Shopping at the farmers market is one of my most rewarding healthstyle habits

Now that you all have your copies of Foodist I’m sure you’re itching to get started upgrading your healthstyle, and I want to help.

This week I’ve partnered with the habit-building app Lift, which is available on iOS as well as your web browser (if you join the Foodist group), to help you get started building healthy habits.

Once you join Lift head over and follow me. I have all sorts of fun habits I try to cultivate including trying new foods, eating something green, walking 10,000 steps a day, and shopping at the farmers market. Feel free to participate in any or all of these, and add your own if you want. Keeping track makes it much easier to stick to your goals.

I’ve also created a special Foodist group of habits in the Lift app for those following the Foodist healthstyle recalibration (Chapter 9). The recalibration requires eliminating sugar, wheat, dairy and alcohol for 2-8 weeks in order to to help restore insulin sensitivity and troubleshoot other food-related health issues. In the book I recommend the recalibration for people with more than 20 pounds to lose who may be metabolically compromised (insulin resistant) or suspect they have food sensitivities.

Although the recalibration is not required for foodists, it can be really useful for those who have had trouble losing weight in the past. If you choose to participate, you’ll be sent a short survey so we can see how the recalibration is affecting you.

Either way I hope you join me on Lift, it’s a great resource for building a better healthstyle. If you add any interesting new habits, feel free to mention them in the comments so other people can check them out and join in.

Photo by Orin Zebest

Whenever anyone tells me they eat healthy but still can’t lose weight, I ask them if they practice mindful eating. Most people just stare back at me blankly, wondering what on earth I’m talking about and whether there’s a chance I’ve traded in my lab coat for some new age crystals and incense.

No, I’m not a hippy. Far from it in fact. But I do think that just about everyone could benefit from adopting some principles of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, particularly when it comes to your eating habits.

There is a wealth of scientific data that eating quickly, not chewing thoroughly and not paying attention to what and how much you’re eating can result in substantial overeating—and even healthy foods can cause you to gain weight if you eat enough of them. Though sometimes this mindlessness can be used in your favor, more often than not you’ll be lulled into a false sense of security and eat more than you intend.

The good news is that these mindless habits can be overcome with practice. The bad news is that like most bad habits, it is difficult to change your behavior without concerted effort. But if you’re committed to the practice, mindfulness does become easier and you’ll learn to enjoy your food more and naturally eat less.

Keep in mind as you’re reading through this list that different things work for different people, and some of these will be much easier for you than others. My goal is to present you with as many options as possible that have worked for myself or others so that you can pick and choose those that fit best with your habits and lifestyle.

9 Simple Tricks To Eat More Mindfully

1. Chew 25 times

Chewing is probably the simplest and most effective way develop the habit of eating mindfully. There used to be an entire dieting movement, led by the late Horace Fletcher, based on the idea that chewing more helped you eat less. Though Fletcher took this idea a little far (and was arguably a little crazy), there is reliable scientific data that extra chewing results in less overall food intake.

I recommend 25 chews per bite here, but likely anything over 20 chews will provide a benefit. The most important part is that you choose a number and count your chews until you reach it. The number itself is less consequential.

To help myself remember to chew thoroughly I’ve used iPhone apps such as Reminders! to ping me a few minutes before my usual mealtimes with a simple Chew 25 Times reminder.

2. Feed yourself with your non-dominant hand

Making things more difficult is a great way to force yourself to pay attention to what you’re doing. One simple way to do this is to force yourself to eat with your non-dominant hand, which for 90% of us is our left hand. It might be too much to do this for every meal, but trying it for breakfast and snacks is a good place to start.

Be careful though, if you get too good at it you can slip back into your mindless habits.

3. Eat every thing with chopsticks for a week

Even if you grew up with chopsticks as your primary utensil, you’ve probably never used them to eat a sandwich or a bag of chips.

I once heard a story about a local tech company that asked a bunch of their employees to use chopsticks exclusively for a week as a mindfulness exercise. Although weight loss was not the goal, everyone in the office lost weight and several reported life changing realizations as a result of the project.

One person dropped his morning bagel habit when he realized that the chopsticks prevented him from experiencing the part of the ritual that he enjoyed the most. Apparently the taste of the bagel was not as appealing as the act of ripping it apart with his hands. Once he realized that actually eating the bagel wasn’t important to him he decided to give it up.

4. Put your fork down between each bite

Putting your fork down between bites of food is an excellent complement to the chewing habit. The act of setting your fork down forces you to focus on chewing your food rather than letting yourself mindlessly pick at your plate for your next bite. It also encourages you to slow down and attend more to the taste of your food, instead of just shoveling it down your throat as quickly as possible.

5. Take your first bite with your eyes closed

I once went to a restaurant where the entire dining experience, including being seated at our table, occurred in the pitch dark. The idea was to focus exclusively on the experience of eating, without the distraction of vision. Unfortunately the food at this restaurant was terrible, and focusing on it only made this point more obvious. But it was a good lesson, and I was certainly not tempted to overeat as a result.

While eating all of your meals in the dark, or even with your eyes closed, is not very practical, taking the time to taste your first bite with your full attention can help you eat the rest of your meal more mindfully. Focus on all the flavors in your mouth and how they interact, as well as the smells and textures. This will help you both appreciate your food and eat more slowly.

6. Try to identify every ingredient in your meal

Trying to taste and identify all the different ingredients in your meal is another great way to focus on the present moment and eat more mindfully. This is particularly fun at restaurants, when you didn’t make the food yourself. An added bonus of this technique is it may also help you become more creative in the kitchen.

7. Put your food on a plate

It may sound obvious, but eating out of a bag is not a very mindful practice. Get in the habit of placing even small snacks and desserts on a plate before you eat them. This will force you to acknowledge exactly what and how much you will be eating.

8. Sit at a table

Once your food is on a plate, you may as well go the extra mile to sit at a table. Formalizing your dining experience can help draw your attention to your food and your eating habits.

9. Eat in Silence

Put away your phone, turn off the TV, hide your kids, hide your wife. Any sensation that you experience outside of taste and smell while you’re eating can distract you and make mindful eating more difficult.

While going through an entire meal in pure silence may be a bit much for most of us, designating the first 3-5 minutes of a meal for quiet and mindful practice can be an effective strategy.

What are your tricks for eating more mindfully?

Photo by *sean

This time last year I introduced the healthstyle Recalibration. Recalibration is an excellent way to help reset your healthstyle (especially if you were a bit derailed by the holidays) and troubleshoot stalled weight loss, but it is not intended as a method of prolonged weight control. For that you need something that lasts.

No human on earth can eat perfectly healthy for every meal of his life. And if you think about it, that shouldn’t even be your goal. Food is too good and life is too short to deprive yourself all the time of things you enjoy. Besides, nobody has an endless supply of willpower, so even if you try for perfection you will likely fail.

What’s awesome is that you don’t actually need to eat perfectly all the time. To achieve and maintain your ideal weight, all you need is to eat healthy most of the time. In other words, the secret to long term weight control is not restricting certain foods or ingredients, it’s changing your habits.

Over the years I’ve noticed there are a handful of essential habits that are necessary for me to maintain my preferred weight. For me these include eating breakfast, shopping at the farmers market (which translates into cooking more at home), eating vegetables daily, walking 10,000 steps per day, strength training 3-5 days per week, chewing my food thoroughly, drinking lots of water and limiting sugary or bready meals to 1-2 times per week.

I call these my Home Court Habits, and if I am able to do them consistently I can pretty much eat whatever I want the rest of the time. But if I miss any of them for too many days in a row without compensating in some way my weight will start to creep upward.

The beautiful thing about habits is that once they are developed they work for you automatically, without much thought or willpower. This means that if you can acquire the right set of Home Court Habits, weight control will be fairly effortless. Cool, right?

Things only start to get tricky when you are thrown off your normal routine for an extended period of time. This is one reason the holidays can be so difficult. With travel and special occasions every weekend, it’s easy to let cooking or exercise slip for a week or more. But when you return to your home court, your habits should put you back on track.

Of course, for Home Court Habits to work, you need to defend them. Birthdays, holidays and pressing work deadlines occur too often for you to rely on temporary diets or willpower to see you through your fitness goals. But if you have a set of Home Court Habits that you know you can depend on whenever you’re in your regular routine, these health-defying events won’t be strong enough to have a significant impact on your weight.

Because Home Court Habits are so essential, you shouldn’t trust yourself or your best intentions to maintain them. Track your activity and keep records to make sure your habits are working for you. Monitoring is a Home Court Habit as well.

To keep myself honest, I use a wifi scale (both Fitbit Aria and Withings are great) daily to track my weight. I know from experience that I fluctuate within a three pound window. If I start to veer outside of that I reexamine my Home Court Habits to make sure something isn’t being neglected.

To make sure I get my 10,000 steps per day I use my Fitbit pedometer and check it regularly. The app keeps a record of your daily steps and sends you an email every week summarizing your activity. Habit building apps like Lift are excellent for helping you track your eating and exercise habits and focus your efforts.

Home Court Habits do not need to be the same for everyone. If you don’t like the gym, find some other activity that helps you be active and reach your step goal (I do think everyone needs to take 10,000 steps per day). If you don’t like to cook, find a few prepared meals (at restaurants, grocery stores or wherever) that are healthy and tasty. Work on building the habit of portion control when you’re indulging in something sweet. This may require developing mindful eating habits so you enjoy food more and are satisfied with less.

Whatever habits you try to develop, make sure that you enjoy them. Habits are always associated with a reward (for more on habit building check out The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg). Though the rewards can be very subtle, if your new activity provokes a negative or even neutral emotional response it probably will not stick. So yes, you’re going to have to learn to enjoy being thinner and healthier. Bummer, I know.

By far the hardest part is identifying and developing the Home Court Habits that work for you, both physically and logistically. There needs to be enough of them to counteract all of your not-so-healthy habits (some of your Home Court Habits may involve reprograming these), and they need to be rewarding enough to develop into habits in the first place. Once formed, however, your Home Court Habits are the ultimate secret to lasting weight control.

What are your Home Court Habits?

Photo by evelynishere

Food shopping can be intimidating, especially if cooking is new to you.

A common approach to this problem is to pick your recipes beforehand, make a list of what you need and then shop until everything from the list is in your basket. But being comfortable shopping without a list is a valuable skill worth adding to your healthstyle toolkit.

Lists can come in handy, especially when you’re planning a large meal or event where organization is essential. But at a farmers market, shopping lists aren’t nearly as useful.

You can never be 100% certain of what you’re going to find at the market each week. Sure there are things you can usually count on (I know I can find kale at my market year round), but having a long catalog of ingredients for a particular recipe is likely to be frustrating.

A shopping list you can’t fulfill will leave you scrambling, running around the market looking for absent ingredients or inferior substitutes. No fun. The last thing you want to do is turn the farmers market into a source of anxiety.

Still the best reason to avoid lists at the farmers market is that discovering new and interesting foods is what makes shopping there such a treat. It takes an open mind and curious eyes if you hope to find the next tree tomato.

So how do you free yourself from the shackles of shopping lists without ending up with a pile of random vegetables and no obvious meals?

When shopping at a farmers market, the best meal planning strategy combines both structure and flexibility. Start with an idea of what you want to accomplish, then let the season’s offerings nourish your spirit of adventure and round out your menus.

Meal Planning at the Farmers Market

Step 1. Quantify

Think about how many meals you want to get from your purchases (e.g. 4 dinners, 5 lunches), and be sure to have that many main course ideas (vegetables being the centerpiece) given that a few will probably repeat.

At this point it is okay to have one or two things in mind you know you want to make, but the rest of your meals should be inspired by wandering through the aisles and seeing what catches your eye.

Step 2. Visualize

As you discover which foods will be the focal points of your meals, start to think about how you might like them cooked (even if you don’t know how). Think about what other flavors usually taste good with what you’re buying–consider herbs (parsley, thyme, mint, cilantro, etc.), proteins (meats, fish, eggs, legumes) and side dishes.

If you can’t think of anything, try to remember how these foods have been served to you in a restaurant. If you still aren’t sure what other flavors would be a good choice, ask the vendor you are buying from. Farmers are usually pretty good at cooking the foods they grow.

Step 3. Consolidate

For all the different ideas you had for meals, think of those with common flavors. Look for similarities between the dishes and overlapping ingredients. For example, most dishes will need some kind of onion, garlic or both. The farmers market is also a great place to get herbs and spices.

Look around and see what is available, purchasing the ingredients that are the most versatile. Flavors that can be included in several different dishes also give you the flexibility to change up your meal plans in middle of the week if you are suddenly struck with inspiration.

Step 4. Collect

As your ideas solidify, be sure to collect all the elements you need. iPhone apps can be particularly helpful with this if you want to double check ingredient lists. Because most popular recipes are born from available seasonal ingredients, it is likely you will find everything you need while shopping at the farmers market. If not, you might need to pick up the rest of your ingredients at a regular grocery store–not the end of the world.

To make sure you don’t forget anything, think about each dish individually and deconstruct each of the elements in your mind. This will jog your memory if you forgot to grab a lemon or some garlic.

Step 5. Plan

It is good to have a rough idea of when you are going to eat each of the meals you visualized. Some vegetables hold up better than others over the course of a week in the refrigerator. Plan to eat the most delicate produce in the first day or two, and save the hearty kale and broccoli for later in the week. Here are some tips to keep produce fresh.

Conclusion

Creative shopping without lists takes some practice, but you don’t have to be a master chef or flavor expert to get it right. When cooking with delicious, seasonal ingredients you can’t go wrong with simplicity. Start with the basics and work your way up as you get more comfortable in the kitchen and at the market.

Do you use shopping lists?

Originally published January 20, 2010.

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

There are certainly some must reads this week, including Ruth Reichl’s speech from the Good Food Awards about how the food landscape has changed (for the better) in America. I also found an excellent discussion of the Paula Deen fiasco, and a handful of studies showing exercise is even more awesome than we knew.

Want to see all my favorite links? Be sure to follow me on on Digg. I also share links on Twitter (@summertomato), Google+ and the Summer Tomato Facebook page. I’m very active on all these sites and would love to connect with you.

Links of the week

• What I Said Last Night at the Good Food Awards <<Everyone should read this. Not only is it the most optimistic and hopeful piece I’ve seen on the food movement (and I totally agree with the sentiments), but it’s a wonderful reminder of how millions of Americans are still eating. (Ruth Reichl)
• Paula Deen has Diabetes and takes Victoza. So What? <<By far the best analysis I’ve seen of the Paula Deen situation. Seriously, don’t look so shocked. (Weighty Matters)
• Twinkies, the Undead Snack <<Mark Bittman would be happy to see Twinkies disappear. I wouldn’t mind either. (New York Times)
• Food industry opposes EPA limits on dioxins <<This is scary, but I think it is worth noting that most dangerous exposure happens in industrial foods, particularly animal production where their feed has been contaminated. This would make pastured, grass-fed animals far, far safer. (Food Politics)
• How Exercise May Keep Alzheimer’s at Bay <<This is a really fascinating story about how those with a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s Disease can virtually eliminate it with exercise (though being sedentary has an opposite, accelerating effect). (New York Times)
• 30 Years of Aging vs 3 Weeks of Bed Rest – Which is Worse For Aerobic Fitness? <<More news in sedentary behavior… it’s really bad for you. (Obesity Panacea)
• 5 Phone Apps for Healthy Green Eating <<I think that anything your iPhone can do to encourage healthier behavior is a good thing. Good suggestions here, and a few I hadn’t heard of. (Treehugger)
• Fish and Young Women’s Hearts <<Eating fish is healthier than not eating fish, by a significant amount. (Dr. Weil)
• 7 surprising reasons to eat more soup <<Soup is one of my favorite foods, and it is one of the easiest to make and store as well. (Stone Soup)
• CARROT TUNA AND AVOCADO SALAD <<This looks tasty and filling. Plus, carrots are amazing right now. (No Recipes)

What inspired you this week?