Baby steps
Having a healthy lifestyle is pretty important to me. I get great sleep, I actually drink the recommended amount of water each day, and I exercise an average of 6.5 days a week. I’m a decently healthy eater too, but this is an area where I have a recurring goal that I just can’t seem to get done.
Meal planning and consistently cooking for myself.
I’m a planner, a list-maker, a process-oriented machine. One would think that meal planning would be child’s play for me and yet – spoiler alert: it’s not. I have tried countless times to think about what I want to eat in a given week, bought groceries, and then somehow at least half of those go bad and I only end up making one thing at best. It’s frustrating and annoying.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what I want for myself next year, and, like every other year for the past few, this keeps coming up. I don’t have the silver bullet to figure out how to make it happen, but this one small thing happened this weekend that felt worth sharing – and celebrating.
Since I spend much of the holidays with my family (and not in my own house), grocery shopping this time of year is a little wonky since I usually only buy for a few days, meaning I don’t want lots of individual ingredients. I was at Trader Joe’s (TJ’s, I love you for your delicious and healthy prepared foods!), buying some pre-made salads and pastas and thinking, OK, these are good, and fairly healthy, but I could make them healthier by throwing in a few additional veggies.
So I went over to pick up a single zucchini and, as it turns out, you can only buy them in packs of four (sigh). I picked them up, sort of resigned, knowing I’ve done this before and ended up with four watery, limp zucchinis that went straight to the compost, and I said out loud (though whispered behind my mask): “I will not waste these zucchinis.”
That very night, I opened one of the salads – again, decently healthy already, but could always benefit from sprucing – and added in fresh baby tomatoes and then steamed one whole zucchini and added that in.
I aspire to say I bought all the fresh ingredients individually and concocted this delicious and healthy meal, but the fact is, all I really did was add a little bit of veggies. But to me, it felt like one teeny tiny step in the direction I’m trying to go. And for the first time, I decided to count that as a WIN, not just a partial completion. Maybe, with each of these little baby steps, that huge mountain just became a lot more manageable…
[Check back in with me in a week and see how those other three zucchinis are faring…ha!]
Get those veggies!
