Lucy Pagano Eating whatever you want, whenever you want.
Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?
But, it isn’t.
Today I’m going to walk through some challenges we all go through while trying to eat healthy. Along with techniques to overcome them and eat whatever you want, whenever you want.
For starters, you’ll notice that putting healthy, organic, and quality food onto your plate isn’t the challenge when it comes to eating healthy. We all know that we want to eat healthy. The challenges come up when you start thinking about things like cost, location, convenience, etc.
In order to spin things into your favor, I’m going to introduce a concept to you today which I call conscious eating. Not like the book, it’s not about being vegetarian. This technique will help to automate your decisions so that you spend less time thinking about how to eat healthy and more time just dumping the good food onto your plate and into your body without even thinking about it.
Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich, talks about a similar concept which applies to finances called conscious spending. In his article, he talks about a friend who spends $21,000 a year going out to just party.
And I know what you’re thinking. Who the hell spends $21,000 partying every year? And, why are we talking about personal finance on a fitness and nutrition blog?
Well, I’ll get to that in like a paragraph. Just hear me out.
See, Ramit’s friend spends a lot of money going out, but always pays himself first. Retirement, savings, and all other financial goals are met. THEN he spends the money that he has left over guilt free.
This same methodology can be applied to your diet. Eat good for the majority of your meals and invest in your health. Then eat whatever you want guilt free. In this article, I’ll break down the 3 pillars of conscious eating that you can use starting today to start eating organic, quality food cheaply and consistently. Here we go:
- Healthy Decision Making
- Grocery Shopping
- Eating Out
Healthy Decision Making
Planning healthy meals suck.
Not just what to eat, but how much it costs, where to get it, etc.
Such a hassle.
Eating healthy isn’t the biggest pain in the ass though. The decision making involved towards eating healthy is actually the real obstacle. More than anything else mentioned above.
Don’t believe me?
Our decision making ability throughout the day, like anything else in our body, is limited. Like fuel in a tank. When used up, we’re exhausted. A New York Times article about decision fatigue, cites a variety of studies showing this to be an actual phenomenon. Also known as “ego depletion”, a term coined by social psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister, showed that mental energy can be depleted. Furthermore, a connection between brain power and glucose was established. Judges who made decisions on parole, shoppers, and even nutrition decisions were altered when glucose level was low.
And if that isn’t enough, ask President Obama about decision making. In a Harvard Business Review article, he discusses how he limits his wardrobe to just blue and grey suits. The objective for him is to limit his decision making. Why?
Because he’s the president of the United States and he’s got some pretty fucking difficult decisions to make. You think he wants to waste time and energy on what suit to wear in the morning? Let alone reading a menu and making sure it’s healthy for him? Shit, we’ve all got a ton of decisions to make during the day, you and him both. Why waste energy towards decisions that can and should be relatively easy?
If you’re constantly making decisions though out the day, which I’m sure you are, making healthy eating choices becomes more of a burden. Face it. By the time dinner rolls around, we’re like, “Fuck it, I’m hungry and just want to eat then go to bed”. Easy, cheap, eat. That or you just give up on eating healthy altogether. Because your mentally drained and your decision making energy is gone.
Now you have two options:
- Conserve your mental energy for healthy decision making, taking away from other important decisions you have to make during the day
- Or, not even think about what what to eat, but go through a quick process to establish healthy eating habits
The idea behind conscious eating is to limit your capacity to make decisions and automate them so you don’t waste energy thinking about it. Making decisions is psychologically draining, so let’s automate them so you don’t have to make them to begin with.
Some planning is involved to make your healthy decision making easier. But, it’s like 5 minutes. And you only have to do it once a week. If you tell me that you don’t have 5 minutes to think about what to eat for the entire week – I’m just going call you out and say you’re a liar. That and you’re a liar.
In 5 minutes come up with 2 to 3 ideas for meals using this breakdown:
Protein + Fat + Carbohydrate
For example, here’s a couple of dinner meals I came up with based on this formula:
- Beef, avocado, and Mixed Spring Salad
- Eggs (protein and fat) with Spinach
You can use this formula to set up your weekly meals for the week. With 3 different combinations you can come up with 9 different meals. It’s an easy way to set up 5 to 6 days worth of eating healthy and automating what to buy.
You now have a couple of ideas for what you want to eat throughout the week. You can go the grocery store knowing exactly what you want to buy.
Grocery Shopping
Make the list, put it in your cart, get out, eat it. That’s it.
Similar principles I’ve talked about previously for grocery shopping apply here, like making sure that you have all your staples. You want to ensure that you have variety so your palette isn’t bored and you aren’t burning a hole in your wallet . . . or purse. You can read more about how to do that here.
And just remember that when you go grocery shopping, shop at the ends of the store. All produce and meat, no processed crap. Processed food is awful for you.
Every time you go to the grocery store you’ll be buying organic, healthy, quality food without even thinking about it. It will be routine. You’ll walk in, pick out what what you want from the based on the formula above, then leave.
(pic of money and plate
No cleaning out your bank account. No wasting energy on deciding what to buy. You can see what I’ve purchased based on my formula above and my receipt from Shoprite below.
If Grocery Shopping makes it easy for you to buy unhealthy food or if you’re too busy to go grocery shopping. No big deal. Here are some great options which I use myself to either resist buying something unhealthy or to make it easy on my schedule.
1. Fresh Direct
2. Green Polka Dot Box
3. Some grocery stores even provide delivery themselves, like the ShopRite in Hoboken.
The tricky part is when other circumstances are out of control. Like, let’s say you are at work and you have to go to lunch. Or you have a lunch meeting . . .
Eating Out
This one is tough. This is where it gets tricky to eat healthy. The easiest option is to just make lunch. If you’re doing that already then that’s great. You’re ahead of the game. If you’re like me though, lazy and don’t want to cook, I got you.
A quick and easy way to make sure you can eat healthy without having to think about it, is picking a couple of places around your office that you can go to. Sounds redundant but it saves time and should come as no surprise that your best friend here is going to be routine. Places where you know the menu and making healthy decisions for lunch will be a breeze. Right now, start identifying places to go to which are great for healthy food. For example, some places I go to around my office below:
1. Dig Inn
2. Chop’t
If I go to a lunch meeting, check out the menu ahead of time and order healthy. Worse comes to worse, be as healthy as possible and take the hit. Since you’re following the conscious eating plan, chances are you’re eating healthy 80 to 90% of the time anyway.
The same applies for eating out on the weekend. In fact, I encourage you to eat what you want. What’s the point of eating right and exercising without enjoying yourself right?
Bottom line is that it’s not hard to incorporate eating organic, healthy, and quality food into your lifestyle. Even though we make jokes about places like Whole Foods costing you your arm and life savings to get groceries.
Or, literally laughing out loud when reading an article on the Whole Foods blog about how to eat organic on a budget.
Better yet, Kelly MacLean talking about the actual Whole Foods shopping experience. Even more hilarious. Warning, don’t read it at work, it’s really funny.
Now, I really don’t have anything against Whole Foods. Actually love shopping there. It’s an experience. If you haven’t gone shopping there, you should. For real. I heard that there’s good food there too, just saying.
All in all, you can eat healthy food for the majority of the week. When the weekend rolls around you don’t have to worry about what is going on your plate. Eat whatever you want. I encourage you to. Invest in your health first, enjoy everything else guilt free. That’s what I call conscious eating.
By Andrew Kobylarz
Photo Credit, Rakka, chicagogeek, foodswings, kotomi_
PS – Sorry I’ve been out of commission for the past 3 weeks. Reason I’ve been on the low is because I’m releasing a FREE ebook! It’s available ONLY to my subscribers. If you want to get your free copy delivered to your inbox, sign up for my email list here or in the signup form below.
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