Shocker: one of the biggest barriers people face when it comes to getting a healthy meal on the table every day is time. It’s kind of sad that we live in a culture where “busy” is a given – even glorified. Way gone are the days when people were home a lot, and food gathering and preparation was a key aspect of daily life. When women (yeah, it was always the women) all got together and shared in the process. Maybe it felt more like a healthy routine than a burden back then. Maybe the social aspect even made it fun! But alas, times have changed.
It’s worth thinking about the implications of our crazy lifestyles and this focus on time-saving. When convenience and speed become your primary goals, lots of healthy food possibilities fly off the table. Too many ingredients. Too many steps. Too much time required to make a protein main dish and two veggie sides. So we default to making (or buying) the same old 5 things we always make. The sure winners. Everybody likes them. They only take 15 minutes. But this restricts variety in our diet, and variety is one of the tickets to optimal health. You need a huge range of nutrients to support all of your systems. So having a boneless skinless chicken breast, rice and broccoli regularly is not truly healthy. It’s limiting.
Maybe you default to frozen foods, which can be totally fine on occasion, if they aren’t over-processed and full of nutritionally void or toxic ingredients. But they’re not as optimal as fresh. Then there’s take-out, which means you have no idea what ingredients you’re actually ingesting. But in mainstream restaurants, rancid oils, high fat and salt, cheap protein and non-organic veggies are pretty predictable.
So what’s the solution? The 5 P’s. A concept I learned about in nutrition school that forever changed the way I approach shopping, prepping and cooking. It may also be the corniest, most prim and proper saying I’ve ever heard: PROPER PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE. It this not School-Marm speak? But sometimes, old adages are still golden.
The simple truth is that planning is everything. If you wait until the last minute, you’re screwed. Thinking ahead about what you want to eat this week and shopping for it over the weekend is key, and it may be that many of you already do that. But there’s much more you can do to make cooking easier on yourself.
Before getting into tactics, I want to talk about mindset. Because the way we think and feel about cooking has everything to do with how we ultimately behave. If you see cooking as a chore, another goal, a “have-to” or a “should”, it’ll never work. Anything that feels like a burden will quickly be rejected, and rightly so. So spend some time thinking about how great it would actually feel to be prepared vs. under water. To be taking excellent care of yourself and your family. To enjoy your time in the kitchen vs. resenting it. This is all possible, but it may require a mindset shift and some practice. I suggest you do this before bothering with the stuff below. Set your intention, feel it, embrace it. Come up with whatever visions of you as a home chef are fun, fresh and believable.
Think about any areas of your life where you feel highly skilled – organized, experienced, efficient, confident. You have a system, a plan, a way of being that works. And it’s valuable!
Cooking may not be one of these areas right now, but there’s no reason it can’t be. YOU decide what you’re going to be good at. It’s a choice. And at the very least, it’s worth an experiment. Try for one month (or even one week!) to act in new ways. See how it feels to take more control, to be a master, to learn and grow. Spoiler alert: it feels really good!!
Now that you’ve got your head and heart on straight, check out some of my tangible tips for executing the 5 P’s.
