Happy New Year! One healthy habit at a time.
Welcome to 2022! May this new year bring adventure, contentment, fulfillment and experiences that get you out of your comfort zone. You’re a perfect work in progress, so I would caution against beginning this year thinking in terms of resolutions. Resolutions are such a terrible way to start the year. Their scope is likely too large and unrealistic, they bring about a certain amount of dread with their all-or-nothing mentality, and often go by the wayside come February anyway. You deserve better than that. You deserve striking a sustainable balance that will still be working for you in January 2023.
Work instead on identifying opportunities to create bite-size habits to slowly head in the direction you desire. To borrow a core tenet of Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where I received my Integrative Nutrition Health Coach certification, focus on “crowding out” instead of depriving.
Crowding out can be applied to any habit, but let’s focus on food for today. So, this means that instead of telling yourself a particular food is prohibited (unless of course it would create serious life consequences for you), you intentionally increase what you want to do more of, thereby leaving little space for the food that’s not serving you. Maybe you’ve heard this as the 80/20 rule. So that over time you can create the balance you seek by forming a more sustainable habit, where food is seen as “always,” “sometimes,” “rarely;” but never “never.”
Let’s say ice cream is one of your favorite after-dinner desserts. Because of its amount of sugar, you would like to decrease how often you eat it, but are daunted by not having a sweet treat to eat in the evening. Maybe you could crowd out ice cream with fresh berries drizzled with honey five times a week and save that bowl of ice cream for once or twice a week. Key here is to decide which nights you will have that ice cream and very intentionally stick to it.
Or maybe you’d like to crowd out the number of days you eat take-out lunch, as opposed to bringing it from home. Write it down on a menu planner (like this one) that you hang up on the fridge. If Thursday is take-out falafel day, then so be it. But make sure you plan easy lunches you can make for the rest of the days so you’re not tempted to change course.
As you can see, this is all about setting small intentions around healthful habits; crowding out, not depriving; creating your game plan; and maintaining patience with yourself. If you “mess up,” you are not a lost cause who just needs to scrap it all and go back to all the old ways. Every day--every moment in fact--is an opportunity to begin again. If you find yourself mindlessly tossing some chocolate-covered nuts in your mouth, don’t beat yourself up; simply pause, reassess your goals, and drink a tall glass of water.
My 2022 wish for you, Healthy-Curious friends, is creating bite-size habits that stick, nourishing yourself with the food that best serves you, and striking that balance that brings you joy.
If you need some help in building this foundation of healthy habits and home-cooking skills that require some friendly coaching and accountability, head on over to my Contact page and let’s get started!
Happy New Year! Xoxo