Is there a change you'd like to make, but don't know where to start?
There’s a lot of things we’d like to get better at, but ideas like “eat healthier” or “get more exercise” can feel lofty and difficult to start. How do you break it down and make those first steps?
What’s something you’d like to do, but could use a little extra boost to get started?
Echoing @Powderhorn it’s good to start with patterns and work your way to the details. New habits (behavioral patterns) like “eat healthier” feel lofty and difficult because they are too broad to be actionable. Identifying habit goals like this is a good first start - the next step is to examine the patterns in daily life that fall under “eating habits” (since “eat healthier” requires changing those patterns).
Meal Planning
Grocery Shopping
Meal Prep
Storage & Usage
and so on each have actions that make up the habits. Adding a new action, or changing one, represents a concrete step to be taken. Under Meal Planning, that might be “one new dish each week”, “one vegan meal each week”, or “unfamiliar vegetables as a side twice a week”. Ones for Meal Prep might be “prep two meals on _____day” or “weekly lunch prep allows x many calories”.
Taking the smaller concrete steps are what give momentum to habit changes and enable larger commitments as successes compound.
I find it useful to define goals and then determine means. Blindly following “common sense” suggestions is how one ends up with an unused gym membership.
I’ll begin - as great as it would be to go full vegan, it’s difficult to imagine for a few reasons:
I cannot eat nuts
I often share meals with a family who loves beef and red meat and is hesitant to try alternatives
Dairy alternatives are generally more expensive
The main reasons I would like to reduce my consumption are to lower my carbon footprint (looking at you, cow farts) and unethical treatment of animals, especially the more intelligent ones (controversial, but if I’m eating meat I feel better about fish or chicken products than pork and cow).
I discovered that just getting off of dairy made a massive difference in how I feel daily. It takes a few days after stopping dairy consumption for the difference to become noticeable, then a few weeks to a couple months before it makes major changes. The effects are probably difficult for most people to detect, unless they eat dairy and notice the effects directly after.
I am partially disabled from a barely-survived hit by a couple of cars while riding a bicycle to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have a single major physical failure point but instead a whole lot of scar tissue and vertebral bone damage. I’ve tried painkillers for years in the past without much effect, and this seems to have contributed to how I process dairy. However, my reason for mentioning it is that I am particularly sensitive to inflammation. Getting off of dairy completely made as much if not more of a difference for me than painkillers. Looking back at what I considered minor stomach issues and minor daily ups and downs of life before I was disabled, the low spots were likely impacted by dairy to a large extent.
The easiest way to get off of dairy is to realize the majority of the world population does not consume dairy. Therefore, it is quite easy to find good foods to try if you start exploring foreign foods. I started with Chinese food, and still cook fried rice weekly.
I am relatively young, still in my 30’s and I was an amateur bike racer before the last crash. I still ride nearly daily. The majority of damage to my back is thoracic, (between the shoulder blades and up), and I can setup a bike to keep that part of my back neutral. I just can’t turn my head to see over my shoulder…or hold standing, or sitting upright posture for more than 1 hour.
While I’m not the ideal end goal in my situation now. I managed to ride from 350lbs in 2009, to 190lbs by 2013. Commuting hardcore helped for sure, and lead to a lot of other healthy activities. That started because I was broke after a failed business and ditching a car saves a ton of money. The real secret to losing weight though is not exercise. All you need to do is negotiate with yourself to make better choices over time, and eat far more often, but far less at any point in time. In fact, I have trouble getting my weight under around 220lbs. The way I managed to do it in 2013 was to reduce my exercise regime and spend longer stretches with rigid consistency. In other words I stopped doing super long rides that caused my calorie requirements to fluctuate substantially.
The real trick to negotiating food with yourself is to assess your habits and try to either reduce consumption or make a shift to a healthier alternative. Maybe you eat oreos on the daily. How many. Can you work on one less every time. Okay, you’re down to your last two beloved oreos but only barely half satisfied. What if you traded you 2 oreos for 5 fig Newton’s in your routine… What if you traded an apple for those 2 fig Newton’s. Be a good negotiator on both sides. You are already, likely, subconsciously engaged in this internal debate. Consciously addressing and influencing the debate is the real key. No one gains the weight over night, and no one can lose it over night either. Weight is a matter of millions of choices over time and the only factor is a feather weight on the scale. Punishing yourself only instigates an internal rebellion. That negativity is useless. This is all a diet is; punishment and shaming. It is ineffective for many people. No one becomes a pro at anything just because they make a first attempt. Healthy eating is a skill too. It takes time. Expecting to flip a switch with a diet is dumb. In the real world, circumstances dictate appropriate behavior. Going to a party or wedding concerned about some arbitrary diet is idiotic. Considering your commitment to health as a failure because of one bad day or meal is equally dumb. The trick to losing weight is shifting a feather on a scale. It is an internal conscience philosophical commitment that only involves back burner awareness and minor adjustments. Do whatever you like with this info. It upsets some people when I have shared my musings on diets. I will say, I don’t count calories, I am 220lbs at 6’1" now and I have spent ~80% of every day laying in a bed since 2/26/2014. In my opinion, my experience of coming from being very overweight, losing so much, and keeping it off even under a worst case scenario should mean something.
Sorry if length offends. Hopefully it is interesting.
Not offended at all - in fact, I think it’s awesome that something I wrote inspired you to write such a thorough piece in response 😄
Funnily enough, dairy is probably the most difficult for me…I come from a family that drinks milk with every meal. Not to mention cheese…
I like your advice about making small swaps. The oreos -> fewer oreos -> fig newton -> apple pipeline is a great example. In my case, baby steps like having a hamburger and a different beverage when it’s cheeseburger night may be the way to start. Thank you.
It actually took me getting so sick from eating bad that stuff like fast food has become repulsive. I managed to keep the repulsion as a kind of mental block. I spent almost 2 years riding 300-400 miles a week. When you need ~4k+ calories just to break even every day, the quality of those calories starts to matter quite a lot. Anything low quality that tends to sit in the gut for too long will cause major issues long term. Like I could feel eating anything from Macdonald’s for 2-3 days. I don’t know how they are so bad but even a salad was bad news. The one that made me say never again was their frozen coffee drink thing. Even that cost me days of misery. My most fundamental food rule is to only eat stuff that looks like it grows.
Dairy seems far harder than it is in practice. If nothing else, try seeking out vegan deserts. They really can be just as good and in many cases better. They usually have much better quality ingredients and you’ll feel better for the subsequent day or two after, especially if you tend to have something sweat in the evening.
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