{"id":5472,"date":"2020-11-02T20:15:43","date_gmt":"2020-11-02T20:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/?p=5472"},"modified":"2020-11-02T20:15:43","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T20:15:43","slug":"62-of-us-have-adopted-healthy-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/62-of-us-have-adopted-healthy-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"62% of us have adopted healthy changes!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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That’s good news, isn’t it?<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

I’m guessing most of our reader community (if not everyone), falls in that 62%.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
So how about sharing what healthy change (or changes) you might have made?\u00a0 Add them to the Comments.\u00a0 What a great way to support each other!<\/div>\n
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My Share<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

I’ve been working to reduce the amount of brown rice I eat.<\/p>\n

Important Note:<\/span>\u00a0<\/strong> This is not<\/em> <\/strong>because brown rice is bad. There is much to recommend it, especially if it replaces white rice and white flour in things like bread, tortillas, pizza and most desserts. So don’t go pitching your brown rice in the compost bin!<\/p>\n

Balance<\/span>\u00a0<\/span> <\/strong>But balance is always key–and my diet has become too heavy on the brown rice scale. This was problematic for a couple reasons:<\/p>\n

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  1. Compromised Diversity<\/strong>\u00a0 Eating too much of one food means I don’t have room for the dozens of other foods needed to keep our microbiome happy. (Remember, we talked about the value of “wild diet diversity” in the microbiome workshop I did with Natural Grocers’ nutritionist Helen Dohrman in July.)<\/li>\n
  2. What’s Right for Me<\/strong>\u00a0 Everyone’s different (surprise!), including our dietary needs. Over the years, I’ve found that my body feels better with a few less grain carbs. As someone who could happily exist on a diet of bread, I transitioned to brown rice when I had to eliminate gluten. But now I realize that I can’t just substitute brown rice for bread as the majority of my diet, just because it’s gluten-free.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
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    The Practicalities<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n
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    A lot of diet hopes die when it’s time to go beyond dreaming to doing. To keep those\u00a0 hopes alive, you gotta figure out the strategies to turn hopes into reality.\u00a0 So how did I transition to better nutritional balance and diversity?<\/p>\n

    Going Cold Turkey<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0 When it comes to diet changes, I am more successful going “cold-turkey” rather than trying to “be moderate.” So I decided to reduce my grain carbs by just completely cutting them out of my lunch meal.<\/p>\n

    Taste Bud Transitioning<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0 At first, it was hard to feel like a lunch was complete without brown rice topping my salads or as a base for stir-fries and skillets, my lunchtime standbys.\u00a0 So I had to pay conscious attention to breaking my taste buds’ automatic yearnings, i.e., acknowledging those yearning but then consciously deciding not to heed them.<\/p>\n

    Gradually, the urge to dish up brown rice with every lunch is diminishing as I have given my taste buds time to realize that I’m actually satisfied without rice.<\/p>\n

    Steady Substituting\u00a0<\/span><\/strong> For breakfasts and dinners, I have begun substituting winter squash for grains. To make this manageable, I cook up a big batch of squash–usually several different kinds–and then store in the frig to eat as is, add to soups, throw in a scramble–or to just nibble on when I’m starved!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    <\/div>\n
    Best wishes for ever more healthy eating improvements<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    That’s good news, isn’t it? I’m guessing most of our reader community (if not everyone), falls in that 62%. So how about sharing what healthy change (or changes) you might have made?\u00a0 Add them to the Comments.\u00a0 What a great way to support each other! My Share I’ve been working to reduce the amount of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5472"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5484,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5472\/revisions\/5484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cookhappylivehealthy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}