This is the third of five articles on Transformation: Being New in Our Thinking. Maybe we don’t often think of the humble kitchen as a place for something as lofty as a “transformation.” But wait until you read this installment!
The first newsletter in this Transformation series listed the amazing wealth of resources available to help us adopt a healthy meal making and eating lifestyle, from thousands of cookbooks and millions of recipes, to hundreds of cooking shows, nutritionists and diet books. By all rights, we should be the healthiest population on the planet! Yet still we struggle.
That’s why I have to question: With all our resources, why do we still struggle to make and eat good meals? The answer, I believe, lies in understanding the difference between surface level resources and the deeper level resource of our thinking.
Instant Pots Indeed, the resources listed above are wonderfully helpful, but only at a surface level. For example, when Instant Pots arrived on the cooking scene, they were an immediate hit. A couple friends hauled the heavy things home, excited by the prospect of Instant Meals.
However, Instant Pots don’t actually produce Instant Meals! They still require the same amount of meal prep as a regular skillet or soup pot. The onions still have to be chopped and sauteed, the spices added, and the vegetables cut and stirred in. It is only the actual cooking step that would be more “instant”–and that is a hands-off step anyway!
For all our helpful resources, then, the fact remains that none of them jump up and make healthy meals on their own. In other words, they are helpful at a surface level, but somebody has to exert time and effort to put them to use.
New Thinking Whether to exert that time and effort is driven by our deeper level thinking, i.e., by what we value and believe to be a worthwhile use of our time. Unless we truly value meal making, what are the chances we’ll put that Instant Pot or any other helpful resource to work creating healthy meals?
I can say that my two friends’ Instant Pots have been relegated (pretty permanently) to a bottom corner cupboard! Though well-intentioned, these two home cooks did not have the thinking level support necessary to figure out how to use an Instant Pot, find good Instant Pot recipes, and then do the chopping, sautéing and mixing needed to prepare a recipe for Instant Pot cooking.
This is where new thinking comes in. What if we so deeply valued our health that we were compelled to deeply value the meal making that sustains our health? An interesting thing happens when the mind truly and deeply values something. That something begins showing up in our lives–and very often without a lot of stress or struggle.
The Thinking-Table Connection The bottom line is that there is an intimate connection between our thinking and what shows up on the table. Our thinking and values have a lot to do with our actions and priorities. Change our thinking and values and our actions and priorities follow along, like the desire to make and eat better meals.
I have to wonder whether the thinking-table connection might it explain why New Year’s Resolutions around healthy eating often fail to materialize?
Maybe it’s not that we don’t structure those resolutions the right way, make them SMART enough, schedule them into the calendar or parcel them into manageable small steps.
Maybe it’s because we don’t want them deeply enough, i.e., they aren’t really backed by the deeper level force of our thinking, beliefs and values.
After all, who wouldn’t resolve to eat better each January? It’s an almost universal hope and dream. However, taking the patient, day by day, not-very-glamorous-steps to make and eat better meals pales next to the many other exciting and attractive priorities vying for our attention, like shopping, social media, socializing, an exciting work project or a vacation.
The Buying Trap In lieu of those not-very-glamourous steps, I often see people substitute the quicker and easier option of buying more helpful surface level things, like a new healthy cookbook, a session with a nutritionist, an armload of fresh fruits and vegetables, a diet book, a weight loss app–or an Instant Pot!
Of course these are all good steps, and they can make us feel productive–like we’re making progress. But can and do they lead to lasting change? Probably not, without the deeper force of supportive thinking and values to put those purchases to work.
Could things be different if we diverted energy instead to exploring our thinking, beliefs, attitudes and perspectives around the kitchen and cooking. For example, do we truly value cooking or does it seem like a trite intrusion on the day, best dispensed with as quickly as possible.
As mentioned at the outset, maybe we don’t often think of the humble kitchen as a place for something as lofty as a “transformation.” But I hope you’re seeing some hopeful possibilities here.