Changing diet is hard. Changing pretty much anything is hard. I read a sort of good book a few years ago, "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business". I say it was sort of good because the first half was quite useful, but the second half was largely crap and could be skipped. Two key things I learned from it were:
"to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine."
and the process for changing or creating habits
• Identify the routine
• Experiment with rewards
• Isolate the cue
• Have a plan
So in part, my strategy for becoming more plant-based was to make it fun, make it a game in a way. As a foodie, I like to try new stuff, new foods, so my approach mirrors that. I also like to cook and look for ways to improve my cooking skills. Some years back I decided that I wanted to learn how to bake bread, so I bought a really good book, "The Breadbaker's Apprentice", and over a year or so proceeded to bake nearly every recipe in the book. It was a great experience, I learned not only how to bake bread, but I learned about many types of bread I had never encountered.
In a similar vein, I started to establish a set of habits to make going plant-based easier.
We always go to the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning: in Houston, it is the Urban Harvest market on Buffalo Speedway and Westheimer, in Seattle it is the U District market on University near U Dub. We have our favorite booths, and generally buy a lot of stuff, depending on what is in season. Typically I will get chard, spinach, kale, winter squash, summer squash, eggplant, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, mushrooms, asparagus, poblanos, shishitos, broccoli, cauliflower, and so on. Plus whatever fruit is in season for breakfast and lunch.
When we get home, I will enter all that we bought into my spreadsheet where I do menu planning.
I will also flag on that sheet any other ingredients that need to be used soon (brown rice, whole grains, pasta getting old, nuts too long in the freezer, older canned goods, etc.). I'll look at the calendar to see if there is anything planned that would make cooking difficult (an early evening or late afternoon meeting). Then I look at the weather forecast for the week - are there days when it will be cold and rainy? Those might be good hot soup days. Finally, I've turned it into a bit of a game. In 2020 I started doing Taco Tuesday - every Tuesday I would make tacos, a different one each Tuesday. Recipes either came from the internet, or from "Vegan Tacos", a really good cookbook. I have gotten very good at quickly making corn tortillas, and learned that fresh ones are so much better than store-bought. This year I have added Mandarin Monday to the schedule, so have started expanding my knowledge and skills around East Asian cuisine. Again, I peruse the internet, but also found a really good cookbook "The Chinese Vegan Kitchen", which I have already used quite a bit.
When I lay out the week's menu, I think about what goes bad first - so things like spinach, chard, and asparagus tend to be at the front of the week, kale and turnips usually later in the week. So with all that information, I build a menu for every day of the week. My latest innovation was to create a spreadsheet of names of dishes with the major ingredients in each one. That has been really helpful to get past the cooking equivalent of writer's block. It has taken me several years to get to this point, but I now have some well-established habits, and so it is much easier planning meals than it used to be. COVID caused me to get even more strict with myself, to try to avoid more than one grocery trip per week, so I really think carefully about what I need for the menu, and what we have available.
In any event, this is how I established my new habits, and it seems to work quite well for me. However, as they say, your mileage may vary. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Comments