I’ve had several emails and conversations about cooking; actually, they’re about the dislike of cooking:(  Planning/shopping/prepping/cooking/packing,… the whole thing can be pretty time consuming and if you’re not used to it, very daunting.  The option of NOT cooking, just buying premade foods, going out to eat frequently, or serving pasta every night, is a really easy road to go down.  Like I always say, Big Food’s done a great job convincing us – for decades – that we don’t really need to cook because they’ve got our back.  Their stuff’s pretty much better than homemade, right? And we deserve it, right?  And the kids are super happy, right?

If you’re reading my Blog, then you know none of these assertions are right, they’re all wrong.  Big Food, premades, restaurant meals, simple pasta dinners – “for the kids” – they’ve made 70% of America overweight, and created disease and poor health like never before in history.  The health predictions for our children are absolutely disastrous.

Big Food is in BUSINESS to make money, and to be effective,  they use the best MENTAL strategies money can buy. (Beautiful, fit, healthy people chowing down on their foods; fun people happy with their food, etc…)  Now YOU’VE got to use YOUR best mental strategies to resist their hypnotic pull and get healthy.  You can do this, I swear.

Our daily habits and thoughts are patterns we’ve WORKED on for years.  Your cravings? Your attitudes? Your likes and dislikes?  You’ve pampered and nurtured them for quite a while. They seem real and solid, right?  Here’s what I’m talking about:  You’re tired at the end of the week, so you don’t feel like cooking.  You go out to a restaurant (because it is Friday after all), and completely indulge (because it is Friday, and you had a long week…).  The Super Hyper Palatable food stimulates pleasure receptors in your brain, and you feel Super Great while eating it.  Relieved, happy, satiated.  For a while.  If you over-indulged in carby, trans fatty, chemicalized foods, pretty soon the positive feelings are replaced with horrible feelings: uncomfortable fullness, indigestion, negative thoughts about yourself, and big plans to start all over tomorrow with a great diet plan.  Sounds like Addiction, right?  The Desire, the Action, the bad physical feelings, and then the assertion with yourself to Change The Behavior soon (again).  This is what I refer to as the Diet Ferris Wheel or Diet Roller Coaster.

The problem is, each time you repeat this pattern, or any pattern – good or bad, parts of your brain lay down “paths” (neurons) that will bring you back to this action over and over and over.  You can’t change your patterns without a solid plan to change your thoughts (where everything begins) and your attitudes ( how you feel, what you like..).  The good news?  This is Totally Possible!

Let’s take the one example of hating to cook: what if you meditated on “I love to make healthy, delicious, meals for my family”,  or “I can’t wait to Power Cook so I can watch my favorite show while I’m doing it”, or “Cooking relaxes me”? Whether these statements are true or not doesn’t matter.  What we say, what we focus on, it becomes real. (Think of your response to a nightmare, or some of your fears: heights, flying, strangers, … ) Another strategy:   What if you planned and made  a precooked meal for at least one of your weekend nights?  That way, when you’re legitimately tired at the end of the week, there’s very little effort required on your part.  What if you wrote notes of your goals? Or a list of habits and thoughts to work on?  There’s so many actions you could take to change your behaviors.

Honestly, getting healthy and/or losing weight is about the Food, but it’s really about your Mind.  No plan will work if you can’t stick to it, and really bad, ingrained habits make plans impossible to stick to.

That said, I’m going to be booking some dates later this month and into the next, afternoon and evening, to hold a Weight Loss Strategies Class.  I’ll be going over a little bit of Digestion and Blood Sugar Biology (because you need a “Why”!) and then Mental Tricks, Kitchen Tricks, and Cooking Tricks.  These classes will be about:  The Foods, The Reasons, The Mind, and The How-To of Losing Weight and Keeping It Off.   I’m going to hold 6, but really it will be just 3 different talks/subjects; I’m trying to cover the day and the evening people.  Come to each of the sessions to make some Real Changes in the way you view food, cooking, your health, and your weight.  All the details by the end of the week.

If you aren’t local and can’t join a class, please check out my Services page.  I do this all the time One-On-One via Phone or Skype.  It’s fun and it’s effective and it can be very personally tailored.  In the meantime, eat Real Whole Food!