Time to combat convenience eating: Part One
It happened again. Despite my hunger to serve healthy, nutritious, and delicious to my family…we faced the dreary prospect of another quick and unhealthy convenience meal. Can you relate?
Even so, I’m giving myself grace to not have it all together.
My five beautiful children all are growing, learning, discovering, playing - and I don’t want to miss it.
Farm babies are making their grand entrance into the world, trees are finally budding in chartreuse spring green, tiny plants are outgrowing their trays - rushing to display their blooms and beauty, and seed packets are still lined up in queue awaiting their turn for planting.
I feel pulled in so many wonderful directions that are all good.
My freezer is packed full of delicious pastured meats that I know will nourish us all, helping us experience the regenerative bounty of all we are doing here at Heart and Soil Ridge. But the excitement, distraction, and beauty all around me make it hard to pause and think ahead.
When the dinner bell rings, I find I have no thawed meat, no plan, and therefore no recourse. Instead of nutritious and nourishing, we have positioned ourselves for convenience.
The problem is not laziness. It’s not lack of goodwill, or minimizing my responsibilities at home. No, I’d diagnose the problem as a simple glitch in my home-operating system.
I need to take the thinking out of my preparation.
I find it laborious to make the daily decisions of what’s for dinner, and I have no routine for pulling meat out ahead of time to prep. It’s no surprise then, that I find myself alerting to the problem of frozen meat and no plan at 7PM.
Charlotte Mason, an educator from the early 1900’s quotes in her book, “…The effort of decision is the most exhausting effort of life…”
I can totally relate. It’s not the process of cooking that is throwing me under the bus. I enjoy the creative process of cooking from time to time, particularly when I get to use quality ingredients!
Nope, it’s the deciding ahead of time that clogs up the gears for me. It’s the exhausting effort of making that daily decision of what’s for dinner, in the midst of a busy and beautiful life filled to the brim with other things calling my name.
So how can I combat convenience eating? I’m going to start at the root of the problem: removing the effort of decision-making around meals.
How then, shall I do this? Good question.
Years ago, I developed a binder that did this very thing. It took the decision-making out of my meal planning. Worked like a charm! Though, after moving and resetting up homes twice, and adding 4 more children into my game plan, my binder got buried.
Time to dust it off, regroup, and wield that binder to work for our now family of seven!
Stay tuned for Part Two of this post, where I will share the beauty of that simple system, and just how to remove the decision-making out of your meal planning.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me an email if you have insights in how you have worked to remove meal-planning details and decisions ahead of time. I’m always learning!
