This is a sponsored post.
Have you ever wondered how simplicity and minimalism can help you eat a better? I know I talk mostly about tossing kitchen equipment and having fewer spatulas on this blog but I was recently asked to write about minimalism and diet and found some great ideas for simplifying your nutrition for better health. I would love it if you included any of your own tips in the comments. Many of these are easy to implement and immediate – no special appliance needed!
Minimalism and Your Diet
As a minimalist, you are probably looking for new areas to apply your minimalist philosophy beyond your closet and kitchen cupboards. How about applying minimalism to your diet? Eating less and eating foods with fewer ingredients can improve your health and minimize your environmental impact. Here are a few ideas to help you start looking for ways to simplify your food consumption.
Start With the Essentials
Start minimalizing your diet by thinking about the nutrients that are essential for living a healthy life. Getting the right balance of protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals in your daily diet will help you to be healthier, feel better in your skin, and have more energy to do the things you really want to do with your life. Your meals are how you provide your body with the building blocks it needs to renew itself. Think about food as fuel first, and pleasure second, and you will be on the right track towards applying minimalism to your diet.
Eat Less
This may seem obvious but a minimalist diet could simply start with snacking less. How many times per day do you eat? There are different approaches to how best to eat that depend on your current health status, your level of athletic activity, and your basic metabolism. If you are in reasonably good health and not training for a marathon, consider simplifying your eating by eating less. Create a little rule to guide your new habit, like replacing your afternoon snack with an invigorating walk, or no eating after eight in the evening – I’ve heard some people close their kitchen after the dinner dishes to discourage evening snacking. The right approach to eating less will vary from person to person, just look for somewhere that you could cut back.
Eat Foods with Fewer Ingredients
Simplicity can be found in a meal consisting of just a few pieces of real food: a lunch of an apple with cheese and bread or crackers. Read food labels and try to stick to foods whose ingredients you recognize, as well as eating foods with the smallest number of ingredients you can find. Ideal foods would be fruits and vegetables, which don’t even come with nutrition labels. Once you venture into processed foods, the minimalist approach may lead you to look for simpler alternatives to some of your favorites. Instead of bottled salad dressing, just sprinkle some oil and vinegar on your salad. Instead of the usual mayonnaise, try making your own from eggs and oil, or try Just Mayo from Hampton Creek, a vegan mayo alternative with recognizable ingredients.
Eat Lower on the Food Chain
Try minimizing the impact your diet has on the planet by going vegan for one day per week, or try Mark Bittman’s approach of going vegan before six in the evening. About 25 gallons of water are required to raise one pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons of water are required to raise one pound of beef. Eating less meat, replacing it with vegetables and legumes, minimizes the strain our food production system puts on the environment.
Prioritize Quality
Minimalism isn’t about being ascetic, it is about simplifying your life in ways that make sense to you. Having fewer things often means you can afford better things. This is a huge advantage with food. If you are eating less and wasting less, then you can buy higher quality foods. Buying high-quality locally grown produce will change the way you think about fruits and vegetables. Sweet summer vegetables from a farm 20 miles from your house picked earlier that day are so delicious that they require little preparation, and deliver high satisfaction. We’ve been buying vegetables and fruits through a local CSA and it’s not only introduced us to some new to us foods – fresh artichokes! – but the higher investment cost has made me even more mindful of food waste.
Prepare Simple Meals
Simplify your diet, and your life, by preparing simple meals. A protein, a starch, a vegetable, and some fat come together to create a delicious and simple dinner. Pan-fry a chicken breast in a little olive oil, make some rice, steam some broccoli, and dinner is done. Or prepare a big salad with lots of fruit and nuts to make it interesting. Multi-step recipes are great for weekends when you have more time to cook, but weeknight dinners are well suited to simple meals. Avoiding complicated recipes allows you to keep your kitchen equipment basic, as well. My family has a few week nights that are busy and I love serving up a tapas style meal of cut up fruits and vegetables with whatever else we have on hand: olives, cheese, hummus. Not having to turn the stove on or wash a pan is a real time saver and these healthy tapas style meals can be prepared quickly.
Applying a minimalist philosophy to your diet can be done in different ways, but they will all result in a simpler life. Eating less food of better quality that can be prepared simply and quickly will improve your health and free up your time for more of the things you really want to do. So include Meatless Mondays in your meal plan, cut out one snack per day, and enjoy the peace it brings you.
I really enjoyed this post. I am a psychotherapist and regularly discuss the value of getting the basics right: eating, sleeping, moderate exercise. This is the sort of thing I think a lot of my folks would be interested in. I almost think that ‘selling’ a healthy diet in the context of a lifestyle philosophy like minimalism can reach some people in ways that a mere recitation of the facts cannot.
Great post! I will be trying some of these ideas. To keep things simple, my 3 boys and I usually eat the same for breakfast and lunch most days. Oatmeal/ milk then sandwiches and fruit. Less time thinking about what we will eat, less fuss from the boys, less work at the store.
Totally agree with have the same easy meals for breakfast and lunch. We usually have eggs and fruit for breakfast and then cut up fruit, veggies and sandwiches for lunch. My kids already go through so much food – scared for the teen years! – that it’s easier just to have a few meal components in bulk that we rely on as staples. Thanks for chiming in Theresa 🙂
There’s nothing wrong with eating lower on the food chain, but the reasoning in the example you’ve used (that beef requires 2500 gallons of water) is deeply misleading to the point of being, in a practical sense, false. It’s a hypothetical figure based on the most water-intensive situation. In reality, regular beef requires about 441 gallons water to produce 1 pound meat (figure from UC Davis), which is similar to rice and beef is considerably more nutritious than rice.
If cattle are raised entirely on grass, that figure is even lower as cattle will derive the bulk of their water intake from grass and dew, and then return it almost immediately to the soil in the form of urine. In a situation where cattle are not only grass-fed and -finished, but also holistically managed cattle and other ruminant livestock help to build grasslands, improve diversity of flora, sequester greenhouse gases in the soil and help to improve soil’s ability to hold onto water from rainfall rather than contributing to agricultural runoff.
Hi Jenny, thanks for chiming with data about the environmental cost of beef. I really appreciate it as we eat meat regularly and it’s nice to get a more balanced view of the production costs. This is a sponsored post – something new for me. Rachel
It is interesting that Jenny provides us with this complement of information on holistic management of beef. While one may appreciate the benefits of that approach to producing meat from cattle, the fact is that the bulk of beef in the USA (and elsewhere in the industrialized world) are finished in feedlots of more than 500 heads. In fact, according to Vaclav Smil (not a vegan or animal rights activist by any stretch of the imagination), by 2007, the country’s 300 largest feedlots shipped 60% of all animals. Those include CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) of respectively 820,000 heads (Loveland, CO), 520,000 heads (Texas) and 350,000 heads (Boise, ID). Imagine hundreds of thousands of animals – and their dejections – in industrial facilities… Imagine how much water it takes to clean that mess every day… among other uses. One must also take into consideration all the inputs that go into raising the cattle for eventual slaughter. Cows don’t eat rice but they sure eat a lot of corn, soy and alfalfa, three water-intensive crops. Those have to be factored into the total water footprint of beef production, accounting for the 2000+ gallons (10000 litres!!!!) figure.
The kinds of benefits that Jenny notes above could perhaps be realized if much, much lower amounts of beef were consumed. At 80 kg of meat per year (which includes pigs and poultry, both of which are environmental disasters of their own at a mass scale, and NOT including fish, another sob story), this is not realistic. You are right, Rachel, to note that meat consumption must be reduced – however it has to be by a lot more than 1/7th (meatless mondays…).
On a side note, it would be nice to know who/what is the sponsor…
This article summarizes the issue nicely: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/grass-fed-beef-is-just-as-bad-for-the-environment-as-grain-fed/
This post was so fabulous! I have never thought about minimalism & diet this way. I love simplicity in recipes and a really appreciated your advice to prioritize quality and focus on the essentials. Thanks for sharing this!
I agree with all of this post. Minimalism is holistic and involves every area of our lives. Even things like not trying to do too much at once or take on too many jobs.