Episode 098: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. On this week’s show we’re looking at how you can be more organised and prepare healthy snacks and meals, even when time is limited.
We look at what constitutes healthy food, meal timing and frequency. We chat about how habits and environmental factors can impact on what you eat. And I provide suggestions on shopping, batching cooking, quick meal ideas, snack suggestions, and much more.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 98 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/098.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another installment of Real Health Radio. This week on the show, it’s just me. It’s another one of my solo episodes. What I want to cover is something that people often struggle with. It’s the idea around food preparation or food planning or organization and putting snacks together and lunch ideas and that kind of thing.
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Before I dive into that, I do have one announcement. In a couple of weeks’ time, I’m going to be releasing the hundredth episode of Real Health Radio. This is Episode 98, so not many more to go. I’m still trying to get my head around the fact, because it feels like I only just started doing this. It feels like I’m just starting to get my groove with it.
But what I’ve noticed is often customary with the 100 episode milestone is for the host to do a personal episode, so they’re either interviewed by someone else or they do a show themselves, talking about their story or part of their life. When I think about the content that I put out, whether that be this podcast show or whether it be the writing and blog posts that I put out, I don’t share a huge amount about my life. I’ve touched on it in certain episodes or I’ve touched on it in certain articles a little bit, but it’s not a regular feature of what I put out.
So for the hundredth episode, I would like to change that. If you have any questions about my life, my thoughts, my beliefs, my experiences, things I’ve been through, practices I do, please send me an email to info@seven-health.com and let me know what the questions are. This doesn’t have to be just about eating habits or exercise routines, and I kind of don’t want to be chatting about that so much as just other things to do with my life.
Anything you’re interested in knowing about, please ask. Then when I start to put together the show – which I’m going to be starting fairly shortly – I can try and answer your questions. I do want this show to be really honest and for me to touch on topics and areas that I haven’t covered before. I’ve already been starting to put together a rough idea of some of the things that I want to talk about, but I would love to get your input on this. So if there is anything that comes to mind, if there’s anything you’ve always wondered about me and something you want to find out about, send me an email. Again, info@seven-health.com, and hopefully I can include it in the show.
Let’s get on with this episode. We kind of find ourselves in a strange situation. On one hand, people are much more health-conscious. People are reading health blogs, they’re reading health books. Despite the fact that some or a lot of this information is probably fairly dubious, people feel like they’re more informed, and they take a genuine interest in the topic of health more than probably any other point.
But on the other hand, people also feel incredibly time-stretched. We are working much longer hours, and the line between work and non-work has become incredibly blurry. People are always on their phone or on email. On average, this is meaning people prepare fewer meals in the home themselves than historically we’ve done. More and more, people are reliant on restaurants or takeaways or delivery services.
So there’s this mismatch between people wanting to be healthier, but then struggling to have the time to make this a reality. What I want to do as part of this show is look at how you can make healthier choices, especially if you’re someone who maybe works and you have limited time, or you’re looking after kids and you have limited time, just so you can make that work despite the time constraints.
As part of this, there’s a couple of things I want to go through. First is just setting the stage a little bit. What I mean by this is I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding of what healthy food really looks like or really means. I want to cover that because there is this endless procession of diets, and lots of people are confused about health and believe information that’s not actually true.
I want to also touch on habit formation because knowing information isn’t enough; we need to look at how someone can then implement that information. I think a big part of this is how the environment plays into our food choices. We feel like we have complete free will, but more and more, research shows that this is kind of an illusion. So I want to touch on how we can best set up the environment so that the healthy choices are also the easiest and the more likely.
Then we’re going to look at the food side of things – things like shopping and food prep and cooking at home and what you can do when you’re out and about and snack ideas and getting lunches when you’re out and that kind of thing.
One thing I do want to mention is that some of the topics and ideas I’m going to touch on as part of the show, I have touched on before and I’ve gone into in more detail. I will be mentioning other shows that you might want to check out, but I’m going to be including a lot of the information in this show as well so that this is a standalone resource. So even if this is the only show of mine that you’ve listened to, it’s not an issue. And I bet even for people who’ve listened to previous shows or all of my shows, you will have forgotten some of it – or lots of it – so it’s a bit of a refresher, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
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Let’s start, then, with: what does healthy food mean or what does healthy food really look like? For me, this is a very context-specific thing. Healthy food should be an individual thing and working out what works best for you, or if I’m working with a client, what works best for that individual.
But if we’re taking a bit more of a broader approach, so not just looking at the individual, but trying to make some generalized comments about healthy food across the board, I think this can be really confusing. As I said earlier, every day there is a new diet book that is released, and each one tells you that their way is the best way of eating and that they’ve got some science to back all of this up, and that everyone else is wrong and that this is just the final way that you should be doing it.
What I would say is while there is this endless list of new diets and new diet books, most of them can be roughly broken down into about seven categories. There will be subtle differences and nuances, but if we’re speaking in general terms, there are several main dietary patterns.
You have a mixed diet; you have a diet that’s low fat; you have a diet that is low carb; you have a diet that’s low glycemic; you have the Mediterranean diet; you have the paleo diet; and then you have vegetarian/vegan. They are the main dietary categories. There will be others, but generally that will cover most bases.
There is an MD called David Katz, and he and his colleagues conducted an incredibly important study in nutritional science. This is something that I heard about and was exposed to through Ari Whitten, and it’s really fascinating. The study was done by Dr. Katz and his colleagues, and they conducted a systematic literature review of basically all of the thousands of relevant scientific studies on the health impacts of those seven different dietary patterns.
When they looked at this to see what is the healthiest diet, there was no clear winner. When they combined the results across all of them, what they found is that at a population level, we can do very well on a real wide range of diets. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you as an individual will do well on each and every one of them, but what it does mean is that when someone says low carb is best or paleo is best or vegan is best, this isn’t actually true. There is no perfect diet that everyone should be following.
Despite the fact that there is no clear winner in terms of which diet you should be following, there were certain characteristics that each of these diets had that were associated with health-giving properties. There were three key components here.
One was that the diet comprised preferentially minimally processed foods direct from nature or foods made up of such ingredients. Two, the diet comprised mostly plants – whether fruits or vegetables or beans or pulses or salads, but it was largely plant-based. And then number three was when the diet did include animal products, these animals had a diet and living conditions that were correct and appropriate for that animal, because the composition of an animal’s flesh or milk from that animal or eggs is as much influenced by the diet as we are influenced by a diet.
Those were the things that are associated with healthy foods if we’re looking at it from a broad, bigger picture place. The reason I’m mentioning this is I think there is a lot of confusion around food and what is healthy, and it means that people end up cutting out whole food groups, unnecessarily so, and a lot of fear is generated around food. In a general sense, the aim should be to eat food that is largely unprocessed and is close to what we find in nature. You don’t have to be a purist about it. These aren’t the only things that you can eat. But the more that this can make up a decent chunk of what you eat, the better.
That gives a little idea of what I mean in terms of healthy foods when I’m talking about it in this context.
The next area I want to briefly touch on is carbohydrates and proteins and fats, which are collectively known as macronutrients, and their roles in the body. This is going to be just a snapshot – and part of the reason I’m doing this, again, it relates to people’s misunderstandings. For a long time, fat was maligned and we were told that if we wanted to be healthy, all we needed to do was eat low fat. Now, for the last decade or more, this blame has shifted to carbohydrates. People talk about how “In the ’80s and ’90s we got it so wrong with our witch hunt of fat, but now we’ve got the right villain. It’s carbohydrates’ fault. We just need to keep that out of our diet.”
But the truth is, none of the macronutrients are evil. They all have roles and functions to play in the body. Yes, people can do well by having higher amounts of some of them or lower amounts of some of them, but often when people talk about this stuff, there’s a lot of pseudoscience attached to it. There’s a lot of demonizing of food. It’s more about fads rather than this genuinely working for that individual, or even genuinely working at the population level.
As part of this section, I will talk about the better forms of carbohydrates or proteins or fats, and this can then link in later on when we’re looking at food options or food prep or putting together snacks.
Just so you know, I’ve actually done a whole show dedicated to each of these – a whole show just on carbohydrates, a whole show just on protein, a whole show just on fats – and not just looking at their functions in the body, but how they’re digested or the intricacies of different types of fats. So if you do want to go deeper on this stuff, I have done shows on it, and I will put links to them in the show notes.
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Starting with roles of carbohydrates in the body, it is probably your body’s preferred energy source. I say probably because I know people argue about this all the time, but generally your body needs carbohydrates as an energy source. That’s for immediate energy, but it’s also then stored as a thing called glycogen in your muscles and in your liver. It’s needed for good gut health. A lot of the carbohydrates that we eat come with fiber attached, and that’s needed for creating bulk with the stool, but also needed to feed the bacteria in your gut that then turns that into different fatty acids and vitamins and is then very important for your health.
You need carbohydrates for RNA and DNA. It’s needed for the antioxidants defense system. Really important. Largely about energy, but it has lots of different roles throughout the body. It’s important in terms of hormones and hormone signaling as well, so lots of roles to play.
Looking at sources of carbohydrates, typically if we’re just looking from a general perspective, things that are largely unprocessed. My leanings would be a little more towards things like fruit and root vegetables and maybe rice, but other grains, other beans, other pulses – whatever people are able to tolerate.
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In terms of protein, most people know protein as “that thing for building muscle,” and it is important for that, but it’s important for so many different things within your body. Of the three macronutrients, protein is the one that really is involved in every system, every organ, every transaction. It has so many more roles than probably either carbohydrates or fat do.
So, yes, important for building muscle, but it’s also important for building collagen and for bone. It’s important for detoxification for Phase I and for Phase II, helping with liver detoxification, but also detoxification generally. You need it to create hydrochloric acid in your stomach and generally for digestion. It’s useful and needed for your nervous system. It promotes alertness, memory and learning. For the production of hormones, you need it as a raw material – and that’s hormones for reproduction, hormones for blood sugar. Protein is broken down then into amino acids, those amino acids do basically everything within the body.
From a food source perspective, eating a real wide variety of protein is typically my recommendation. You can have both animal-based protein and vegetarian protein. If you’re having meat, eating a real wide variety of it – and that includes having things like organ meats or making broth and stocks from the bones, stuff from the sea, so having fish or seafood or that kind of thing, eggs and dairy if people tolerate it – and then also the vegetarian sources of protein, so having fermented soy, having beans, pulses, things like quinoa and other grain proteins, and then different protein powders, whether we’re talking about a whey protein or a collagen powder or having a pea protein or a soy protein or a rice protein powder. All of these can be helpful.
Again, it comes down a lot of digestion, and I find in the beginning when I’m working with someone, if their health isn’t as good, we lean a little bit more towards the animal sources because I find they can be easier to digest. But it just depends on the individual.
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The final one is fat. Fat has many roles within the body. One of them is to create hormones. It’s the raw materials for creating hormones. I said that for protein, and fat is also needed. Fat is an energy source, so in the same way that you use carbohydrates for energy, you can use fats for energy. You need it for your brain and your nervous system to function properly. You need it as part of the cell membranes, the outer part of the cell. Really important.
Food sources of fat: typically you’re best trying to get fat in the food already there, so having a cut of meat that already has the fat in it, or having some coconut as opposed to having the coconut oil, or eating nuts and seeds instead of having the nut and seed oil. Having the fat actually contained within the food is a better option. Instead of having a fish oil supplement, eating some oily fish.
If you are going to be adding fat to your food – and you normally do as part of a cooking process or putting it on salads or that kind of thing – if you’re cooking with it, typically having fats that are more saturated is going to be better for you just because of how the cooking process can start to degrade that oil. The more saturated an oil is, the better it can then stand up to that stuff. So doing more of your cooking with coconut oil or butter or ghee or that kind of thing – olive oil seems to be pretty good with standing up to cooking as well, but typically try to get more of your fats coming in as food as opposed to having the separate oil.
That is carbs, proteins, and fats, and what your body needs them for and some of the best sources. My suggestion is that when you are getting to the stage where you’re putting together a snack or putting together a meal, you try to have some of each of them. Have some carbs, some protein, and some fat. So when you look down at your plate or you look down at the snack that you have in front of you, ask yourself, where are each of these?
Most of the time you don’t need to focus on all three; you just need to focus on the carbs and the protein. The reason I’m saying this is because most of the proteins have fat attached to them. In the case of meat or dairy or eggs, there’s already fat attached. Or in other situations, you use fat as part of that cooking process. If you’re having a piece of white fish, you might then cook it in some oil or some butter. So most of the time you just have to think about the carbs and the protein, because the fat’s already going to be there.
This isn’t some iron rule where every meal, you have to have one of each of those things, and if you don’t, something terrible is going to happen. It’s just a really good starting place, and it’s an easy way to keep things simple and to make sure that you’re regularly having those different macronutrients come in.
The final thing I want to mention in this little section is in regards to meal timing and frequency. This is something I think too few people pay attention to, or if they are paying attention to it, it’s because they’re doing something like intermittent fasting, where they’re having an eating window or something along those lines.
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On meal timing, the body really thrives on regularity. As much as possible, you should be trying to eat your meals at a similar time each day – so having your breakfast at a similar time, having your lunch at a similar time, having your afternoon snack at a similar time. It doesn’t have to be obsessive, where the clock strikes 11 a.m. and you’re like “I must eat now,” but it is helpful to have regular meal times that you follow each and every day.
Part of this is so that your body learns that it’s having regular energy come in and gets used to that, and that’s a good thing because it knows that there isn’t the stress of wondering where the next meal’s going to be coming from. It’s got that regularity.
But part of it also is to do with circadian rhythm. Your circadian rhythm is your 24-hour body clock where certain functions or certain hormones are being released or doing different things at a different point of the day and the night. Many factors can impact on circadian rhythm and train circadian rhythm and give the body feedback about what time of day it is and what should be happening.
Largely, this is dictated by light and darkness. Where is the sun and the moon, and where are you in the day based on the light is the thing that probably has the biggest impact on circadian rhythm. But it’s also impacted on by meal timing – so when you’re eating – and also on movement practices. This is because we should be doing more of our moving, more of our eating, during the daylight hours and doing less of that in the evening time. That gives feedback to the body about what time it is and what should be happening.
So having meals at a similar time each day helps with circadian rhythm, and therefore with overall health.
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The other part of this is to do with meal frequency, which is how often you need to eat. Are you someone who does three meals a day and that’s it, or do you need to have three meals and then two snacks, or do you have four similar size meals each day? When deciding which is the best option, it should be based on what works best for you from a physiological perspective.
Typically what I find is the better health that someone is in, the longer they can go between meals. They have better digestion, so they can eat a bigger meal and then get the most out of it, and then they can go for a longer time, and they’ve got better reserves that then can be called on easily because they’re storing glycogen well. It’s in the muscles, it’s in the liver, so if they go a longer time between meals, they’ve got more of that to call on, whereas someone who’s not in as good health, they have a really big meal and it just sits heavy. They can’t digest it very well. That piece of it I think is important, just being conscious of that.
I would add to that that not everyone in great health likes to only have three meals a day. You can be in really good health, but just prefer to eat more regularly.
But what I see happening in reality is that people’s eating isn’t based on what works for them, but rather they let life dictate when they can eat. They’re hungry at 11 a.m., but instead they just continue on with emails or putting together some project, and suddenly it’s 1 p.m. They were ravenous earlier on; they’re now even more ravenous come lunchtime, and then they may struggle to choose a healthy option at lunchtime because they’re just so fixated on what their palate wants, or whatever they end up eating, after lunch they feel really tired or they’re craving something sweet because they’ve gone too long between those meals.
A big part of meal frequency is body awareness. This is the case with really all the work I do with clients. Yes, there are universal truths, like the fact that you’re most probably going to be healthier if you’re eating more unprocessed foods, but in terms of what this really looks like and how often that’s going to be and what’s included, there is a real huge amount of scope there.
Starting to just pay attention to your different body symptoms to work out what is the right mix I think is really important, and that’s definitely the case in terms of meal timing. Working out what is best for you and what is the best frequency for you is really, really important.
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I now want to look at environmental cues and habits. The reason that this is important is that just because you know you should do something or you have some knowledge, doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it. We are much more impacted upon by our environment than we would like to think. The state that we are in impacts the choices that we make.
To give an example, there’s a really fascinating study that was done in Israel on judges who presided over parole hearings. There was a paper. This study looked at over 1,000 rulings made by eight judges in 2009. While the judgments should be based on the facts of the case, what they found was something different. They found that the likelihood of a favorable ruling peaked at the beginning of the day. It then steadily declined from a probability of about 65% at the beginning of the day to nearly being zero, before then spiking up to about 65% again after they’d had a break for a meal or a snack or for lunch.
Basically, if a judge was full and had good energy, a favorable judgment was fairly likely (65%). As the time went on and they became more hungry and low in energy, they then made more unfavorable rulings towards the defendants. So they saw the defendants in more of a negative light. And this is meant to be judges who are rational in their decision-making and weighing up the merits of the case, but rather than that, what was going on was where they were from a blood sugar perspective impacted on the decision they made.
If we look at our food environment and things that are within our environment, it can also impact on our decision. There’s been loads of research looking at how non-food factors affect our consumption and affect our awareness of that consumption. The type of music that is played can impact on how much someone eats, or the amount of people at a restaurant who are sitting on your table, so the number of people on your table can impact the number of calories that you eat or how much food you eat. Or on a food menu, if there’s an item, if that item has a descriptor added in, people will report liking that food even more, despite that if they have the exact same food without the descriptor, they don’t like it as much.
Again, this is something I’ve done podcasts on. I’ve actually done a couple of shows on it. One was looking at how environmental factors affect children, and the other was looking at how environmental factors affect adults. I think this is completely fascinating stuff because it just shows how irrational we are and how much the environment impacts on us, even though we don’t think it really does or we’d like to believe that it really doesn’t. I’m going to put those shows, again, in the show notes. But I just want to mention one area that I think is relevant to this episode.
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There’s an acronym called C.A.N. This acronym largely dictates what you end up eating.
The first letter is C, and that stands for Convenience. Essentially, we are lazy. We want food that causes us the least amount of effort to eat it. If you’re working in an office and you have food on your desk versus food in another room, most of the time you’ll eat the food that is sitting on your desk simply because it is closer to you.
Typically the more difficult it is to procure the food, the less likely you’re going to be eating it regularly. And yes, there are restaurants that people go out of their way to go and eat at, but those are exceptions. They’re not doing that meal after meal. Most of the time, they eat what is in arm’s reach of themselves.
This can also relate to the convenience in eating ability. If you have fruit that is cut up, people will tend to eat more of it because it’s that tiny bit easier. To eat an apple that has been cut up as opposed to biting into a whole apple is that much easier that people will eat more of it. I guess having a pomegranate on your desk probably doesn’t make it likely you’re going to eat it because those things are really difficult to get into. But typically, if you can make stuff easy, you’ll eat more of it. Humans, we stumble at the easiest of barriers. So if you want to eat certain foods, put them within arm’s reach and make them easy to eat.
The second letter is A, which stands for Attractive. Food that looks appetizing or appealing are the kinds of things we’re going to eat. If we have a salad on our desk that is within arm’s reach, but it is wilting and it looks like it’s past its use-by date and it probably went off yesterday, chances are you’re going to want to eat something else. But if that salad looks really nice, looks really appetizing, chances are you’re going to eat it.
What you want to do is make simple food, make healthful food, make the kinds of foods that you want to have yourself eating – have them look appetizing. Have them appear like something that you do want to eat. That can be, again, simple things where you peel the carrots or you wash the fruit or you have lots of colors – whatever is more appealing to you and more attractive to you, put in that little effort to create that in whatever you’re wanting to eat, and you’re more likely going to eat it.
The third letter in the acronym is N, and it stands for Normal. Most people want to choose foods that feel natural or feel normal to them. We may have times when we are adventurous; you may be away, you’re in Thailand, and there’s an opportunity to eat some strange local delicacy as you’re walking along a street. But most of the time – and especially in everyday life, in your everyday work – you want things that you feel are normal or familiar, especially if you’re going to be feeling apprehensive about being judged because of your food choices.
If you’re someone who is trying to transition into eating in a slightly different way, so you’re wanting to eat healthier or you’re wanting to include more of these foods, and they’re novel to you, they’re not part of your everyday eating, then just be aware that it can take a little while for this stuff to be seen as normal and for you to see them as normal.
I think just being aware of that – and as I’m talking, I’m thinking about the first time I had quinoa and it felt quite strange and quite different, whereas now, because I’ve had it so many times, it’s not a big thing for me to cook that and eat that. There’s probably lots of foods that could fall into that category for people, where it just feels different to start with, but the more you can normalize those things, the better.
If you’re wanting to change your eating habits or if you’re wanting to analyze why you eat the way that you do, I think looking at your environment and keeping in mind the acronym of C.A.N. probably will answer a lot of those questions.
One thing I do want to add to this is that healthy eating isn’t about perfection. It’s about trying to make the best choices of what is reasonably available to you. I always say to clients, something is better than nothing. If you are busy and you’re working and you’re suddenly really hungry and there is no chance for you to get to the shops, you don’t have any snacks you’ve brought in, and the only thing that you have in that moment is a chocolate bar or eating nothing, have the chocolate bar. It’s going to give you energy. It’s going to give you more than if you just eat nothing.
Too often when people are evaluating what they ate, they compare their choices to this fake list of foods. Like they shouldn’t have had the chocolate bar in that scenario, they should’ve had a fresh beetroot and carrot juice, despite the fact that they were at work, they couldn’t leave the office, and they weren’t working in a juice bar.
After they’ve eaten that chocolate bar, the next time they’re out at lunch or the next day they’re at the shops, yes, see if you can pick up some snack items that you could keep in your desk or you could keep in your drawer or you could keep in your bag – and I’ll talk about this stuff. Yes, make yourself, in the future, more prepared. But I think people need to be more realistic with their choices and keep in mind that something is better than nothing. You’ve just got to do your best. Don’t be comparing those choices to something completely unrealistic that you just didn’t have control over.
The next part I want to touch on is habit formation. This is a huge topic. I’m barely going to scratch the surface on it, but it’s something worth mentioning because as I’ve said, just knowing you should do something doesn’t actually make it happen.
Again, this is a topic I’ve done a whole podcast show on, looking at habit formation and achieving goals. It’s actually one of my most listened to episodes, so if you haven’t listened to it, then I highly recommend checking it out. Links will be in the show notes. But I just want to refer to one part from that show.
Every habit that you have, whether that be a good habit, whether that be a bad habit, follows a 3-step pattern. That 3-step pattern can be easily remembered as the 3 R’s. One is reminder. This is the trigger that initiates the behavior. Two is the routine. This is the actual behavior itself or the action that you take. Then three is the reward, the benefit that you gain from doing the behavior. I want to run through this in terms of creating a new habit in the context here of food prep or organization or bringing in snacks, so it’s relevant to this show.
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That first R, as I said, is reminder. One of the biggest hurdles with starting a new habit is getting the process going. It’s remembering to actually do it.
There’s two suggestions I have with this. One way of doing this is to attach your new behavior that you want to create to something that you are already doing or already happens every day without fail. You could sit down and write a list of things that you do every day without fail. This could be you brush your teeth in the morning, you have a shower, you sit down for breakfast or you sit down for dinner, you get into bed, you put on your shoes, you get off the tube before walking to work. This list then provides you with a set of potential reminders that you can connect your new habit to.
Not all of these are going to be reminders for improving eating that we’re talking about in this show, but some of them are. For example, you may decide that you’re going to take food in to work with you every day. So every night, you make making dinner your reminder for taking in snacks the next day. So when you’re making dinner, you use this time to then pack some snacks.
Or when you get off the tube in the morning, you use this as your reminder to get the food that you need for the day. You get off the tube in the morning and you then head straight to a supermarket before going in to the office. You use this to pick up everything you need for the day, and then you’ve got all of that food there. So you use these current habits to then remind you to do a new habit.
The other way of doing this – and this is often what I do with clients – is to just use their phone or use their calendar to set off reminders. If you want to start packing a snack at dinnertime, set an alarm in your phone. If you want to remember to eat a snack at 11 a.m., set an alarm and have it go off. With this stuff, you can set it once and have it just go off every single day.
What I find with clients is they’re often busy. Say they are at work, they become engrossed in their work, and they don’t get the hunger signals because they’re just getting on with things. But then at some point when they step out to get food, it really hits them that they’re lightheaded or they’re a bit shaky or they realize they’ve gone way too long between a meal and they’re ravenous.
Often it doesn’t have to be these kind of severe symptoms. They just notice that if they have a snack, they feel better. So they set off a daily alarm, and at 11:00 something beeps on their computer or something beeps on their phone and they have that reminder, “okay, I just need to eat something now.” So this reminder or this way of doing it doesn’t have to be linked in to a current habit. It can just be something as simple as setting an alarm and having that go off. And as I said, you can do it where you set it once and it continues to go off day after day.
The second R is the routine. This is the actual habit you’re going to be doing. You might be thinking, okay, cool, pretty straightforward. I know exactly what I want to be doing. I know what habit I want, end of. But there is one big suggestion that I have with this, and it’s make it incredibly easy to start, like so easy that it feels like it’s impossible to fail. Rather than thinking “ultimately where do I want to end up?”, thinking “what can I do that gets me started?”
With the example that I gave before with packing food – so at dinnertime, at nighttime, you decide you want to start packing food for the next day. It could very easily become overwhelming that every night, you start to think, “God, I’ve now got to pack food for lunch the next day.” It becomes so overwhelming, not only do you not want to pack a lunch the next day, you get to the stage where you don’t even want to cook dinner that night because of the thought of having to do all this and all the prep, etc.
With the routine, set the bar stupidly low. Maybe the goal is that each evening, you have to find one item to take to work with you the next day for food. So you take a banana or you take an apple. Or if you don’t have fruit in the house, you cut up a piece of cheese and you take that with you, or you take a bit of yogurt, a small pot of yogurt, or you peel a carrot and you take that with you. Taking anything, but pick just one thing.
The reason for picking just one thing is it feels totally doable. It’s not overwhelming, but instead, it gets you doing the behavior. What happens ultimately is you start to do more. Instead of just taking that one thing, when you’re getting a banana you also get a piece of cheese or you also get a carrot or whatever the snack may be. But you actually make this happen by creating a really low bar so you just get started as opposed to creating a high bar of “I’m going to have to take these three snacks and then this lunch,” and that just becomes so overwhelming.
So start small and then you can build up so that in a month’s time or 2 months’ time or 3 months’ time or however long it takes you to build up, it feels very natural to be taking that extra food to work, and you’ve then got to that endplate that you wanted to get to.
The final R as part of the 3 R’s is reward. This is about celebration. You want to continue doing things that make you feel good, and because an action needs to be repeated a number of times for it to become a habit, you want to be rewarding yourself or reinforcing why you should continue to do that new habit.
In most situations, especially with something that you’re going to be repeating on a daily basis, the reward doesn’t have to be something massive. It can be something as simple as just congratulating yourself. So at the end of packing together the food for the next day, you could be like, “Nice work. This is going to really help me tomorrow.” Or after you go to the shops on the way to work, it’s like, “Great job. This is going to really help come 11 a.m.”
This may seem really simple or mundane, but it is amazing, working with clients and chatting to them about so much of this stuff, how poor most people’s internal dialogue really is. Most people, or a vast majority of people, are constantly tearing themselves down and always focusing on the negatives. Or when they even do something that is a really good job, instead they comment on how they could’ve done it better or why they should’ve done it better. This isn’t very rewarding. It makes it less likely you’re going to want to keep up the habit. Or if you are, you’re then just relying on willpower, and at some point that is going to end. So find some small way of rewarding yourself or reinforcing a positive reason for continuing on with the behavior.
Those are the 3 R’s of habit formation. They’re important for then helping you to do some of the stuff around the food side of things that I’m going to touch on in a moment.
00:45:35
Before I touch on that, I just want to mention one other thing in terms of habits, and this is the concept of keystone habits. For a lot of people, when they look at what they’re currently doing and where they want to be, it can be, as I said earlier, really overwhelming. There could be 10 or 15 or 20 things that they want to be doing and think that they should be doing, and that can be exhausting.
Instead of focusing on all of these different things at once, what can be very helpful is to identify a keystone habit that actually creates a snowball effect. Let me give an example of this.
For a lot of people, exercise can be their keystone habit. Maybe they haven’t been exercising in a while. They start to exercise. It can be a little inconsistent to start with, but it gets better. Because they’re now exercising, they start to go to bed earlier. They used to be midnight, 1 a.m., but now it’s closer to 11:00 or maybe 10:30. They’re doing that because they want to go to the gym in the morning, and they notice how much better they’re feeling by getting the extra sleep.
Because of the extra sleep, they’re waking up feeling more refreshed, so they’re having breakfast. They’re not feeling as tired during the day. They start drinking less coffee. They come home in the evening and they’ve got more energy, so they start doing a bit more of the cooking there. They’re finding it easier at work. As time goes on, they notice they’re drinking less alcohol – not because of better willpower; they’re just having better energy. They feel better within themselves. They’re more active on the weekends and in the morning, so they just don’t want to be out drinking on a Friday night.
All of this stuff doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen over the space of months or a year or however long it takes. It’s because they focused on finding that keystone habit that then had that trickle-down effect.
And often with keystone habits, it works in the opposite direction as well, so someone for whom exercise is incredibly important, when exercise starts to drop off, they unconsciously start going to bed later and they’re doing less of their own cooking, and the alcohol intake starts to increase, etc. So it can really move in both directions.
But I think that it’s worth finding what your keystone habit is that just pulls everything together. I know I’ve used exercise in this example; it doesn’t have to be exercise. It can be different things. For me personally, sleep is probably my keystone habit. When I’m getting really good sleep, life is easier. I eat healthier food, I’m doing more of my own cooking, I want to be out doing movement and exercise. Work feels easier. I feel more on top of things. I’m not feeling so overwhelmed, etc. So for me I really guard sleep because I know the knock-on effect of how helpful it is when I’m doing it, but also the drawback when it’s not happening and how things start to go awry.
Again, it’s not just exercise or sleep. I know clients who say it’s meditation, and they’re like “When I’m meditating, when I make that a daily practice, even if it’s only 10 or 15 minutes, the change that I notice in my life is huge. I’m so much less anxious. I’m much more productive. I’m much better with getting my own food,” etc.
The reason I’m mentioning this is obviously I’m just about to touch on different things that you can do around shopping and food prep and snacks and all of that stuff, so it might be “cool, I want to really focus in on those things.” But actually, what you may find is if sleep is your keystone habit and you then just focus on the snacks, but you’re not getting proper sleep, life can feel really difficult. Whereas if you sort out the sleep stuff, then the rest of the things I’m going to talk about become so much easier. You just do them and it’s easy to do on autopilot and it’s not the same struggle that you would find if you hadn’t first dealt with that keystone habit. So that’s the reason I wanted to mention it, just because of the trickle-down effect, the snowball effect that those keystone habits can have.
I now want to focus on ideas around food prepping and foods you can cook and all of that stuff. I hope you do understand why I’ve gone through everything else to lead up to this point, because as I said, people are often confused about what it means to be having healthy food and this narrow and incorrect definition. But also, just knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to follow through with it, so ways that you can change habits or just set up your environment so it almost feels like you’re not having to make a choice because you’re just doing it.
00:50:40
The first idea is around shopping. You want to have healthy food – healthy, whatever that means to you – surrounding you. When you open the fridge, when you open the cupboard, it’s there. Or if you’re at work, when you open your drawer or open your bag, there are food options.
With shopping, there is no right way of doing this. It just depends on what works for you. If you want to go to the farmer’s market on the weekend, then great. If you want to go and do a big weekly shop at a supermarket, that’s cool. If you prefer doing an online shop because that’s better for you, more convenient for you, then do it that way. I do know with a lot of the online options, you can set it up automatically so it delivers each week, so you can always have the basics saved of “these are the things I want every single week,” and even if you forget about it, it still gets delivered.
But basically you want to figure out the way that is the easiest for you, that you have shopping done and food in the cupboard and in the fridge and wherever you’re going to be on a regular basis. Because if that’s not there, that’s often the first hurdle that people stumble on.
00:52:00
The next idea is quick meals and learning to cook quick meals. If you’ve got a weekend and you can make a roast and you can spend 2 hours doing it, then great, but what most people have during the week is really limited time. What I want people to do is not set the bar way too high on a work night. How can you make it completely doable?
The challenge I would set is find a handful of recipes that you know you can make in 20 minutes from start to scratch. That should be you start cooking, and 20 minutes later it’s on a plate and you’re already eating. This can be an ongoing process. Start by having four or five, and then regularly add to this so that you’re not getting bored and there’s food variety coming in.
If you can’t already think of these kinds of meals, get a really basic cookbook – something aimed at students or complete novices. Or get a cookbook where the premise of the book is recipes that have five ingredients or less, or seven ingredients or less, or whatever it can be where it’s super easy, not opening Ottolenghi and seeing like 25 ingredients, most of which you’re not going to have in the house.
For example, for a quick meal you could put a piece of fish in some foil, put a little bit of oil on it or some butter with it, and put it in the oven and set a timer for 20 minutes. You can then put on some rice or peel some potatoes and then cut them into small enough pieces so they can cook over the next 12 or 15 minutes or so. While they’re cooking, you can then make a salad or you can cut up some other vegetables, and then you throw the other vegetables in with the rice or the potatoes when there’s 3 or 4 minutes left. That whole meal can be done in 20 minutes, and you probably didn’t even need to be in the kitchen for all of that time.
I’m going to talk in a second about prepping food in advance, but if you are time-stretched, there are plenty of meals that you can make in this fashion, where it is a very short amount of time – but that’s as long as you have the ingredients in the fridge and in the cupboards to start with, so again, this ties back into the shopping thing.
Another alternative is to use a company that sends you all the ingredients for the meal, so you just have to cut it up and cook it. These companies are really in plentiful supply. Blue Apron do some pretty hardcore advertising. Pretty much all of the big podcasts that I listen to have Blue Apron appearing on their show as an advert. In the UK, I know of clients who’ve used Hello Fresh, and another brand called Mindful Chef.
I’ve used Hello Fresh myself as a trial, and it was fine. I work from home, so I’m not so time-stretched, and I can be popping in and out of the kitchen if I need to. I’ve also been cooking for quite a long time, so I don’t feel like I was getting as much out of Hello Fresh because I could make a lot of things. But I can see how useful it is A) for clients, but B) at some future point when I am more time-stretched and I’m maybe not working from home as much, or I’ve got so many other things on and I can’t be cooking while working, then I’ll probably use them again.
Another alternative would be getting ready meals from the supermarket that take very little cooking. I know this is probably blasphemy for a nutritionist to be recommending ready meals, but there are some really good, high quality options these days. In the UK there’s a brand called Charlie Bigham in Waitrose which does really good ready meals that you can either put in the oven or, for some of them, you cook them in a pan and you just need to make some rice that you have with them. These meals are going to be more calorie-dense or richer than just having some fish or some vegetables or maybe something I’d make from scratch myself, but in comparison to having a takeaway or having some fast food, they’re a really good option.
This ties into something I was saying earlier: something is better than nothing. This stuff isn’t always going to be perfect, but if you’re having this kind of meal and it saves you some time and it’s healthier than whatever the alternative was going to be because you were just going to get a takeaway or get some fast food because you’re really stretched and you’re getting home from work late, then I think this is a real win. It doesn’t have to be Charlie Bigham. They’re just the brand I know of because of Waitrose and doing shopping in Waitrose.
But I think a lot of ready meals have got a bad reputation – and probably for a good reason for a lot of them, but there are a lot better quality of that stuff now starting to appear in the different supermarkets because they’ve cottoned on to A) people are time-stretched and B) people want to be eating healthier foods, so there really is a market for this stuff.
00:57:40
The next suggestion is to do batch cooking. This can take a couple of different forms. Maybe every weekend you dedicate a couple of hours to doing some cooking. You put on a podcast, you put on some music, and you just do some cooking for some stuff that you can then use all during the week. Or one night during the week when you’re making dinner and you have a little more time, you can just prepare some other stuff at the same time.
If I’m going to give you some actual suggestions – and I’ll touch on some of these later on as well, when I get into the snack suggestions and some other things – but making a root vegetable salad that you could then have every day, or you could make a frittata that you can then have for breakfast. You make it that it’s got 10 or 12 eggs through it with some sweet potato and some cheeses and some other vegetables, and then that is big enough so that you cut a piece and it lasts you for 4 or 5 days.
In the wintertime, making a batch of soup and then for one of your meals each day, that can be something that you have. Or you roast a whole chicken, and then throughout the whole week you use some of the meat, or you cut up a whole load of fruits and make a fruit salad, and that can then sit in the fridge, and then you just take some of that stuff every day as part of your lunch. Prep things that either take a long time to cook or that take a long time to cut up and stuff that’s not going to spoil if you do that in advance.
I know this suggestion of doing batch cooking makes a huge difference in clients’ lives. Yes, it requires a bit more work upfront, but once it becomes the norm and once it becomes a habit, it saves them so much time and stress, and they know the difference between the weekends where they spent 2 hours on a Sunday prepping versus the weeks that that didn’t happen and how much of an impact that has.
The other thing that’s similar to this is making double portions when you do make dinner. Whatever you have for dinner, the next day you just take one of those portions in to work with you. Obviously I think there are foods that work better with this type of stuff, and there’s others that don’t work so well, but that can be another way of doing some prep in advance.
01:00:25
The next idea would be to keep non-perishable food in your bag, so it’s always there. Most people have the same bag that they’ll take in to work each day, or when they’re out and about, they’ll have the same bag. Or if you have multiple bags, you can do this with all of them. The idea is that wherever you go, you will always have some kind of food on you. This is more maybe for emergencies, and hopefully you’ll have other stuff on hand most of the time, but for the days where you forget to pack something or you’re out shopping and you realize that you’re really hungry right now, you always have something there.
Some of the ideas – and again, this is for stuff you can leave in your bag and you can find a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks later, and you’re not worrying about the fact that it’s going off. Beef jerky or biltong is something that’s great. It’s a really good source of protein, and because of the nature of it, it’s got a very long shelf life. So you could have some of that in a little Ziploc bag that you can leave in your bag for quite a long time.
There’s a company in the UK called Bounce Balls. I don’t know if they’re around other places in the world, or other kinds of protein balls that are in packaging that you can then buy, you can keep in your bag, and if you find them in a month’s time or 2 months’ time, you can still eat them.
You can have something like some protein powder, like a whey protein or a gelatin powder or something like that, that you can then add to something else. It might not be a complete meal on its own, but with the gelatin, you know that if you just order yourself a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or an orange juice, you can add it in. Or with the whey protein powder, you can add it in to another drink. It’s often protein that people struggle to find when they’re out and about. It can be easier to pick up some fruit or to pick up some bread or other things, but the protein can often be a struggle. So having something like that.
Nuts and seeds and keeping them in your bag – and I’m not nuts and seeds’ biggest fan. I find for me personally and for other clients, they don’t digest them so well. But if you’re someone who knows you tolerate nuts and seeds well, then I think that’s fine.
Then having dried fruit so you can have some protein that you then have with some carbohydrates. Some prunes or some raisins or some figs or some dates, or having dried mango or banana chips – again, all of these things you could keep in a bag or in a drawer, and you come back to them in a distant time in the future and they’re okay to eat.
The final thing I want to mention in this section on prepping is that people need to remember to prep for snacks. Regularly people think of bringing in their lunch if they’re going to work or bringing in main meals, but they often forget to think of snacks. Invariably they end up either eating nothing, and then that affects what they eat at lunchtime, or they eat whatever is in front of them, which is whatever someone else has brought into the office, so that’s biscuits or chocolates or whatever food is around them.
If you are someone who isn’t just having three meals a day of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if you do know that you have snacks and you do better on snacks, then actually plan that stuff.
01:04:00
I’m going to run through some different snack suggestions, and some of these can be used for accompaniments to main meals as well, so they’re not just snack suggestions. I’m also going to include this as a handout that you can download. You can get it from the show notes. This should give you some ideas. With each of them, I tried to make it so that there’s some carbs, some protein, some fat, to tie in to what I was saying earlier on.
You could have some root vegetables that are paired with some kind of dairy or some kind of cheese, like some beetroot, some squash, and some feta as a salad, or some sweet potato that you have with some cottage cheese, or some butternut squash that you have with some sage and some goat’s cheese. Or even just having some parsnip chips and some cheddar cheese on the side. All of these can be made in bulk so there’s lots of servings, but it’s then just really easy to pull that stuff out.
Having some kind of fruit, again with some dairy. Having some berries and yogurt, or you can stew up some apples and pears. Again, get a couple of bags of apples and pears and stew it up so you can then leave that in the fridge and you have a huge amount of it. You just take out a portion as you need it and you have some stewed apples and pears that you have with some yogurt. Or you can have some cheese that you have with some dried figs or some dates. You can have a smoothie. That’s an easy way of using fruit.
Beef jerky and biltong, as I mentioned before, having that with some form of carb, whether that be fruit, whether that be some root vegetables, whether that’s with some rice or some oatcakes or whatever it may be.
Having gelatin-based snacks. You can get the Great Lakes Gelatin that comes in the orange container. That’s one that you can make jelly snacks with. You can make your own gummy squares, you can make some panna cotta, you can make different gelatin-based snacks. You could then get the Great Lakes Gelatin in the green tin that dissolves into hot and cold liquids, so you could have that in some orange juice or you could have it in some tea or you could have it in some coffee, whatever it may be. Using gelatin as the protein and then having that with some form of liquid or some form of carb.
As I said earlier, making some broth or making some soups and having these as a snack. This might be more appropriate in the wintertime, but you can still have soup in the summer. If you’re making a vegetarian soup as opposed to a broth and you want to have some protein with it, then adding some form of protein, whether that’s having some beans or pulses as part of the soup or having some cheese with it or some tinned tuna or some gelatin or whatever form of protein you want to add in.
Boiled eggs I think are a really good form of protein that you can then, again, add whatever form of carbohydrate to. So having boiled eggs with a banana or having them with an apple or some dried fruit or some rice or some root vegetables.
Some other things would be just some cheese and crackers. Having some popcorn that you have alongside some form of protein. Making a bean salad, which you can either have a snack or as a main meal.
You could get some different types of bread, like a pumpernickel bread that you could have with some avocado on, or you have it with some tuna on. Or have some rye bread that you have some cottage cheese on, or some oatcakes that you have chicken liver pate on. Some tuna and sweetcorn that you have on oatcakes.
Homemade potato salad or making some coleslaw, and again, adding in some form of protein, whether that’s some eggs or some biltong or some gelatin or some cottage cheese or whatever it may be.
Really, you can just mix and match any of these things with the goal of having a snack that has some carbs, some protein, and fat. Hopefully that gives you some suggestions of things that you could be including or making or taking with you for snacks – or, as I said, accompanying a main meal and then just making it a little bit bigger.
01:09:00
I now want to turn my attention to grabbing lunch when you’re out and about. My general suggestion is to follow the principles I’ve outlined earlier in respect to what constitutes healthy foods and going for things that are minimally processed and made of ingredients that are minimally processed.
Typically you want to include, again, carbs, proteins, and fats as part of the meal. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with eating lower carb or eating lower fat, but make sure that if you are doing this, it does actually work for you – it’s not because you’ve just heard that this is a better way of eating.
Most supermarkets these days now have decent food selections that can make up a healthful lunch or make up whatever you need to eat when you’re out and about. Going in there and seeing what you can put together isn’t too difficult these days. I’d say the same thing for a lot of the High Street chains like EAT or Pret or Yo! Sushi or LEON or Itsu.
I know these are all UK focused or UK brands. I don’t know exactly where you are living in the world, but I think things have got better for a lot of places. I know when I’ve been in Sydney, there’s always a huge amount of selection of healthy foods or different options, and the same for most of the bigger cities that I’ve traveled to. I am aware there are places that could be described as food deserts, where it is a real struggle to find fresh food or fresh produce and the options are very limited, and it might only be fast food or might only be fried food or whatever it is. But I think for the vast majority of people and for the vast majority of people listening, this isn’t going to be the case and you do have options.
With this, pay attention to what works for you. For me, having a jacket potato for lunch is a fantastic meal. It fills me up. It makes me warm. It gives me really good energy. But for someone else, this kind of meal just might not work. It might put them to sleep, so they’re better off going for something else. Or for someone, having a sandwich for lunch really works, while for someone else, it leaves them feeling bloated or they’re hungry an hour later. Pay attention to this stuff. Pick the things that work for you.
But I do think you can definitely make healthful choices when you are out and about. When you’re buying stuff on the High Street, it might not be as good as something you could make yourself from scratch, but it’s probably not too far off, and you could definitely do a lot worse.
My other big suggestion here is that you want to get food before you’re too hungry. If you’re working in an office, you don’t want to leave it too late to go out, or if you’re a parent and you have little ones and you’re out and doing shopping or you’re out and doing whatever and you need to get food, you don’t want to leave this too long because the more hungry you are, the less likely you’re going to eat something that is about health and what’s going to sustain you and what’s going to nourish you. It’s more likely going to be something that’s going to hit your palate.
01:12:10
The final comment I want to mention before I wrap this one up is for this to work, food has to be seen at some level as a priority. You have to see the value in taking the time to do this, because even though these suggestions are meant to make things easier, there is obviously some level of effort that is required.
If this is creating new habits, it’s probably going to be more of a priority and be more of an effort to start with. But the more you can do this, the more it becomes second nature and then you don’t have to think about it. You always just have fruit on your desk, or you’re always used to boiling some eggs and taking them with you to work the next day. This just starts to become very natural. But it takes food being seen as a priority for this to happen, and it takes action steps to then make that a reality.
And this isn’t just about the time to make this stuff, but it’s also the time to eat it. It only may take 4 or 5 minutes to eat a snack, but often people feel like they’re too busy to do it. Or setting aside 15 or 20 minutes to just sit down and eat lunch feels like a real stretch.
Too often what I find with this is the focus is on the short term. They’re like, “well, if I’m taking this time for that snack, and then the time to sit down and eat lunch, and then I’ve got to go and get lunch, and then I’m away from doing my emails” and they add it up, they’re like, “I’ve lost 40 minutes, I’ve lost an hour.” But I don’t think this is fair math, because it’s not the amount of time that someone is working, but how productive you are during this time. By creating more time and by having more space and prioritizing eating, you become infinitely more productive.
What feels like lost time in the beginning because you took time to have lunch or you took time to have a snack ends up creating more time because when you then are working, you’re much more focused. You’re much better at getting things done.
That is it for this week’s show. As always, I hope you found it useful and that there’s been some insights of things that you can start to do. I mentioned lots of different podcast shows as part of this, and I’ve touched on certain ideas, so be sure to check them out if they’re of interest to you. I’ll also be including the snack ideas handout. You can find all of that stuff at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/098.
I will be back next Thursday. Until then, have a great week and look after yourself.
Thanks for listening to Real Health Radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at the Seven Health website. That’s www.seven-health.com.
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[…] Food Prep, Organization and Snack Ideas Recipes: Budget Bytes, The Minimalist Baker, Imma Eat That Planners: Grocery List Notepad, Menu […]
Hi Chris,
I absolutely loved this podcast, there were some really helpful tips in there! I was wondering if there was anyway of getting a print out or some notes on the ‘creating habits’ section?
Kind Regards
Olivia