THE BEST REASON TO CARE WHAT YOU EAT

October 6, 2007

Take all the time you need

Changing what you eat takes a thousand small steps, just like exercise. I could never stick to diets where I had to measure, much less weigh, food. True growth must be gradual or it doesn’t happen. We need time for new ways and ideas to stick.

Choosing to be in a hurry is like a premonition for failure. Don’t do that to yourself. Give yourself the time you need for new strategies to become such a part of you that you no longer have to think about them.

Food for creative thought.

Don’t start with your favorite food

The secret is to cancel out one small thing every week or two. Don’t start with a whole food category like ‘sugar’. At first, you’ll feel deprived. The old stuff that drags you down will clear out over time because you’ve decided that this will happen, but for awhile it will make pitiful attempts to hang on.

You are changing what you’re used to. It won’t happen in three days, but it will happen. Don’t spend time thinking about this; it is guaranteed to happen the instant you take a look around and say ‘I want to change the way things are’.

Lose a food you wouldn’t notice

At first, for some undecided period of time that doesn’t matter, eat less of something. Butter? Salt? Pick something easy. I’d pick salt because I don’t like it anyway. I could equally well pick bread, but I could never pick ice cream or cheesecake.

I buy the most boring No Name Brand ice cream ( a big weak point if it’s Ben&Jerry’s), so I might eat a teaspoon of it now and again but I really wouldn’t miss it even if it weren’t here. Whatever you pick, let yourself have some, just less.

Live by one new rule

Maybe it’s easier to decide to live by one new rule. One that I like is that I can only eat vegetables while I cook. The rule is not “no eating“. It’s too absolute. It’s hard to handle food all afternoon without some finding its way into your mouth.

So cut up a red pepper of some celery (raw green beans are my favorite) and go ahead and eat as much as you want, whenever you want. When you eat and cook, you don’t taste it anyway. You’re just eating because it’s in front of you and you’re thinking about food.

You can have anything you want

This is not about negatives. The constant message of ‘I can’t have this’ and ‘I can’t eat that either’ wears down your motivation. Though it’s very normal to be worn down before you build back up when you’re learning something new, it’s still hard to fight back. You can become discouraged.

The argument in your head has to be positive : there’s plenty of food and you can have as much of it as you want.

Ignore all the rules

Although we all agree that nutrition is one of the cornerstones of spectacular health, trying to adhere to a set of rules feels too restricted. I’m not great with rules. I can’t follow a recipe without changing things. Feeling controlled by ‘Thou shalt not’ dogma rubs against the grain of my personality.

I believe that for almost everything, there are as many ways of doing things as there are people doing it, and they’re all correct. There is no Universal Formula or we’d all be following it but that world would be beyond boring.

Expect your body to get better

Body changes will just happen. The only aspect worth dwelling on there is how it feels to know that something good in the future is certain to take place. You can’t doubt that your body will change if you eat differently. It happens to every human being.

We’re not concerned with the specifics of how it will change, it’s not ‘well, yeah, my body might change, but will it lose 20lbs?’, just that something is going to happen that will be good.

That’s a pretty useful thought pattern to get comfortable with because there’s a connection between you fully expecting this positive thing and it coming true. Once you know what it feels like to hold that belief in one area, it’s a lot easier to move it around into other areas of your life, for other things you might want to do, have, or become.

Your brain eats what you eat

So, it’s not about how your body looks. So what then? It’s about how your brain thinks. To have a clean, clear head, you need a clean and clear body.

You have so much power and ability in your head. Few among us can fully comprehend the depth of that notion. We’ve all been given ability beyond our wildest dreams – not ability to build a space station, but ability to be good to other people, to be imaginative and creative, to enrich our spirit with the staggering beauty in this world.

Food for a clear mind.

I know this to be true, and to the extent that I am able, I want to strive to get a little closer to understanding it. Time on this Earth passes fast. Don’t waste a second of it by just accepting where you are. Begin moving towards what you could be.

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Food & Recipes