferments and famine patterns that your ancestors moved through long before you arrived. That intelligence is still operating. It’s encoded in your enzyme expression, your microbiome tendencies, your inflammatory thresholds, the particular way your body processes certain sugars or saturates certain fats.

This is why the “best diet” conversation deserves careful scrutiny before you buy in. For example, the Mediterranean diet is a beautiful system of eating. But it tends to be healthiest for people whose lineage was shaped by Mediterranean soil, Mediterranean sunlight, Mediterranean microbial ecologies. While, a body whose people came through coastal Scotland carries different cellular expectations, as does one shaped by lineage in West Africa or the Korean peninsula or the high deserts of the American Southwest. Each has its own metabolic grammar, its own deep seasonal logic.

This isn’t philosophical speculation. Research out of Cornell (Ye et al., 2017) has shown that the FADS genes, which govern how your body processes essential fatty acids, were shaped by natural selection in direct response to what your ancestors ate. Southern Europeans, with their longer history of plant-heavy farming, developed genetic variants that enhance the conversion of plant-based fats into the long-chain fatty acids the brain and immune system require. Northern Europeans, whose ancestors relied more heavily on dairy, seafood, and animal fats, retained a different variant, one better suited to metabolizing those denser fat sources directly. That genetic gradient still exists today, running from north to south across the continent. It means the olive oil that’s a cornerstone of Mediterranean health may not be doing the same thing in a body whose lineage ran through Scandinavia or the British Isles, where butter and lard were the ancestral fuels.

None of this means you need to reconstruct an ancestral diet in your current eating life. Realistically, you can’t, and that’s also not the point of this conversation. The point is that your metabolism has a specificity to it, a fingerprint, that no generic protocol can fully honor. And spring is the season that makes this most visible, because spring is when the body’s deep intelligence starts waking up and reaching for something and generating discomfort and ailment when it doesn’t get honored.

The Third Plate

So, what’s one to do? Here you are, standing in a particular landscape in a body that is shaped by a different one. Is this a problem to solve, an issue to correct? Emphatically, no. It is simply a conversation to have, within your cells and your soul.

It’s an opportunity to lean in and ask what your body is asking for from the ground you’re actually standing on, and recognizing how does that request gets filtered through the ancestral intelligence still running in your cells.

And this is the point in this conversation that I get really passionate about. Feeding yourself well is something far greater than just nutritional data. It is attunement. Your emotional system recognizes something more. When you listen in, you start noticing that certain spring foods, the bitter greens, the first wild garlic, the sharp bite of something fermented through the winter, don’t just satisfy hunger, they land somewhere deeper. Your soul-level knowing says yes, this. There’s a resonance that goes beyond macronutrients and micronutrients into something all of your systems register.

That resonance is your metabolic intelligence operating across every dimension of you, physical, emotional, mental, soul, all the way to what I call the Cosmic Bridge. When you eat something that truly nourishes you at this level, you’re not just feeding tissue. You’re participating in a conversation between your lineage and your landscape, between the body you inherited and the life you’re living.

What This Looks Like in Practice

It looks like pausing before you follow the latest spring cleanse protocol and asking your body a different question: What are you actually hungry for?

It looks like noticing that your system might be craving dense, slow-cooked broths while your neighbor thrives on raw spring salads and understanding that this isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s a difference in metabolic grammar.

It looks like developing a relationship with the land where you currently live and the land that your lineage walked. What’s coming up in each region right now? What did the people who lived on each soil before you eat at this time of year? Not as a prescription, but as a thread of intelligence worth following.

It looks like feeding your emotional and soul hunger with the same attentiveness you bring to your plate. What relationships nourish you? What creative work feeds something that food cannot reach? What are you starving for that has nothing to do with calories?

The Convergence

Spring is a threshold season. Everything is between states. The ground is between frozen and thawed. The light is between winter and summer. And you are between the body your ancestors gave you and the life you are composing right now.

One of the most nourishing things you can do in this season is to do a little exploration and get curious about your now and your then. Where do your lineage and your current landscape meet? What are your ancestral intelligence and your present-moment cravings trying to support in you? Your metabolism, your sacred, specific, unrepeatable metabolism, is waiting to join the conversation with you.

That meeting place is where real nourishment lives. Not in the protocol. Not in the trend. In the specificity of you, standing on this ground, in this season, feeding a body that carries both ancient instructions and right-now hunger.

Both springs are happening. Feed them both.

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Dr. Stephanie Shelburne is the Executive Director of The New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine and the creator of Your Sacred Metabolism®. She writes from her farm in Vermont, where mud season is epically unfolding.