I’m often on the receiving end of a lot of well-intended but ultimately dead-end New Year’s resolutions.
Most of my patients resolve to lose weight. Some resolve to eat more vegetables. Many would like to start cooking more at home to save money and eat healthier.
Several mom friends are determined to take back control of their children’s wayward, kid-food diets.
The problem with all of these resolutions, unfortunately, is that not one of them is specific enough to be implemented – nor are any of them measurable such that it’s clear whether you’ve actually fulfilled the resolution. In other words, these “resolutions” really represent desired outcomes beyond one’s immediate control, when a true “resolution” would be a concrete, behavioral action plan intended to facilitate the achievement of a greater intended goal. Ideally, each resolution would also specify a quantifiable outcome, so one could definitively say whether or not they’ve achieved their goal.
How do you plan on losing weight? Will you exercise three times per week? Will you stop keeping cookies in the house? How much weight will you need to lose in order to have achieved your goal?
How will you go about eating more vegetables? Will you join a CSA? Will you order a salad for lunch every Monday, Wednesday and Friday? What frequency or quantity of vegetable consumption is your end goal?
How will you start cooking more at home? Will you batch cook a stew every Sunday afternoon? Will you join gatheredtable.com to plan weekly menus and have groceries delivered? How many home-cooked meals per week do you aim to be cooking in order to achieve your goal?
How will you help your children improve their limited, kid-food diets? Will you start cooking one single family meal every Sunday night, rather than short-order cooking for each family member? Will you limit the amount of snacking your child is allowed during the day, which may be interfering with mealtime appetites? What is the change in your child’s eating habits you’ll need to see in order to feel things have improved?
You get where I’m going with this.
I recently stumbled across a brilliant idea for a New Year’s resolution that I believe can actually address all these common desired outcomes. It’s elegant in that it’s specific, measurable and, above all, fun. It’s called The 52 New Foods Challenge (#52NewFoods).
52 New Foods is the brainchild of Jennifer Tyler Lee, a mother of two who devised the challenge in response to hitting a wall with her elder daughter’s dietary repertoire – which consisted primarily of macaroni and cheese and peas. Here’s how it works: You resolve to try one new food each week for a year – or commit to trying an unfamiliar preparation of an already-known food. That week, the family jointly chooses one new recipe for the food and commits to preparing it together. That’s it. Once these steps are completed, each family member can choose whether to taste it or not; pressured mealtimes and compulsory tasting is not part of the challenge or fun. To make things easier for the rest of us, Tyler Lee’s book contains a suggested starting list of 52 new foods, as well as several simple, family-friendly recipes for each food on her list. If the list doesn’t resonate with you, consider it a starting point and modify it to your own family’s situation. (My family has pretty much written the book on eating watermelon during the summer, so that’s not a high priority for my list. But beets and spinach during the winter? Sign us up!)
From: https://www.yahoo.com/health/the-52-new-foods-challenge-2015s-best-new-years-105968749193.html