I could distill my boring principles for eating well into the following short statements:
1. Eat a decent breakfast.
2. Do not eat anything else until lunch.
3. Eat a decent lunch.
4. Do not eat anything else until dinner.
5. Eat a decent dinner.
6. Do not eat anything else until breakfast.
7. Don’t drink sugared beverages and drink lots of water.
Eating real food involves a certain amount of effort, unfortunately. Your great-grandma wouldn’t recognize frozen pizza. Learning to make something that’s good for you and tastes good is a true life skill and a test of your ability to take care of yourself. You can’t just eat cold cereal for dinner or order takeout every night. You can’t go out to eat for every lunch. And you can’t skip breakfast! If you do these no-no’s you’ll spend way too much money, almost certainly weigh more than you should, but, more importantly, you’ll be eating lots of processed food, which means you’ll be eating lots of salt, non-healthy fats, and weird stuff. That’s the technical term: weird stuff.
This isn’t a cooking blog per se, especially for regular weekday meals. Most of the recipes you’ll find on this site as it is going to be re-branded and re-purposed will be for party food, and even
I wrote a post some time ago called “Fifteen Minutes a Day Can Change Your Life.” This was a quotation from a former pastor, who may have gotten it from the book Success Is Not an Accident: Change Your Choices, Change Your Life by Tommy Newberry. (I just googled the phrase and this book came up—it looks good! I now have it checked out from that great library service Hoopla.) Anyway, the window of opportunity has now narrowed from 15 minutes to 5 seconds. Very efficient, no? I found out yesterday about this totally, insanely motivating woman named Mel Robbins through a rather circuitous route that started with my usual Thursday listening of the “Happier in Hollywood” podcast hosted by Sarah Fain and Liz Craft. They were interviewing someone who had interviewed Mel on her own podcast, so I went over and listened to that episode (language warning) and then watched Mel’s TED talk (access below) and a video or two or her on her own. Now I’m a Mel Robbins fan.
The title comes from a recent BSF lecture, an idea that is so obvious that it gets overlooked, especially by me. Our teaching leader was talking about the Billy Graham crusades that took place in past years, when whole stadiums would be filled to hear the dynamic preacher. But, as she said, the results came about not just because of Mr. Graham’s own spiritual standing, Scriptural knowledge and personal magnetism but because of the advance teams’ work. They would go to a city where a crusade was to take place and meet with churches, scope out the venue, recruit volunteers to help with everything from counseling to cleanup—on and on. Without all of that unseen work the crusades just wouldn’t have happened, or if they had they’d have been much less successful. Whether or not you agree with how the message of the Gospel was presented in those crusades, and many don’t, the fact is that they were masterpieces of organization, and of organization that was done ahead of time.
Today I sat down to go through an accumulation of notes I’ve taken over the past couple of years, mostly from sermons at my church and lectures at Bible Study Fellowship. I was particularly looking for ideas that I’d scribbled down in the margins about possible blog posts, while also reminding myself of the wonderful spiritual truths that have been showered down upon me from various speakers. I don’t know that I intended to spend quite as much time as I did, but now I have a manageable little pile of notepaper with various areas highlighted. So I decided to go with the idea that ended up on top, quoted above. Here’s the entire quotation:
As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, one of the bloggers/podcasters I follow is a woman named Laura Vanderkam, a speaker and writer whose area of expertise is the efficient use of time. She tracks her own time regularly, and every year she invites her readers to participate with her for one week. Last year I started to do it but quickly fell off the wagon, as I couldn’t figure out how to characterize time spent sitting at the table and talking to my husband while at the same time eating a meal.
If you follow this blog much you’ll know that I’m a great, great fan of the blogger, podcaster and author Gretchen Rubin. I was thinking today about how my own blogging and book writing was kicked off by the simple act of my reading a review of her first book on happiness, The Happiness Project (Revised Edition): Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Well, I had a nice post planned for today, something about the difference between self-awareness and self-absorption. Instead, I’m writing about food again, this time quoting from another book, Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite
I mentioned this book in another post, over a year ago, and I was reminded of it by a little phrase that popped into my head: “one tiny chop.” I knew the words were from this book, and I was determined to find it and put it into
Well, Thankgiving is next week. Kind of crept up on me, to be honest, as I’ve been somewhat consumed with all the other food events in my life going on right now. I don’t even know what my responsibilities are going to be for next Thursday, as my dear mother-in-law will be in charge of the meal and I’ll just do what she tells me to do. It’ll be our first TG here in the new space. Have to tell you, by the way, that this past weekend was the second retreat rehearsal of the year for the Cherry Creek Chorale and also the second one I put together in my beautiful little kitchen, and it again performed flawlessly. So nice and compact! And I still love my stove.
I know, I know: this small-things-every-day idea comes up over and over again in this blog because I struggle with it so much. I devoted a whole chapter in my book to the idea of “the power of small things.” (Read that chapter here.) Becoming more aware of how counterproductive it is to let things pile up has helped me to improve my consistency even as I experience the boredom of putting things away, making the bed, wiping down the bathroom counter, etc., etc. It’s a total drag,
