“Those who Think They Have no Time for Healthy Eating, Will Sooner or Later Have to Find Time for Illness.”
Today I thought I would share one of my favourite quotes. This quote states that a person who says they cannot find time for healthy eating, will sooner or later have to find time for illness. Do you often find yourself saying that you do not have time to cook or do not fancy cooking for an hour after work every day? In this article, we will be exploring my thoughts and opinions of this quote as well as supplying my own suggestions that may be able to help if you find yourself in this position.
There are a few points that I would like to make about this quote. Firstly, I believe that it is a great way of highlighting the fact that everyone has time to eat healthily. It is just a matter of finding a routine or system that works best for the individual. Eating healthily does not mean that the meal you make must take a long time to prepare and cook, nor does it have to be complicated. For instance, a stir-fry can take 20 to 30 minutes from start to finish, prep to cooked. Now, this is already not a long time to prepare and cook a meal but we all have different jobs, home lives and circumstances that impact our free time. If you still find yourself saying you do not have 20 to 30 minutes after work to cook a dish, there are other things you can do to make this even easier.
A great option for people that do not have much time during the working week could be to batch cook meals. You could batch cook meals on a day that you have more time and store them in the fridge or freezer so that they are fully prepared. All you would need to do then is re-heat them when you are ready to cook, significantly reducing the prep and cooking time.
If you like the idea of batch cooking but do not want to spend a lot of your day off cooking all of your meals for the week, you can do it in stages. What I mean by this is, on Monday evening you could make your meal but instead make double the amount you are planning on eating. You could then re-heat and eat the duplicate meal the next evening and repeat this process the evening after that. Alternatively you could make double portions on Monday, eat the duplicate portion on Wednesday, make double portions on Tuesday and eat that duplicate meal Thursday so that you are alternating meals.
Another option to decrease the amount of time you need to make the meal, you could simply do the prep work in advance. If you cut all the vegetables and prep everything and leave it in the fridge until the evening or next day, this will save time when it comes to making the dish. In the example of the stir-fry, the start to finish time would change to around 10 to 15 minutes.
Another Point that I wanted to make was that this does not mean you can not eat your favourite unhealthy foods, you could start small and slowly make your overall diet healthier. For example, if you tend to come back from work and order a takeaway or eat junk food because you have no time to cook, instead of making a drastic change, you could start with just changing 1 or 2 days to start with. Even just changing a couple of days in the week is a considerable change to your diet and you would likely feel better for it. Slowly decreasing the amount of takeaways and junk food that you are eating and replacing them with healthy, nutrient rich foods can help you to feel rejuvenated and improve your well-being.
This nicely leads us onto my next point that I wanted to make. Of course everyone knows that eating healthier, nutrient rich foods is healthy as it is literally in the name but eating healthily does not mean that you have to eradicate what people call “bad” foods. A lot of people do it, including the media but I do not believe that we should label foods “good foods” or “bad foods”, I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to label foods as such. I am a healthy person, I exercise frequently, I watch what I eat and after losing weight when I was younger, it is not a place that I want to go back to. This by no way means that I have stopped eating the foods that I enjoy. Sure, I reduced how often I was going to restaurants, eating takeaways and junk food but I have never stopped it completely. I enjoy eating pizza, crisps and chocolate as I am sure many of you do as well but I know full well that I would not be a happy person if I forced myself to never eat these foods again.
I can say from experience that if you try to completely remove foods like this rather than slowly reducing them, then you will start to crave them more and even experience cases of eating a larger portion of the desired food than you otherwise would. At the end of the day, if you eat healthily for most of the week and have an occasional pizza once a week or every two weeks, it is not the end of the world and will not ruin all your progress on it’s own. The same goes for that sneaky few pieces of chocolate after dinner when watching the tv. Similarly, if you are going out to a restaurant for someone’s birthday or another special occasion, eating what you want while you are out will not be the end of the world and ruin your fitness goals. If these foods make you happy and you enjoy them, then go for it but do so in moderation, smaller quantities maybe. Try to make sure you are eating a balanced diet so you are still getting your required nutrients and minerals and so that you are not overindulging and pushing yourself into a consistent caloric surplus.
These are my main thoughts related to this quote, let me know what you think in the comment section. Do you agree with what I have said? Maybe you have a different view point, I would love to hear what you think. Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this post. Let me know if there is a specific topic that you would like to see me discuss! Stay happy and healthy, ciao!