The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating
Lynn Johnston
Published by Open Clearing Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Lynn Johnston
Discover other titles by Lynn Johnston at Smashwords.com:
The Kaizen Plan for Decluttering Your Computer (free)
A few sections of this ebook are updated reprints of posts that originally appeared on Lynn's blog: http://www.smallstepstobigchange.com.
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Table of Contents
Your Personal Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating
Step 3: Don't Waste Your Willpower
Step 4: Get Educated About Nutrition
Step 7: Get More Nutrients From the Food You're Already Eating
Step 8: Eat Your Veggies First
Step 9: Stay Between 20 and 80 Percent
Step 10: Start With Foods You Already Like
Step 11: Treat your Vegephobia
Step 12: Add a Salad or Some Crudites
Step 13: Sneak a Veggie Into a Dish You Already Like
Step 14: Give One Meal a Makeover
Step 15: Find New Ways to Prepare Your Vegetables
Step 16: Cheat Your Way to Eating More Veggies
Step 19: Eat More Whole Grains
Step 20: Make Sure You're Drinking Enough Water
Step 21: Reduce or Eliminate Food Additives
Step 23: Eat Fewer Added Sugars
Step 25: Replace Unhealthy Fats with Healthier Ones
Step 26: Go to Bed a Little Earlier
More Resources for Healthy Eating
Introduction
Healthy eating did not come easy to me. I was raised in an authoritarian household, where I was expected to do what I was told immediately. At mealtimes, that meant if I complained about something on my plate, if I refused to eat something, or I ate too slowly, I would be force-fed.
As you might guess, I became an expert at swallowing foods as quickly as possible without chewing them, to avoid tasting them, and at smushing the food around my plate to make it look like I'd eaten more than I had. I would fake illness before dinner to avoid eating foods I particularly despised, and occasionally would hide food in my napkin so I could throw it away after I'd left the table.
I didn't like my mother's cooking, either: it was bland and mushy and it had weird flavors in it. Since asking what was in a dish fell into the category of "complaining," I often found myself picking through the mystery dish du jour, trying to identify ingredients.
Only last year did my mother casually reveal to me she'd lost her sense of smell after a terrible flu during pregnancy and the only flavor she could taste was salt. Wow, did that explain everything! But of course, I didn't know that at the time…back then, I thought she just hated me.
Can't get worse, you're thinking?
Sure it could. When I was in junior high, my father decided we weren't eating healthy enough, and put our family on the Pritikin diet. If you're not familiar with that one, here are the high points: no salt, no sugar, no fat. I was a teenager for whom hamburgers, pizza, and peanut M&Ms were off-limits.
By the time I was a freshman in high school, I equated "healthy eating" with "pure torture."
Worse, as a result of the no-fat requirement, I wasn't getting any of the essential fatty acids that are so necessary for brain development. I began to suffer mood swings and anxiety that wouldn't go away. I craved nuts as much as I craved junk food.
As you might guess, as soon as I was in college and in charge of what went in my mouth, my food choices swung to the other extreme. After years of craving oils, I indulged—but not in healthy oils. In onion rings and deep-fried shrimp and greasy pizza. Sugary cereals and sandwiches and potato chips were staples. The closest I got to eating healthy food was Chinese takeout. And I ate as many peanut M&Ms as I wanted. I was finally free: I had escaped the tyranny of "healthy eating."
After graduation, my diet got even worse. Half the time I didn't even manage to have a bowl of sugary cereal for breakfast—I'd pick up a brownie and a cup of Dr. Pepper on the way to work. Lunch would be fast food and dinner would be the cereal I never got around to eating for breakfast.
In retrospect, I'm shocked that I even survived that period of my life. Between my diet, my stressful temp job, and my habit of getting about five hours sleep a night, the fact that I managed to work full-time and write on the side is a miracle.
Then I fell in love with a vegetarian. It was wonderful and awful at the same time. Every time he'd offer me some healthy food or try to cook for me, I'd feel like I was a kid again being forced to eat, and I'd get defensive and upset. Thankfully, he was wise enough not to push harder. He did get me to eat a little bit better, but not much.
Then came the straw that broke the camel's back. I developed fibromyalgia. I didn't know what it was at the time—for six years I went to doctors who told me I didn't really feel as terrible as I said I did, and if I would just get more sleep and more exercise, I'd be fine. I got more sleep. As my symptoms got worse, I reached a point where I slept for 14 hours each night and still felt exhausted. I tried to exercise too, but I could barely walk a few blocks before I'd be so sore and shaky I had to sit down and rest.
For those of you who've never had fibromyalgia, it feels like having a bad flu virus—that lasts for years instead of 24 hours.
When I finally was diagnosed correctly, I was so relieved I almost passed out. The doctor prescribed antidepressants and painkillers.
"How long before I'm cured?" I asked.
"There is no cure for fibromyalgia," the doctor replied. "You'll be taking antidepressants and painkillers for the rest of your life."
I couldn't accept that.
With the loving help of that vegetarian (who I'd since married), I read everything I could about fibromyalgia. At the time, the medical establishment knew very little about it, so a lot of my research fell into the alternative medicine category. Most of the suggested therapies for fibromyalgia were nutritional.
I had no choice. I had to start eating healthy.
It was a slow process. I was lucky my husband was not only supportive, but extremely knowledgeable about what constitutes a healthy diet. He cooked for me, he cajoled me into trying strange new vegetables, and he managed not to laugh when sometimes I literally had to plug my nose to get the healthy food down.
Somewhere along the line, I discovered there were a couple of "healthy" foods I actually liked if they were cooked the right way. The more recipes I tried from different cuisines around the world, the more vegetables I wanted to eat. I gave up some of my junk food. The stuff I kept, I ate less of. I started looking forward to meals instead of dreading them. The nutritional supplements I'd been taking to combat my symptoms seemed to be more effective than they had in the past.
After four more years of slowly improving my diet, I reached a point where I didn't have any symptoms at all.
I won't lie to you, it wasn't an easy process. I backslid, I attempted radical dietary changes that lasted less than a week, I went cold turkey on the junk food. I tried cleanses and detox diets and New Year's resolutions to become a vegetarian.
What eventually worked was the approach I'm describing in this book: small changes that fit my lifestyle, introduced gradually so I didn't feel overwhelmed. I hadn't heard the word "kaizen" back then, but I wish I had. If someone had given me this strategy at the start, I would have recovered from fibromyalgia much more quickly and with much less stress. You don't have to struggle like I did. You can do it the easy way.
My journey isn't over—I'm still fine-tuning my diet, and there are "superfoods" I still can't bring myself to eat. Yet. But I've gone from someone who starts the day with brownies and Dr. Pepper to being someone who looks forward to eating fresh veggies from the garden in my backyard.
If I can do it, you can do it. I know you can.
Lynn
7/29/11
Your Personal Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating
We all know how important it is to eat healthy foods, but knowing and doing are not the same thing. Our eating habits are established when we're too young to make good choices ourselves, so we learn to eat what our parents eat. As we grow up, our food choices are influenced by those around us and we might try new dishes here and there, but chances are the patterns are already set by the time we're teens. By the time we're old enough to think rationally about what we should eat and why, we've been in the habit of eating the same types of foods for maybe a decade and a half. And the longer you've been stuck with a habit, the harder it is to break.
The good news is there's a way to make it easier to break those habits. We humans are wired to resist big changes because the risk of losing what we've got right now is high with a big change. But we've also evolved to adapt to small changes almost without noticing, because if we couldn't handle the little day-to-day changes life inevitably throws at us, we would never have survived as a species.
The Kaizen Plan for Healthy Eating takes advantage of your natural ability to adapt to microchanges with minimal effort. Other books will tell you to throw away all your junk food and replace it with foods you may not like yet and might not know how to prepare to your own tastes. The cold turkey approach fails because it triggers the automatic resistance that kicks in whenever someone tries to force us to do something (even if that someone is ourselves!).
I say, leave the junk food there for now. Let me introduce you to some small changes—so small you'll barely feel like you're changing anything. Over time, you'll find yourself eating less junk food naturally, because you'll have gradually trained your taste buds to enjoy healthier meals. You'll start to crave the good stuff because you'll have discovered it makes you feel better and you have found ways to prepare it so you like how it tastes.
In this book, I've broken down the elements of a healthy diet and identified one or more small changes that address each element. You're probably already doing some of the things suggested here. If so, good for you! Please choose the small steps that complement what you're already doing right.
This is not a weight loss plan, although if you implement the changes suggested in this book, you may find yourself dropping excess pounds. If your goal is to lose weight, the changes you make as you work through this book will make it easier for you to adapt to a reasonable weight loss plan later, and will build up your body so it can adapt more quickly to exercise.
This approach is not a quick fix. If you make one small change a week, you could easily spend an entire year improving the quality of your diet. But because those changes happen gradually and relatively painlessly, they'll stick with you.
What is Kaizen?
Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning "continuous improvement" and it's used in the business world to describe the approach of accomplishing things by making a series of small, simple changes that result in gradual improvement. It's the approach Japanese businesses took after World War II to remake their manufacturing industry and turn companies like Honda and Toyota into the world-renowned corporations they are today.
But the kaizen approach isn't limited to business. It can be applied to any goal or project that can be broken down into smaller steps. The biggest benefit of the kaizen approach is that it eliminates overwhelm. All you have to do is focus on one small step at a time.
What is a Kaizen Plan?
A Kaizen Plan is simply a set of small but doable steps taken one at a time. Each step addresses some aspect of the problem you want to solve or the goal you want to achieve.
The effect of a Kaizen Plan is cumulative. Each small step you take synergizes with the others, so life gets better faster than you’d expect.
Each step in a Kaizen Plan has to fit several criteria:
- Simple. A plan consisting of complicated, difficult steps is a plan that never gets executed.
- Short. A change that requires you to set aside a large block of time is a change that doesn't get made. But a change that you can do in a few minutes is much easier to squeeze into your busy schedule. Most of the changes I've suggested can be done in just a few minutes per day.
- Personalized. The most effective small steps are the ones that directly address your needs. Always feel free to modify any of the suggestions in this book so they work for you, or use them as inspiration for coming up with specific changes that meet your needs.
- Affirming. You shouldn't have to change your personality to change your habits. The goal isn't to become a different person, it's to become a healthier version of who you already are.
If you're a super-motivated, uber-disciplined overachiever whose life is already organized in 15 minute increments…this book isn't for you. It's for the rest of us.
What kinds of projects is the kaizen approach appropriate for?
The kaizen approach is a tool you can turn to when:
- You can’t carve out a big enough chunk of time to complete a project all at once
- You’ve been procrastinating on the project because it seems overwhelming
- You don’t have the willpower to make a big change (like quitting smoking or going on a diet) all at once
- You’re not sure where to start, or you’re afraid of starting in the wrong place
- You’ve started the project before and given up or gotten distracted
- You don’t have an impending deadline to keep your motivation up
- You have a lot of mental resistance to changing
- You want to make a change that is actually multiple small changes combined
That last one is so important I want to repeat it: sometimes the change you want to make is actually multiple small changes combined. Just because you can state your goal in a single word or phrase doesn’t mean it’s one change.
Eating healthy, for example. That sounds like one goal, doesn’t it? But it requires a lot of willpower because it’s really a lot of little changes that you have to stay on top of. (Which, incidentally, is why it’s so darned hard to go on a diet.)
The kaizen approach helps you separate a big goal into all its little changes so you can focus on one at a time.
You could, for example, swear off sugar, throw away all the junk food in your house, go grocery shopping for healthy food, buy a cookbook of healthy recipes, and then try to learn how to cook (and enjoy eating) healthier food next Monday. But that’s going to make next week pretty stressful, because you're going to be tackling a new learning curve while, at the same time, exhausting your willpower by resisting cravings. Plus, you'll have spent money you hadn’t budgeted for, so you’ll feel even worse if you're not successful in sticking to the new diet.
On the other hand, deciding you're going to buy several pouches of frozen veggie mixes and eat one each day is a relatively simple, affordable change that doesn’t require you to adjust any other aspect of your life.
You could go a step further and decide steamed veggies will be the first course of dinner, so you fill up on nutritious food and have less room in your stomach left over for lasagna or dessert. This is a little bit bigger change, but it’s doable. You're not denying yourself lasagna or dessert, you're just arranging the meal in such a way that you're eating the "good stuff" first. Doesn’t that seem easier?
Once eating your veggies first has become a habit you do automatically, without effort, you can redirect your willpower to the next small change, like adding fruit to breakfast or remembering to take a multivitamin or going for a 15-minute walk after lunch.
A kaizen plan is customizable. Maybe you love fruit and you cook with healthy oils, but the only vegetable you like is celery and you eat more salt than you know you should. Or maybe you eat plenty of veggies and whole grains, but ice cream and Oreos are your downfall. That's okay, you're going to create a kaizen plan that starts with the way you eat right now and introduces very small adjustments in the direction you want to go.
Anything you’re already good at doing, keep doing it.
I also want to point out how small steps can turn into big steps. I procrastinated on repainting one room of our house for three years, and it was only after I decided to create a kaizen plan for the project that I was able to get started. But when my husband and I finished that room, he was so excited by how much better it looked, he wanted to help me repaint the hallway and one of the bathrooms. So we repainted both those areas too. It just took a little bit of success to get us excited about doing the rest of the work.
Progress, Not Perfection
When I first started taking the kaizen approach to developing better habits, I learned a few lessons I'd like to share with you in the hopes of saving you some stress.
Lesson 1: I wanted to bite off more than I could chew.
When I did my baby steps on the first couple of days, they were so easy I immediately started to get down on myself. "This is lame," my inner critic scolded. "You could do more than this. You should also start exercising right now. And organize the office. And start a diet. And…"
Naturally, as soon as the voice in my head started talking, I felt terrible–even though I’d succeeded in doing what I’d said I would do and was already seeing a small jump in my daily productivity. That voice was trying to take me right back to feeling so overwhelmed by all the "shoulds" in my life that I wouldn’t do anything.
Then the voice started in on what I’d done right. "An extra hour of sleep, and you only got one or two more things done than usual. That’s not enough. You need to do something big! You need a big improvement! You need to get it all done! Today!"
Did I mention that my inner voice is crazy?
I consider it a victory that I didn’t give in and listen to that tirade. I didn’t try to add a whole new diet and a whole new exercise plan and a whole bunch of other "shoulds" to my week. I stayed focused on the two small changes I'd begun, and I saw a small but noticeable improvement as a result.
Lesson 2: It would be easier to focus on and celebrate the small improvements if I kept track of them in some way.
I accomplished more than I expected to those first few weeks, in terms of number of items crossed off my to-do list. But it would have been more motivating if I'd had a visual representation of the progress I was making. If I'm going to stay motivated, I need to reward myself for being consistent until the new habits have become second nature.
Lesson 3: I need to remind myself that a little progress is better than no progress.
Or, to borrow a mantra from the FlyLady, Marla Cilley, who’s an established expert in the field of getting your house organized in baby steps: Progress, not perfection.
Say it with me: Progress, not perfection.
We’re not perfect. We can’t be perfect. Trying to be perfect makes us crazy.
But we can make progress every day. And even an inch of progress is going to add up if we keep pushing ourselves forward every day.