Motto: Don’t make the pressure feel bigger than the achievement
I’ve decided to do something about our (me and my family’s) diet. Not as in setting a specific diet for a limited time, but as in moving towards adopting a new lifestyle diet-wise (#healthy #diet). I know that there are things I should do for us to eat healthy, but this is always a fuzzy amount of ideas and decisions that need to be made. As such they constantly get postponed. I never take the time to properly do something about it. I’ve heard somewhere (definitely in multiple places, but surely also on muchelleb’s YouTube channel – if you don’t know her, go check her out, she’s great) that in order to achieve my goals I should first get clarity on them and then turn them into actionable steps. This is what I intend to do here.
Get intentional
In order to achieve them I need to clarify my goals and to turn them into actionable steps. This is what I intend to do here.
What I know so far is that there are several things I intend to achieve with this personal challenge:
Eat healthy food.
Eat more sustainable food.
Make it easier to eat healthy and more sustainable food.
Before discussing each of these it is important to ask myself (please Me, keep this in mind, it is important) to refrain from planning too big. You might know what that feels like. I have this tendency when I sit down to plan something, to imagine I will make major changes. Usually, this does not end well. So I will try to keep this whole initiative as feasible as possible. Less pressure, more action! OK, let’s see how it goes. This is the first on a series of blog posts on this topic so make sure to sign up for my newsletter if you want to be noticed when I upload new content.
1. Eat Healthy Food
The first goal of my healthy diet project is quite self-explanatory (#healthyfood), but there are some things which I feel should be more clearly specified. I want to eat food which is (1) nutritious, which (2) boosts energy levels without making you feel sluggish or bloated. This food should be good for the body and also for the mind. It might seem silly but I intend to research foods which (3) boost focus, attention span, memory and overall brain power, in addition to it being good for the muscles, blood pressure and all that. It is highly probable that the two are interconnected, but I will just check to make sure.
2. Eat More Sustainable Food
I live in an area where it is rather difficult to recycle and to have an overall sustainable lifestyle (#sustainablefood). It’s not impossible, but they do not make it easy on you. At the same time it is very important for me to contribute less waste and to live more sustainable, therefore sustainability (how many times can you say ‘sustainable’) will definitely be a major component of any of my goals, including this one. I therefore need to factor this in and to make sure I will choose more sustainable (here we go again) options when it comes to food.
That means:
buy local (and obviously avoid as much as possible to buy from the supermarket)
try to plan meals around seasonal foods
I would add ‘try to preserve your own foods’ – but I don’t think this is a realistic goal, the chances for me to find the time to do this are quite slim (proud of myself for catching this one, one of the first attempts of this personal challenge to plan too big and make the pressure feel bigger than the achievement). A big No! No! (but I will keep the idea here, as inspiration for future me)
don’t buy a lot in advance
push your grocery shopping as much as possible so as to use most of what you own before going shopping again – hopefully this will also push you to be more creative with food.
order less and cook more
3. Make It Easy to Eat Healthy and More Sustainable Food
In my opinion, there are two main things to consider here: time and taste. First it is important for the food options to be accessible and/or easy to prepare. If it is not, chances are we will resort to ordering take out, going to eat out or buying unhealthy (less healthy, whatever) alternatives. Also, a lot of the time I tend to stick to the same things because it is so damn difficult to think of options and to decide on something. So, my plan to tackle this is to:
have a ready to go list of recipes to choose from (this should help with both having an array of options and with reducing decision fatigue)
only include food we have tried and liked,
allow yourself to be flexible - the list can be expanded as time goes, but keep ‘the list’ as a tool for making meal planning easier. It does not mean it is something to prevent you from cooking something different, but something you can rely on when you don’t feel adventurous in the kitchen (which for me is most of the time)
make sure the recipes include lists of ingredients (to make it easier to shop for them when necessary)
make sure recipes cover all essential meals: breakfast, lunch, dinner and (maybe) snacks
make sure recipes cover all seasons – I live in an area where we still have four seasons (kind of) so I feel it is important (mainly for the sustainability goal) to make sure this is factored in, I am pretty sure the watermelons available in winter are not locally produced
make sure the recipes include healthy ingredients (as suggested by prior research)
Make it easier on you to eat healthy and sustainable food by preparing a list of quick and nutritious meals.
OK, this is getting too long. I’ll stop here for now. These are the basic ideas which should guide the process further. Can you relate with these goals? Do you feel there is something important that I have left out? Since I am experimenting myself, I would love to hear other opinions on this. I feel that a lot can be learned from sharing ideas so be sure that any comment, recommendation, objection etc. will be highly appreciated.
Next post coming soon
How to eat healthy – a personal challenge. Step 2: Define actionable steps
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