It can get a little monotonous listening to health professionals and other experts telling us we need to eat more healthily. I’m sure everyone knows that by this point. The trouble comes with converting that knowledge into action.
There’s a popular perception that eating healthy food is more difficult than dining exclusively on junk food. If you ask most people, they’ll say it’s harder to find, more expensive to buy and takes more time to prepare. Sometimes that’s true, especially if you live somewhere remote, like one of the areas known as a “food desert” because of the lack of access to fresh produce.
Despite this, some of the steps you can take to eat more healthy foods are actually pretty simple (https://www.bluezones.com/2021/06/7-things-to-do-now-to-make-healthy-eating-easy-and-fun/#). Not only that, they can make the whole cooking and eating process a fun thing that you can share with your whole family.
Where possible, you should buy local, seasonal ingredients. If they’re not available in your local stores, you may even try to grow your own. The priority needs to be placed on making as much fresh fruit and vegetables available as possible. If you have a bowl on your table with some of your favorite fruit constantly on display, that will encourage you to go there for snacks rather than to the chips or candy.
That’s because it’s not just about what’s physically available to you, but about how you use it. You need to make yourself want to eat more healthily. This may mean finding prominent places to stand your fruit and hiding your sugary snacks in a cabinet, or it may mean involving the rest of your family, or even friends, neighbors and the rest of the community, in food preparation.
Choosing ingredients and cooking together can be a powerful bonding experience as well as a way to improve your diet. You can then hold community events where everyone shares their different styles of cuisine as well as tips, tricks and advice. Perhaps they’ll introduce you to new ingredients and recipes. Food can become a shared celebration rather than an unfortunately necessary chore.
There’s a lot of room for creativity when it comes to food. As long as humanity has existed, it has taken the most unlikely ingredients and combined them in astonishing ways. Find the right mindset and you can do that, too.
