The quick answer: The ultimate test of mom’s leadership is to overcome the billions spent by Food Inc. to market factory foods and win the family's support for healthy home cooking.
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Managing stress
Eat smarter, look better, live longer—that’s our goal. Learning to eat wisely in a toxic food environment is the challenge, but there’s more to health than diet. Four of the Healthy Changes are about exercise. Others cover the benefits of sunshine (2), fasting, and this week’s topic: stress management. In the coming weeks we talk about the importance of adequate sleep, best friends, and the blessedness of simplicity. Our goal is modest: Discover, with the help of readers, the world’s best health wisdom.
The last post shared ways to get off the stress escalator. Chronic stress is a factor in the chronic diseases. But the worst cut of all is how stress robs you of your beauty (think wrinkles), and contributes to overweight (including compulsive snacking). You can’t overcome stress by running faster—you have to step off the escalator. If you don’t do something different, create change, everything stays the same.
The Phases of Change
Think about change in three phases:
Phase 1: Getting started is hard, so in the beginning there is little benefit for the effort required. Therefore, it’s easy to become discouraged.
Phase 2: Resistance is overcome and you get greater benefits for the same effort. This is the exciting phase—you’re making big progress and it feels great.
Phase 3: The last part is critical; it’s more about consolidating the change, making it permanent so you don’t lose the benefits. There’s still fruit to pick, but it’s not low hanging.
You can picture your whole life here: Phase 1 was childhood (you’re making steady progress but can’t do any of the adult stuff); phase 2 is the high school and college years (maximum growth, lots of fun); and phase 3 is adulthood, which you all understand.
The well-lived life is a series of changes; each change represents some challenge overcome, or beneficial habit acquired. Think about the menu writing habit: Phase 1 is the first year; it’s hard to come up with something every week. Phase 2 is the second year; now you have a binder of old menus and it’s easy. Phase 3 involves maintaining the habit in subsequent years, with continuous improvement.
Carcassonne, France
Like most people, we reared our children on a skinny budget. The kids wore hand-me-downs but seemed happy making do with what they had. The blessing of this is today, as adults, they’re all good managers of their money. As the older kids began their college years our finances improved and we were able to afford a few special things, which brings us to Carcassonne, France.
Carcassonne is an ancient walled city in southern France, near Spain. We spent an unforgettable night there a few years ago, en route from Barcelona to Provence. The evening was foggy, and it was eerie to walk the narrow cobblestone alleys; I half expected a knight in armor to come clanking out of the fog. We ate in a tiny restaurant; the mood was romantic, even if we didn’t know exactly what we ordered. As we were eating the door opened to admit a tall man in a long black coat, carrying a well-worn guitar case. I thought of him later as the Basque Johnny Cash. He took out his guitar and began to play traditional Basque songs, singing in a rugged but melodious voice. The memory has stayed with us.
That magical night in Carcassonne came to mind this past weekend. I was acting as docent for the local historical society; the French accent of a visiting woman caused me to inquire where she was from. She named a town in the Pyrenees Mountains, near Carcassonne, and said she was Basque. The lady was older, but had the lean, healthy look of one who has been active and eaten well. I was immediately curious about her food traditions and asked questions. “Are you a good cook?” I boldly enquired. She laughed and told me to ask her daughter, who was standing nearby. I asked. “My mother is a fabulous cook,” the daughter rejoined. “But she never let me have soda drinks growing up.” They turned to each other and laughed. By now I was a fan of the mother so I directed her to this blog, inviting her to share her experience. I hope she writes.
Winning Support
The Basque woman taught her daughter healthy food traditions in a way that developed a close bond between them. We need to talk about how to do this in a more difficult setting: the modern food culture. To start the discussion, here are a few observations:
Avoid power struggles: To improve the diet of the family, the first step is to win their support. Explaining works better than lecturing; inviting is better than demanding. Imposing change without support is stressful for all parties. My beautiful wife, in simple, loving ways I don’t fully understand, was masterful at winning the children’s support. She sidestepped the power struggles you sometimes see between parents and children. At dinner, they weren’t forced to take food they didn’t want, though they were encouraged to try a bite or two of new foods. But if they took food, they had to eat it. Actually, the children’s bigger worry was about being last and getting the small serving.
Share control: You can win support by sharing control. When writing menus, for example, let them add their favorite foods. (Everything doesn’t have to be perfectly healthy.) When you try new recipes, let them vote on whether to add the new food to the regular menu. Last weekend we made mac & cheese using different cheese combinations. It was an experiment and we asked the grandkids to be the judges. They had a great time and actually choose several combinations over Kraft’s version.
Walk the talk: Jenna is one of our readers and she writes the popular lifestyle blog That Wife. Following Healthy Change #38, “Form, or join, a nutrition and cooking club,” Jenna arranged the use of a church kitchen to start the Hyde Park Cooking Club. The purpose of the club: “Share the things we know about cooking from scratch using real ingredients, to create meals that fuel our bodies in a healthy way, and promote change across our communities.” The club goes beyond recipe swapping; it’s a force for nutrition reform. Check out Jenna’s cooking club here.
Have fun: In recent decades people who should have known better looked down upon the domestic arts, including cooking. Cooking was falsely portrayed as drudgery and few had the common sense to object. Food Inc. smelled opportunity and introduced a cornucopia of factory-made processed foods. The fast food giants introduced hyper-processed foods (think of those chicken nuggets). Restaurants responded with overly complicated dishes no sensible cook would bother with at home. There was even a false belief that factories could make food cheaper than we could. This was patently false—we’ve shown that many times in this blog and the N. Y. Times recently agreed with this article.
The wisdom of tradition tells us that home cooking, besides being good for both health and budget, is creative, relaxing, and a blessing to the family.
Please comment: What has worked for you to win the support of your family for good nutrition?