Don't Give Up on Getting Better
September bonus post and link for Sunday's online meetup
This is a post for paid subscribers, and I’m sharing the top half publicly to encourage free subscribers to consider upgrading. The second half of this post shares a story about a physical therapy breakthrough.
Hello friends,
I’m looking forward to our monthly meetup this Sunday, September 18, at 5 p.m. Mountain (4 Pacific, 7 Eastern). The Zoom link follows, and I’ll send a cal invite also. Bring nutrition-related questions to the discussion. We’ll spend some time in a Q&A with one of this newsletter’s supporters, Sheila Dalton, who’s a nutrition and wellness coach along with being an avid trail runner (check out her site here).
I challenge you to consider, how might you prepare food and eat differently to make you feel better? Are there any aspects to your current nutritional habits that make you feel gross, guilty, or otherwise unsatisfied? What makes you feel good and proud about the way you’re cooking and eating now?
I’ll share a few things that have made me feel better:
The pandemic cut our eating-out habit. In the Bay Area, my husband Morgan and I used to eat dinner out at least two, usually three times a week. When we moved to Colorado, we still drove 25 minutes each way to town to eat out a couple of nights a week. Now, we eat out maybe once/month. My experience with eating out = expensive, overly filling, overly salty, and I inevitably drink two pints of beer or one beer + one glass of wine. That’s an enjoyable indulgence once a month, but too much twice weekly.
I subscribe to the New York Times Cooking newsletter and use the NYTimes Cooking app to challenge myself to cook one new recipe/week. I also recommend this newsletter for its recipes and advice, by the author of The Weekday Vegetarians (a book for omnivores who want to eat less meat but not give it up entirely).
Morgan and I stopped buying wine earlier this year, to curb our expensive chardonnay habit. We still enjoy beer most nights (I like to have one kombucha or one NA beer with dinner, then maybe a real beer while watching TV), but we no longer split a bottle of wine with each dinner. I discovered I don’t need wine to enjoy a meal, which feels liberating and also is better for my head and nightly sleep. Drinking two glasses of wine per night (plus sometimes a beer, too) whetted my appetite to overeat and led me to feel bloated and fuzzy-brained the following morning.
Breaking habits is hard, to put it mildly. I’ve found the key to modifying habits is