10PRINCIPLES FOR A GOOD FOOD DAY

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It’s easy to get bogged down in the constantly evolving, sometimes confusing details of healthy eating advice. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to a good food day, and your own definition of it may change over time.

1 Eating must be enjoyable. On a good food day, eating is still a primary source of pleasure. With quality ingredients, a few basic cooking skills, and the recipes, you can create meals that are so delicious and satisfying, they feel indulgent. Deprivation isn’t the solution—satisfaction is.

2 Cooking empowers you to eat better. By cooking your own food, you’re in control of what goes in your body, and you won’t eat nearly as much sugar, salt, and fat as what you’ll get with processed foods. As Michael Pollan said, “Cooking, transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appealing things for us to eat and appealing things for us to eat and

3 Proper prior planning prevents piss-poor performance. Feeding yourself (and others) the right foods requires thought and planning. You don’t want to have to cook every time you need to eat, so plan to make larger batches of leftover-friendly foods that can be repurposed into new meals. It might seem overly time-consuming at first, but once you establish a system—planning meals, choosing a shopping day, and making a schedule for cooking days—it becomes a reflex.

4 Get in sync with Mother Nature. In-season ingredients check every important box: They are better tasting, more nutritious, higher quality, and more affordable. As seasons and ingredients shift, so should your cooking methods. You don’t want a slow-cooked stew on a hot summer day or a cold tomato salad in the dead of winter, right?

5 Quality ingredients are everything. The closer a food is to its whole form, the better. The surest path to finding quality ingredients is your local farmers’ market, where everything is fresh and in season. At a supermarket, organic becomes more of a priority because certified organic foods are held to a higher standard of production. Choose the highest-quality option you can afford.

6 Eat real food. Many processed foods have artificial ingredients, chemicals, additives, and excess salt, sugar, and potentially harmful types of fat. This can be true even if the food is organic or from a health food store, or screams buzzwords like “whole grain!” on the package. If you buy processed foods, ignore the labels and let the ingredient list be your guide. Look for real ingredients that you know are good for you.

7 Be a conscious eater. The act of eating should be a restorative

interlude in your stressful, chaotic day, not a time for multitasking. By giving meals the attention they deserve, you eat at a slower pace and give your body a chance to register taste and satisfaction. You wind up feeling satiated with smaller portion sizes and enjoying your food more. Slow down. Chew. Savor your food.

8 A twinge of hunger isn’t the end of the world. Most of us shovel food down with such frequency that we don’t know what hungry feels like. Familiarizing yourself with hunger signals is a key part of learning to feed yourself well. Not shaky, lightheaded, desperation hunger, but the twinge of tightening in your stomach that first alerts you to hunger. When you start from this point, you’ll discover which foods and quantities truly satisfy you. You may need a lot less food than you think.

9 Diversify. Food boredom is frustrating and leads back to old habits and crappy choices. Eating well for the long term requires choosing foods with a wide range of flavors, colors, and textures. This not only keeps

10 Make indulgences a guilt-free part of the program. Call it a cheat day, the 90/10 rule (eat well 90 percent of the time, splurge the other 10 percent), or whatever resonates with you. Granting yourself permission to say “to hell with it” once in a while increases your chances of successfully sticking to good eating habits.

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