When Greg and I started to eat better, it took us almost a year before we were ready to stop buying dairy and meat altogether. Over the course of those months, we made small change after small change until they all added up to a completely different way of eating. It felt natural and it was a lot easier than going cold turkey. Our preferences gradually changed and we started to crave what was good for us rather than craving all the food we had been addicted to previously. For example, last night I got a craving for steel-cut oatmeal made with nothing but water and a little agave. Seriously. It was weird.
Maybe you find yourself in a situation where you’re gradually changing your diet. Maybe you find the idea of completely overhauling your diet to be overwhelming or cutting out dairy to be too much. Let’s look at some other ways that you can start to improve your diet that will get you ready for bigger changes.
1. Read about food:
Read far and wide about the nutritious effects of eating a plant-based diet. Read anything about food. Cross-stitch information about food and see who agrees and who disagrees and what the evidence is, then make your own decisions about what you think is the right way to eat. Just reading and thinking about nutrition in food is a big step for starting a better diet. It makes it more difficult to eat the foods that you know have no nutritional value on a regular basis.
Our favorite books on food so far are: The China Study
I also like to read while I’m eating, so sometimes I will search for the foods that I’m eating to reinforce how I feel about them. If I’ve just added some ground flax seed to my morning oatmeal, I might check out the health benefits of flax on whfoods.com or in wikipedia. It helps me feel positive about the food I’m eating, and believe it or not, makes it taste better.
2. Stop buying the foods that you don’t want to eat:
This sounds hard, and it is. And it’s going to be exponentially harder if you live with people who will resist your changes or ignore them and buy their own food. But if you just don’t buy foods that are bad for you, then it will be much more difficult for you to eat them. If you’ve got a stockpile of something in a cabinet somewhere, you’re going to dig into it in your weak moments, and weak moments can happen everyday.
Try phasing junk food out one item or two items at a time. It might be hard to even know at first what should stay and what should go, so read those books and change at your own pace. Once you get used to not eating certain foods at home, you desire them much less. Your preferences and cravings start to change. Which leads me to #3.
3. Buy more fruit & vegetables, splurge in the produce aisles:
Yesterday I saw a Peapod truck advertising that ordering groceries online would reduce the number of impulse buys that one makes at the grocery. But when you’re shopping in the produce aisles, impulse buys should be encouraged. In-season produce is less expensive than other produce and it looks fantastic and appetizing. Even out-of-season stuff that’s shipped in from the other hemisphere is usually inexpensive and it’s full of nutrition, even if it’s not organic. Don’t refrain from buying fruit and veggies because they aren’t organic – the food you buy in boxes and bags in the other aisles or the meat or dairy that you might buy isn’t going to be organic either, nor is it going to be so nutritious as fruit and vegetables.
Related posts:
- Affordable Ways to Eat Organic
- Affordable Ways to Eat Organic Part II
- Who says Organic Milk is Safe?
- Crystalline Fructose
- Healthy Lunch for Work
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