Happy Tuesday!
Here are my interesting reads for the week:Food Boundaries
The first is about creating boundaries for yourself so you don't use food in a dangerous way, such as a tool to combat depression or intense emotions. Reading this article made me think of Why French Women Don't Get Fat and Mireille Guiliano's trick of personal boundaries when it comes to losing weight. For example, I kept a food journal for a few weeks and identified an afternoon snack from the vending machine as one reason why I was having trouble sticking to healthy food choices. Instead of using optional language: "I can get food from the vending machine, but only if I really need it," I use definitive language to create a boundary for myself: "I don't eat from the vending machine."I find that I am still tailoring my boundaries. I am trying to whittle my diet down to mostly vegetables for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which makes me uncomfortable when I am out with friends because I felt like they were judging me. It turns out that the reason they were being judgement was that I had made a big declaration that I was turning vegan and night after night more meat kept appearing on my plate. Whoops.
The lesson there is:
- I shouldn't make big announcements about a personal matter, because it is no one's business and I will just feel bad if I slip up; and
- instead of allowing myself to be persuaded by the peer pressure of everyone else's taste buds, I need to employ my definitive language trick again: "I do not follow the trend of the table."
Another boundary I have for myself is that I eat as nutritionally as possible when I am by myself because it helps me to focus on at least two meals a day being very nutritionally dense.
G-BOMBS
Well, isn't that an easy thing to remember. According to Dr. Joel Fuhrman, it stands for:
Greens
Beans
Onions
Mushrooms
Berries
Seeds
In order to get the most nutrition out of your diet, you should be eating these things every day. I tend to spread mine out by meal. I eat berries in the morning with greens or oatmeal for breakfast, greens with seeds, mushrooms and beans for lunch and beans, onions and other steamed veggies for dinner. Of course I normally have more than that, but it is nice to have basics to fall back on. I found this article that talks about eating for health.
