Healing with Food Article
Healthy Eating Habits
Accompanying recipe: Quinoa Pudding
Perhaps you decide to enjoy a better diet. But, notice how resolving to kick, for example, your chocolate habit, actually increases your cravings.
There’s a secret to transforming your negative food patterns into healthy daily habits. Here’s how to upgrade your health and increase your energy.
First, consider your current diet and your three best healthy eating habits. Name the ones that are as routine as brushing your teeth in the morning. Congratulate yourself for these important ways that you are self-nurturing. Note how each is just something you do without fuss, like watering your houseplants.
Healthy habits aren’t a burden. They’re habits. “With habituation, one can get used to anything” observed an 8th century Indian pundit, Tsong Khapa. Now, choose one new diet goal for yourself that you want to become a habit.
If it happens to be “eat less sweets” then that’s putting dessert before dinner. Instead, make a resolution to enjoy regular and nurturing meals. Do it. Then note how your sweet tooth naturally subsides. (And how it instantly comes back when you skip a meal or grab something on the run.)
Letting yourself be well-nourished at breakfast, lunch and dinner is a habit worth cultivating. And, it is do-able. With an upgraded diet, you will feel better, sleep better and have more energy.
Acknowledge that you’re ready to do what it takes. Don’t just think this thought and then let it slip into oblivion. It’s effective to speak your intention out loud and write out a plan with specific steps to implement it.
To help determine a skillful course of action, reflect upon the self-strategies you’ve used in the past to develop positive habits. Make shopping and cooking time a priority and schedule them into your daily planner. Cooking classes can be helpful, as is cleaning and organizing your kitchen.
One useful technique is One Pot--Three Meal technique. When you make a grain or protein, make enough for it to form the basis of your next three meals.
For example, if you’re steaming quinoa or roasting chicken, make enough for the next three meals. Don’t make enough for a week, that’s too much. Recall how disheartening it is to find a moldering dish in the fridge and have to toss it.
If, for example, it’s quinoa, enjoy quinoa plain as a side dish the first meal. For the second meal, put left over quinoa in a soup or a veggie or meat burger. For the next meal, make the rest into a comforting pudding.
If you want three meals from a roasted chicken, the first meal is chicken with various side dishes; the second might be a chicken sandwich and, for your third meal, put the bits and pieces into a soup or stir fry.
Enjoying more home cooking is do-able. Determine how you can make it habitual and then anticipate enhanced well-being.
May you be well nourished,
Rebecca Wood