Are You Unknowingly Keeping Yourself Sick and Miserable? Week 24 of 52 Weeks of Wellness

Are you feeling sick, fatigued or just plain miserable? You should know that…

80% of disease is preventable by lifestyle choices.

Meaning diet and exercise (or FSA as I like to call it, “fun sweaty activity”) is the key. If you continue to believe that there is nothing you can do to prevent disease and you don’t make wellness a priority you could have some serious health issues in the future to combat.

We just finished up talking about how the majority of available “convenience foods” are terrible when it comes to your health. The “Pantry Purge” I suggested you tackle is the first step towards the lifestyle changes necessary.

Squash those temptations

Ridding yourself (and your family) of the opportunity to eat poorly is what I recommend to clients. This isn’t done overnight since it often takes each person time to learn the good and bad when it comes to food.

  1. Start slowly and purge everything that contains the handful of problem ingredients that you know of. Refer back to the week 23 post if you need a reminder of some of the most common things to avoid.
  2. Once you purge the bads tackle replacing those purged items with the whole, clean food alternatives.

A good example of this is the Campbell’s Cream of [insert flavor] soups. Many contain MSG and their sodium levels can also be quite high. Once you’ve gotten rid of those convenient little soup cans you might be at a loss when certain recipes call for the use of one of those cans, say in a casserole recipe.

A solution is this nifty little homemade dry mix that works just as good, yet doesn’t contain all the artificial or chemical stuff. Be sure to use an organic dry milk as well as the cornstarch. Better yet, arrowroot powder is a good substitute for cornstarch.

Planning

This is an obvious one, but planning ahead and takings steps to make your changes more convenient can make or break your attempts. Say you are converting from prepackaged oatmeal to homemade, from scratch oatmeal….

Doing a bit of research on homemade oatmeal can reveal some great ideas for simplifying and even removing cooking all together. Have you heard of overnight oats for example? You mix them up the night before, refrigerate them and in the morning they are ready to eat!

Another preplanning meal tip is make you Quinoa in advance and store it in the fridge (plain) so that you have it ready for breakfast, for making simple afternoon salads and more. Making it ahead saves time rinsing and cooking.

Having things ready to go when hunger strikes gets you fed faster, it takes the stress out of working new healthier foods in your diet and it encourages you to eat those good foods. Read more about time management and wellness here in The Time Management and Cancer Correlation.

Week 24 Action Step:

Pick one or two items to purge and replace and make those items ahead so they are ready to go for you. What items have you picked to purge and replace? What are you replacing them with? Do you have a tip for simplifying their prep? Share with us in the comments below.