health

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Permanent Healthy Eating Habits: The Perfect New Year’s Resolution

Yes, we’ve made it to the last full week of the decade! It’s certainly been an interesting one, and the next one promises to be even more so 🙂

It’s usually around this time of the year that people start coming up with some grandiose New Year’s resolutions. Mostly, these resolutions are linked to diet and/or exercise. And sadly, they rarely make it past January. 

This week, we’ll talk about three great resolutions for the new decade, paying particularly close attention to one key detail: actually making it happen. 

The key to a successful New Year’s resolution

If you promise yourself you’ll go on a diet from the 1st of January, let me save you the trouble. It ain’t gonna happen, at least not for the long run. 

The one and only way to successfully achieve a New Year’s resolution is to change your environment so that actions consistent with your goal happen automatically. It’s well worth reading this long sentence a couple of times. 

If you commit yourself to the latest fad diet inspired by access to a fresh new decade, you’ll soon end up relying on willpower alone. And, over time, willpower always runs out. 

Diet vs. lifestyle change

The weight loss industry is one of the most fascinating constructs of our affluent modern society. In the United States, for example, this industry is worth $72 billion, significantly more than the clean energy industry. 

Yet, the long-term success rate of diets and other weight loss schemes hovers around 5%. This means that almost all of those 72 billion dollars might as well have been burned. 

The rather obvious reason for this great failure has been discussed earlier: the powerful cravings that kept us alive through millennia of extreme scarcity are still just as strong in today’s world of great affluence.

We’ve evolved to eat for our very survival and, in today’s world with hyper-palatable nutrient-free treats around every corner, an obesity epidemic is a pretty obvious result. 

Fad diets and exercise gizmos are powerless against millennia of evolution. Indeed, the only way to victory is to gradually implement permanent lifestyle changes that automatically control our primitive cravings. 

This is what we’ll be doing over the next three days. So, stay tuned… These strategies could help create a New Year’s resolution that actually happens, making the 2020’s your best decade ever 🙂

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Recap: Building Permanent Healthy Eating Habits

We all have a pretty good idea of what we should and shouldn’t eat. The real challenge is actually implementing this common sense, consistently. 

That’s why the last two weeks were dedicated to strategies for building permanent healthy eating habits, allowing optimal nutrition to happen naturally. Let’s summarize how this can be done.

The checklist

There are five categories of foods that should be an integral part of healthy living. To automate our consumption of these foods, we need to maximize taste, practicality and affordability. Here’s how this can be done:

  • Nuts, seeds and berries: Here we focused on maximizing the practicality and affordability of this surprisingly tasty superfood combo, particularly through bulk purchases of seeds. 
  • Raw green veggies: These green nutrient bombs taste rather bland, but things like a green drink and smart combinations with other tasty foods can make them regulars in your diet.
  • Cooked veggies, mushrooms and beans: This strategy revolves around the use of meat and other flavors to include surprisingly large quantities of these colorful bits of health into cooked meals. 
  • Fish and eggs: The convenience of smoked and canned omega-3 fish and scrambled eggs or omelettes make these high quality protein sources easy to include. 
  • Avocado (and other fruit): Here we discussed the fine art of avocado ripeness management together with several ways to make fruit consumption even easier. 

Next, we need to keep self-destruct foods out of our lives. A strong defense against the world’s worst foods that lurk around every corner in your local supermarket looks like this: 

  • Refuse to pay for self-destruction: Trading time, effort, vitality and life expectancy for fleeting endorphin highs is a truly terrible deal. Realizing this on a deep level is a great first layer of defense.  
  • Healthier snacking: Sometimes really tasty treats can actually have some longer-term benefits. For these rare occasions, choosing healthier alternatives makes all the sense in the world. 
  • Home-made meals: Taking care of your health becomes a lot easier when you take direct control of what goes into your body. Home-made food also makes overeating much less likely. 
  • Whole foods: Buying more whole produce is a great way to keep self-destruct foods out of your life. Getting into the habit of reading food labels can also add many good years to your life. 

So there you have it. These strategies combine very nicely to build healthy nutritional habits that last a (considerably longer) lifetime 🙂

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Keep It Fresh and Whole

Committing to buying whole and fresh produce is a great way to protect yourself against self-destruct foods. As a simple rule, the less processing a food has to undergo before ending up in your stomach, the better.

But first we need a proper understanding of what the terms “whole” and “processed” actually mean. 

The wholeness scale

Broadly speaking, there are four levels of food wholeness:

Right at the top, we have whole foods that have not been processed at all. These are things like fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, fish, eggs, milk and meat. They are generally good and healthy. 

One level down, we find mildly processed food. These foods remain healthy because they have been processed using methods and ingredients you could conceivably replicate at home. Whole foods that have been frozen, dried, smoked, baked or juiced fall in this category. However, any added sugar downgrades the food another level. 

The next step down is processed food. This is where we need to start exercising some caution. Processed foods are still based mostly on whole foods, but must be made in a factory and often involves some added sugar. Common examples include whole wheat cereals, sweetened fruit juices, canned food, yogurt, processed meats, cheese, chocolate and beer.  

Right at the bottom, we find ultra-processed foods. These should be avoided outright. Any food that is based on refined carbohydrates or trans fats or includes any ingredient you cannot instinctively identify will fall in this category. Examples include candy, soft drinks, white bread, packaged pastries, as well as most chips, breakfast cereals and biscuits.  

In general, any food that comes in colorful packaging or clearly does not look like it comes from nature should be viewed with skepticism. Develop the habit of reading food labels. It really is quite enlightening! 

Go whole or go home

As a general rule, try to get over 80% of your calories from whole or mildly processed foods. Processed foods can be added in moderation after careful study of the food label to make sure it is not ultra-processed. Ultra-processed foods should be avoided as much as possible. 

These days, eating whole is not so hard anymore. It just needs a little bit of awareness. Give it a go! I think you’ll like it 🙂

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Tell Your Body You Care with Home-Made Food

Two weeks ago this time, I was ranting about everything that’s wrong with convenience-first foods: how easy they make overeating, how low they prioritize health, and how much additives they contain. 

Well, the antithesis of convenience-first food is home-made food. There are few things that that say “I care” quite as well a home cooked meal. So, why not let your body know you care every day?

Why home-made?

Convenience foods generally put taste first because they must sell in large volumes to a broad client base to be profitable. Making healthy convenience food is much harder because it is more complex and will appeal to a smaller segment of the market. 

That’s why home-made is so important. Each one of us needs to find their own zero-compromise healthy meal plan. This will look different for different people, and the only way to cater for this diversity is to make most of your food at home. 

Home-made food naturally has a little bit of resistance built into it, making overeating much less likely. It will also generally use fresher ingredients, avoiding the intensive processing and additives typical of convenience-first foods. 

Home-made does not mean hours in the kitchen

A home-made meal does not need to take more than a couple of minutes to prepare. As some examples, take a look at these breakfasts and potential dinners using avocado or egg.

Even cooked meals do not need to be that much effort. If you cook easily freezable meals in bulk, it can work out to as little as 5 minutes of active prep-time per meal. 

Anyone has time to spend 3 minutes on a delicious and nutritious breakfast, 7 minutes on a nice warm lunch, and 5 minutes on a small and simple dinner. 

Take stock

So, what percentage of your meals are home-made? Anything where you combine three or more whole and nutritious ingredients can count.

If you’re below 90%, it may be time to do a little bit of thinking. Don’t worry, not much thinking is required, just enough to do a little search and start trying some new things. Once you get started, this interesting challenge and it’s great rewards will keep you going. 

Your body is the most important possession you have. Show it that you care with regular home-made meals 🙂 

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The Case for Healthier Snacking

Yesterday’s post discussed just how bad of a deal purchasing empty calories actually is. But if these treats occasionally come to you for free at a fun social event, they’re not so bad.  

There are also some times when buying sugary or buttery treats can actually be useful. Maybe you’ve had a truly terrible day and really need something to lift your mood to a more productive state. Or maybe you just need to take a tasty snack to a social gathering. 

For these cases, it’s very useful to do a little bit of thinking about upgrading the health value of the treats we buy. 

Healthier but still pleasurable 

The whole point of culinary treats is the instant pleasure (endorphin release) they deliver. Sometimes, this burst of instant pleasure can break a sour and unproductive mood or contribute to a joyful social experience, bringing genuine longer-term value. 

Empty calorie carbs and fats are hard to beat when it comes to delivering this endorphin boost. But luckily, there are healthier instant pleasure snacks out there. You just need to look.   

My personal favorite is a combination of yogurt nuts and sweet chili nuts. Nuts covered in chocolate are not far behind. Dark chocolate is another good option. 

Fresh strawberries, raspberries and/or blueberries also work well as healthy treats. Some molten chocolate on top can really get those endorphins flowing 🙂 

But there really are tons of other options out there. Just Google “healthy snacks” and you’ll discover a whole new world. 

Priorities

The challenge with healthier culinary treats is that they are often more expensive than the endless assortment of empty calories lining the shelves at your local supermarket. 

Here, the best advice is to simply make a rule: it’s either healthier snacking or no snacking. The logic behind this rule is simple:

  1. Snacking is supposed to deliver instant pleasure, which can be genuinely useful under certain circumstances.
  2. There are plenty of reasonably healthy snacks that can deliver this instant pleasure just as well as empty calorie carbs and fats. 
  3. Any money or effort saved by choosing cheap empty calories instead will need to be payed back 10-fold in lost vitality and life expectancy.
  4. If you can’t get yourself to pay for healthier snacks, you clearly don’t need instant pleasure badly enough for snacking to be useful.  

Also keep in mind that, when you choose healthier snacks for a social event, you’re not only boosting your own vitality and life expectancy, but also that of your friends. 

This logic needs to sink in pretty deep to really start influencing real day-to-day actions. But once it gets internalized, you can finally put the days of spending your hard-earned money on self-destructive empty calories behind you 🙂 

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Refuse to Pay for Self-Destruction

Over the coming week, we’ll be building our defenses against the world’s worst foods. And given the dizzying array of endorphin-releasing treats offered by today’s vast instant pleasure industry, these defense had better be super strong. 

It all starts with a simple realization: Every time we purchase these unhealthy treats, we’re exchanging the time and effort we put in at work together with our vitality and life expectancy for a couple of minutes of instant pleasure. 

Just let that sink in for a couple of seconds…

Yep, whichever way you look at it, this is a horrible deal. Yet, it’s made billions of times per day across the world. Today’s post discusses the simple and obvious solution.

Refuse to purchase empty calories

Empty calorie carbs and fats taste great, but they load the body with a whole lot of calories with no nutrients. As discussed earlier, this is like running an engine on low-grade fuel and never servicing it. 

The simplest solution is to refuse to enter into the terrible deal described above. And this takes nothing more than a couple of seconds of discipline when you’re at the shops. 

Recall the crux moments we discussed earlier. If you give in and purchase some empty calories, you’re locking in unhealthy eating habits for the near-term future. But if you can resist this urge for just a few seconds until you’re out of that environment, the craving will often vanish before you know it. 

Not all bad

But what about the times when you’re in a fun social situation where you’re offered some empty calories for free? In this case, you don’t lose any money and build some relationships, sweetening this sour empty calorie deal. 

Sure, the deal is still not great, but it’s at least tolerable. This is what I like to call the 2-out-of-3 rule. It means that any food you eat should be at least 2 out of the following 3 things: healthy, tasty and free. 

Of course, if you’re in the deceptively dangerous position of getting empty calories for free all the time, this is not a good idea. But for most people, adhering to this simple rule will strike a good balance between health and social ease. 

Indeed, if you nurture your body with lots of nutrient-rich foods for 20 of the 21 meals in the week, it can handle one or two fun and unhealthy excursions. 

So, in conclusion, there’s no need to be a health prune and refuse some tasty snacks at a social event. But there’s even less need to spend your hard-earned money on your own self-destruction. 

As is often the case though, there are one or two exceptions. We’ll get to those tomorrow. 

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Making Avocado (and Other Fruits) Part of Your Life

We’ll finish off the week with my personal favorite: the avocado (with a supporting cast of other fruits). 

These guys are luckily also one of the easier groups to include in a healthy diet, so this post will be appropriately short for a Friday 🙂

Let’s talk strategy

Avocado and other fruit are very tasty, very practical and quite affordable. Thus, there are no real barriers to making them a bigger part of your culinary life. 

But there are still some things we can do to make it even easier and more rewarding.

  • Learn to properly select and ripen avocados as outlined in the previous post.
  • Commit to keeping a bowl of varied fruit somewhere where you can easily see it.
  • Look for some services delivering fruit baskets to companies in your area and petition your boss to use this service to improve team health. This is a win for all involved!

Easy meals

My default dinner is crushed avocado on seed sprinkled dried bread with some Aromat seasoning and smoked salmon on top. To me, this is the ideal combination of health, taste and convenience. 

For those who like a little more variety in their lives, there are many other ways to enjoy avocado in things like salads and dips. It’s said that avocado makes salads even healthier by encouraging the absorption of nutrients. 

Fruits are even simpler. It’s worth maximizing convenience by buying fruit that does not have to be pealed, seedless grapes and fruit juices. Just make sure you select 100% fruit juice with no added sugar, preferably with some fruit fibers still inside. 

As stated in the previous post, it is possible to eat too much fruit. So, don’t go crazy. On average, more than three fruits and one glass of juice per day might introduce some moderate health (and dental) risks. 

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Making Fish and Eggs Part of Your Life

From a health and environmental point of view, fish and eggs are king among animal proteins. If you choose free-range eggs and sustainably caught or farmed fish, they also score high on animal welfare.

Even so, most people still prefer meat. This post will attempt to make fish and eggs so attractive that they relegate meat to the “vegetable dressing” role described yesterday. 

Let’s talk strategy

To become a natural part of our lives, food needs to satisfy three criteria: great taste, high practicality, and reasonable cost. 

Objectively speaking, the taste gap between meat and fish is pretty small. Often, it’s more about what you’re used to. 

But change can be difficult. For some, knowledge about the health and environmental aspects of meat (particularly red meat) vs. fish & eggs will suffice. If you care about these important topics, use it to drive positive change in your eating habits. 

Aside from these motivators, we can also do a lot to maximize taste and convenience at a reasonable cost. 

In terms of practicality, cold smoked salmon and canned mackerel are great options. Both of these great omega-3 sources are super convenient for making a light and healthy dinner (see next section). 

Some simple cooking skills will also help a lot. We should all know one or two good recipes using locally available fish. Proper scrambled egg and omelette should also be in anyone’s skillset. 

Fish could present a challenge when it comes to budgeting. Omega-3 fish like salmon can get pretty expensive, but there are cheaper options like mackerel or sardines. Adjust the amount of fish you eat based on local price and availability. Luckily, eggs are affordable almost everywhere. 

Light and practical meals

It’s a good idea to maximize variety by regularly eating oily fish, white fish and eggs. Oily fish is very convenient in smoked or canned form, whereas white fish is often sold in convenient fillets. Scrambled egg or omelette can be made in less than 5 minutes. 

I have six main fish and egg meals. The first is my staple avocado and smoked salmon dinner, which we’ll get to tomorrow, but my two secondary dinner options fit perfectly with today’s theme:

  • Omelette filled with canned mackerel in tomato sauce with cucumber on top. Only add the cucumber before each bite and it will add a very pleasant crunchy texture to the culinary experience. 
  • Scrambled eggs with sweet chili sauce on spinach leaves. These healthy leaves are a very useful utensil for eating scrambled eggs 🙂

Over weekends I make one of three fish recipes:

  • Salmon with beetroot. This is just some salmon fillets seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and lemon with some pickled beetroot on top. It’s ready after 16 minutes in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius and works particularly well with barley rice and mango chutney. 
  • Baked pollock fillet with mixed vegetables. Some convenient crusted fillets are baked for 20 minutes with mixed veggies at 200 degrees Celsius. The crust may not be very healthy, but it makes it much easier to supersize the vegetable portion.
  • Salmon instead of meat for the barbecue. The usual salt, pepper, garlic and lemon seasoning combo works very well here too.  

So, check out your local fish availability and invest some time to learn to prepare it in a tasty, healthy and practical way. That little bit of time invested in learning will pay you back handsomely!

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Making Cooked Veggies, Mushrooms and Beans Part of Your Life

Many of the super-healthy plant-based ingredients that can be used in cooked meals face a similar problem to the raw green veggies discussed yesterday: they fail to deliver instant pleasure. 

The good news is that cooked food offers much greater possibilities to add great taste to these health sensations. That will be the core of today’s strategy for making these superfoods a permanent part of life. 

Let’s talk strategy

I grew up on a very meat-rich diet and my mom had a tough time getting me to eat some veggies. But as I learned more about health and environmental issues of high meat consumption, this changed. 

Today, I see meat as a glorified vegetable dressing. In other words, meat’s main purpose is to make vegetables super tasty so that daily consumption becomes totally natural. 

There are countless ways to combine meat with vegetables, mushrooms and beans, but dishes based on minced meat are the most practical. In my case, these dishes are made once a month in bulk and frozen in convenient containers. 

My three preferred minced meat dishes are listed in the next section. To further reduce meat consumption and increase variety, I replace one third of the meat with soy mince. 

It really is remarkable how little meat you need to make vegetables genuinely delicious. Less than 5% of my calories come from meat, but this lowly 5% is leveraged to turn a much larger amount of veggies, mushrooms and beans into genuine taste sensations.   

“Vegefying” meat recipes

The bulk of my 5% meat intake comes from three recipes: lasagne, bobotie, and chili con carne. There are tons of these recipes on the internet, so you can take your pick. 

But these are just examples. It’s the principle that is important. I strongly encourage you to think carefully about how you can leverage the meat dishes you enjoy today to maximize your consumption of veggies, mushrooms and beans.

Here are the vegetables that work best in my three core dishes: 

  • Lasagne is great for including copious amounts of mushrooms, onion, peppers and eggplant. In addition, it works surprisingly well with raw spinach leaves on the side. 
  • Bobotie is strongly flavored, so it goes brilliantly with a rather bland mix of cooked vegetables. Frozen packs of mixed vegetables are perfect for this purpose. 
  • Chili con carne can accommodate lots of beans, carrots, peppers, onions and chili. The spicy nature of this dish facilitates surprisingly large quantities of vegetables. 

The general formula is very simple: choose your vegetable and gradually increase the concentration each time you make your favorite meat dish until you reach a limit where the taste starts dropping.

Don’t rush it. Make a small increase every time and, before you know it, you’ll be eating loads of healthy veggies without even noticing it!

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Making Raw Green Veggies Part of Your Life

Humans are instinctively driven towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. For this simple reason, it’s pretty hard to make raw green veggies a permanent part of life. 

They’re not exactly painful to eat, but there are tons of other foods that are way more fun. And even though these other foods may be vastly inferior in their offers of vitality and life expectancy, we prefer them because of our primitive drive towards instant pleasure. 

That’s the challenge we must overcome to make raw green veggies a permanent and natural part of our diet.

Let’s talk strategy

Recall that permanent adoption of a healthy food requires only three elements: great taste, high practicality and reasonable cost. 

In this case, taste is the key challenge. One effective strategy for getting around this problem is to combine these veggies with very delicious foods. Yes, drowning a few spinach leaves in an enormously rich cheese sauce will erode most of the benefits, but there are plenty of other options. 

My personal favorite is having raw spinach leaves with lasagne. These leaves work just as well with scrambled egg. Get a pack of spinach leaves and try them with various good meals. You might be as pleasantly surprised as I was 🙂 

But the most effective strategy for getting a regular fill of raw green veggies is the green drink recipe given below. This drink is a very practical way to regularly consume a variety of raw green veggies and it tastes at least reasonably good.  

It’s very important to make the drink in bulk as outlined below. Expecting yourself to go through the process of making a fresh green smoothie every day borders on self-delusion. The green drink needs to be waiting for you in the fridge to be consumed with minimal effort. 

Green drink recipe

This recipe takes about 45 minutes to make enough green drink for three months. The green drink is frozen in small plastic containers that can be defrosted on demand. Once defrosted, it will keep in the fridge for about 4 days. 

Equipment:

  • A smoothie maker with at least 1 liter capacity
  • About 15 plastic containers with a capacity of about 300 ml each 

Ingredients:

  • 400 g of spinach
  • 200 g of kale
  • One bunch of celery
  • Six cucumbers
  • Six apples
  • One medium size ginger root
  • Turmeric, cayenne pepper or any other spices
  • 1.2 liter 100% orange juice with fruit pieces

Guidelines:

  1. Wash all the ingredients.
  2. Chop up the celery, cucumbers, apples and ginger into large chunks.
  3. Separate the chopped ingredients, spinach and kale into six equally sized and evenly mixed piles.
  4. One by one, put the piles through the smoothie maker with 200 ml of orange juice and some spices according to your taste.
  5. After each batch, pour the resulting green smoothie into the small plastic containers for freezing. Only fill each container about 80% to avoid a mess from expansion of the liquid in the fridge. 

That’s it. For 15 minutes per month, you can have a permanent supply of highly convenient green goodness 🙂 I’ve been doing this consistently for the past eight years and some family members also found it quite easy to incorporate into their lives. 

I dilute the final product with more orange juice before drinking, but if you can drink it straight up, so much the better. 

Give this a go and see what happens 🙂

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