People eat for a variety of reasons. They’re bored, looking for an experience, need a reason to hang out with friends, or even to comfort or distract them from stress. The point is, food has become a much bigger part of our life aside from feeding us.
Fourteen years ago, I started eating for a completely different reason, and it’s made a massive difference in my life. Here’s why.
I grew up eating pretty healthy.
For growing up in relatively small towns, my parents were ahead of the whole “eat healthier” movement, and it rubbed off on us. I’ve definitely had my share of soda, chips, and frozen pizzas, but they also cooked most of our meals.
In high school, my eating habits took a nose dive, because at school we were allowed to leave campus and eat whereever we liked. I was eating fast food for most of my lunches, only to return to school to almost nap through my next class.
It took me long to catch on to how much food not only influenced how I looked, but how I felt. Pasta, sugary foods, and any type of bread would end up making me tired for hours after I ate them. My brain would be foggy, and I just wasn’t myself.
Once it finally clicked, it made it so much easier to care about what I ate.
Food is not worth giving up hours of my day to feel tired.
I now eat with the goal of feeling good – all the time. As long as I keep that in mind, my weight and health have taken care of themselves as well.
Sure, I LOVE eating pizza, pasta, breads, cereal, ice cream, and fried foods, but there isn’t a single food or taste worth trading hours of my life feeling tired for.
But….there’s a catch.
Eating healthy isn’t easy.
In your typical grocery store, you have to almost completely ignore 95% of what’s available. Healthy eating isn’t as profitable, so few companies cater to that crowd. It’s so much more profitable to make food people like, not what’s good for them.
To make eating healthy bearable, I had to change how I ate.
When I tried cooking full meals from scratch, it was just too time consuming to find recipes, buy the ingredients, cook, clean, and repeat all over again. I quickly realized this wasn’t sustainable.
Now, I find simple things I can either cook quickly or cook a lot of to save for multiple meals later.
I still care how things taste, but that is a far second to making sure I feel great after eating it.
A few of my favorites are:
They’re easy, use few ingredients, and a couple of them can easily be combined with other ingredients to make completely different dishes.
To eat healthy, you have to cook. If you don’t like cooking, you may want to upgrade some of your cookware. Besides making it easier and more enjoyable to cook, quality knives, pans, pots, etc. last a LONG time. I’m still using pans and knives I bought 14 years ago!
One thing that’s harder to upgrade, but has made it more enjoyable to cook is cooking with gas on our Ilve cooktop. Gas is easier to control, and it brings everything up to heat quicker.
We love our Ilve cooktop because it has a range of different burners. Large when you REALLY need some heat to bring a pot to boil or sear a steak, and a griddle in the middle which is perfect for making a lot of food at once or protein pancakes with the kids on a Saturday morning. You can remove the griddle to reveal a long burner underneath which would fit almost anything you need.
Just like a clean suit or new car makes you feel better, it’s just more enjoyable to cook in kitchen you want to be in using the proper tools. If it gets you cooking more, it’s one of the better investments you can make in your health.
**I have a new question I like to ask everyone, and I’d love to hear from you. Do you have a healthy recipe you make all the time? What’s your go-to meal?
A lot of my favorite new dishes come from recommendations from people like you, so please let me know in the comments below or shoot me an email here.
