May 30, 2012 – What is a convenience food? A broad definition would be any food that is partially or completely prepared for use when it is purchased. That will include the majority of food products in today’s supermarkets. Many food items have become so well accepted that people no longer think of them as convenience foods.
A loaf of bread is a good example. Most people today, however, think of convenient foods as packet foods and canned foods.
Convenience means saving time. But there can be a nutritional and monetary cost for that saving of time. There are several things to consider when evaluating convenience foods and those prepared from “scratch”.
You can compare by adding the cost of the ingredients used in a recipe and dividing the cost by the number of servings.
Talent and wealth may vary from person to person but there is one great equaliser in life-time. While we are alive, we’ve all been given an equal allotment. We share the same sixty minutes of each hour and the same twenty-four hours of each day. It’s been said that we make room for that which we decide is most important. Choose to be the master of your time and find small, consistent ways to invest in your lifestyle. If you wait until tomorrow, it will never come.
Some years back, I had no control over what I eat so I became a compulsive, emotional overeater. I believed I was out of control with food, so I was. Soft drinks, especially Coke, was my best and I took it every day. And of course, in the whole bulimia cycle, every time I drank one more bottle than I thought I should, I figure I might as well consume more bottles of Coke and throw up. It was powerfully destructive thinking. Over time, I came to believe the lie that Coke had control over me.
What do you believe? Can you see yourself in perfect shape? If you have battled with your weight for years you may not believe you can ever lose weight and have a perfect shape for your age, sex and height.
Lies sabotage us when we begin to believe them, so we must take control of what we allow to enter our brains. Some people get a little concerned that this might be some kind of New Age routine that is obscure and confusing due to it’s complexity. It isn’t. God has designed our brains to respond in specific ways to consistent messages. If these messages are negative or destructive, the results will be negative as well.
Get in tune with all the negative messages and programmes and tune them out. Get them out of your life. That’s what fulfilled living is about-renewing your mind with the truth.
It is also appropriate to create healthier messages specific to your personal issues or habits. For example, if you feel compulsive about eating every time you sit down to watch television, give yourself a new message: “When I sit down to watch television, I don’t feel like eating.”
If you tell yourself that message long enough, you will start to change your thinking. This is a simple biological truth about how your brain has been designed.
ADOPT A NEW ATTITUDE
Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude towards life. The longer I live, the more convinced I became that life is 10 per cent what happens to us and 90 per cent how we respond to it. —Chuck Swindoll.
There are some common attitudes that sabotage your potential for lifestyle. Among others, there is what I term: The “All or Nothing” Attitude
This is the attitude that convinces you that Monday is the best day to start a new lifestyle change. And when the next Monday falls at the end of the month, you may as well wait until the first of the next month!
All or Nothing thinking leads you to believe that if you aren’t “on” a programme, you are off. This attitude says nothing counts unless you are doing it all the way. Nothing’s farther from the truth in regards to living a healthy lifestyle. Everything counts. And it’s the small things day after day that make the biggest difference.
Think of your lifestyle journey as a less -than -direct route towards your destination. Imagine you are walking across a room by taking three steps forward and then two steps back. This is what we do in our lives when we are trying to grow. Don’t focus too much on the two steps back. Focus on the three steps forward and celebrate the fact that you are making progress!
