Models I Live By

There are three constants to your 80,000 meal journey:

1. whole foods.
2. making those foods edible (or buying in an enjoyable ready-to-eat form).
3. the skill to adapt to your changing circumstances, energy, emotions, cravings, goals and needs.

Along your journey, you’ll live through ideal days of feeding yourself, and much tougher days where you’re just managing to feed yourself. Then there’s somewhere in between, which will make up many of the days.

To make this work over the course of your 80,000 meals, you need a system.

The System

It works if it makes it easy for you to eat whole foods that make you feel good and satisfied in most scenarios, no matter what variables come up – emotions, dynamic schedule, or energy changes.

But how do you create a good system?

It starts with accessing whole foods easily. If that part isn’t easy, it makes the rest so much harder. But what does it mean to access whole foods easily?

How to Create Your System

There are mental, emotional, physical barriers that increase the gradients of difficulty to eating whole foods. So to access whole foods easily, we must have minimal barriers.

The easiest scenario is seeing them freshly cut and then being able to eat them with a fork. The more there is between you and the mango, the less likely you are to eat it. The packaged mangoes on the far right of the spectrum don’t seem to appealing to you to eat, do they? But if the mango was right in front of you diced up, there’s literally no physical barrier. This is why buffets are quite ingenious. You tend to eat more because there are no physical barriers between you and the food.

The barriers you may experience are more of the mental kind – like doubt. ‘Will these actually be fresh? How long has it been sitting there?’ You’re may have an emotional barrier. Maybe you don’t feel like them just now. What we set out to do is remove as much friction and as many barriers as possible. Ideally this means you get the foods you like, prepared freshly for you so that there’s far less chance of you not feeling like it.

If it looks colourful, fresh and vibrant and it’s only food you like, it’s then significantly easier to eat whole foods.

But Have Awareness and Courage

There are two more elements that go hand in hand for this system to work – awareness and courage. You must be aware of what you like; yet you must also have the courage to try other things. Sticking to the same thing is a bit like watching your favourite film every week. Does the job but are you growing in any way? To improve gut flora, food resilience and independence, approach new foods with courage.

Practical Tips

So what can you do in a practical setting?

• Prepare yourself ingredients if meal prep is too challenging (like wash and chop your carrots or favourite vegetables) and put them in clear containers at easy height in the fridge.
• Have a backup – places you could go to easily when you can’t prep your own food. These places should be ones you know won’t make you feel bad afterwards. It’s worth investing time into this (and very enjoyable!).
• Be adaptable. That means it’s very much worth learning how to feed yourself in your own kitchen, but also don’t just restrict yourself to your own kitchen – get good at making good choices when you’re out.

Enjoy your meals.

You’ll have 80,000 of them.