Upgrade Your Food

It’s simple.  Sorta.  The idea of upgrading your food is anyway.  Everyone knows it is better to eat a salad with carrots and cukes than it is to eat a pound of chocolate.  Even organic chocolate. 

But sometimes that’s just plain hard to do.  As a health coach, I have been working on finding simpler, more palatable options for folks to upgrade their food.  Simply put, they are not willing to give up the junk.  Not all of it anyway.

With that in mind, I think it’s cool to bring in the concept of upgrading.  We do that with our appliances, with our computers.  Let’s do it with our food as well.

If you are madly in love with a highly processed junky cookie you buy at the grocery store, see if they sell an organic version that may be less processed or have less chemicals.  The breakup may be hard, but read the label and see if it’s an upgrade.  Or if possible, make from scratch.

I’ll share one of my “dilemmas” with you.  I love chocolate chip cookies.  I mean I LOVE chocolate chip cookies.  I could eat them by the bucketload and then refuse to share any telling you that there are not enough to share.  Even if I have 100 cookies (which has happened). 

So, what I did was figure out what was negotiable in my chocolate chip cookies and what was non-negotiable.  My girlfriend, Patty, tried to assault me with a no-name chocolate chip morsel cheap imitator in her cookies.  I spat it out, being the connoisseur that I am.  And I may have spoke with a French accent while spatting out.  Just to emphasize my disgust. 

But what a great lesson.  Now I know, the chocolate chips MUST be Nestle.  FOR ME, anyway, that’s a non-negotiable.  But what about white flour versus wheat flour, or rice flour, or almond meal?  Organic sugarcane and stevia in place of white sugar?  Through various tests, and hundreds of cookies eaten, I have found a concoction that works for me.  It’s a makeshift version of the ever-famous Tollhouse Recipe. 

It’s on my website and I call it ‘Super Secret’, but anyone can access it.  Now, I know it is not perfect.  And I know, it is not as healthy for me as a banana.  BUT, I have upgraded some of the ingredients to make it a little more healthy.

Sometimes, that’s all we can do.  Meet eachother where we are.  I would encourage you to look at your favorite foods to see if you can make a healthier version simply by upgrading some of the ingredients.   Substitute a highly processed for less processed.  Make from scratch with upgraded ingredients instead of from a box, bag or can.        Give it a try!

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