Eating Becomes a Social Function

[Concord]

My biggest challenge for, lets say, 40 years is that I am surrounded by family and friends that place way to much importance on food and eating. Visiting anyone becomes "I wonder what they're serving". Visiting family turns into a weeks scheduling of restaurant visits. A discussion at breakfast quickly turns to dinner plans. It seems that planning food, cooking food, admiring food, simply occupies too much of the day. My success has depended on abandoning much of this conversation and participation, sometimes resulting in hurt feelings. As the old adage goes, I truly "eat to live", not the other way around.

[MarciM]

Hi @Concord. Don't let your healthy choices be a reason to lose your social circle. Instead consider talking about healthier options, eating only real whole foods, finding new places to eat that have plant based dishes and sustainable food options. It can be a new conversation starter and in the process you might just make your family and friends healthier too. My husband and I started our journey in 2010 to stop eating anything processed, which also meant giving up alcohol and in the beginner we stopped going out to eat with friends and avoided meals with the extended family, finding it too hard to explain how/why we were eating the why we were. This was not sustainable for us and we went back to our old bad behavior. Our second venture into this was much more success and has lasted since 2014, we let our circle of friends in on what we were doing, family got gentle reminders about what we would and wouldn't eat. Eventually everyone got use to it and started adopting our habits. It helped that we both lost a weight, so the results where clear. It is a journey, but one you shouldn't take alone. I hope this helps motivate you to share with your friends and family and to ask them to at least support your choice if they aren't ready to join you. 

Have a blessed day!

[GershonSurge]

If someone starts harassing me about what I eat, I change the subject to politics. 

[SunsetRunner]

@GershonSurge so... evil.... 😄

[PibbleRunner]

Thanks for the story! This is inspiring to me, for sure. I haven't set my goal to "zero processed food" level (yet). I suppose I'm still in the stage where I'm trying to fit my better food choices into social gatherings, and making exceptions when I feel it's appropriate. Cutting out processed food is more of a slow journey for me instead of cold turkey.

[Dominique]

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@PibbleRunner wrote:

I haven't set my goal to "zero processed food" level (yet).

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There is no real need to: not all processed food is inherently bad. The focus should be on minimally processed food.

For instance, one of my staple foods is this:

It’s made from pasteurized milk (one form of processing), it only has 0.2% fat (another form of processing), it was transformed into cottage cheese (yet another form of processing) and put in a plastic container (gladly, we recycle these). Great source of lean protein in spite of being processed to some extent.

[GershonSurge]

Some foods don't need to be processed to be deadly.

The whey in cottage cheese contains casein, which is perhaps the strongest carcinogen known. It  contains IGF-1 which acts as a switch to turn on the process to make cancer cells reproduce, Milk products have sulfur attached amino acids which combines with the amino acids to create sulfuric acid. This is neutralized by calcium from the bones. 

[SunsetRunner]

@PibbleRunner

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I haven't set my goal to "zero processed food" level (yet).

Well, I've got a news for you 🙂 You probably won't be able to implement such goal. For a very simple reason - even food that you cook is processed. Cooking is one of the ways of processing food. The goal should rather be "no buying processed food" and even that isn't always possible. The difference between your own processed food and shop bought is that you exactly know what's inside and you make it depending on your needs. So saying that processed food is bad for you is well overstatement 🙂 I don't buy bread but when I have a need I make my own ( usually quick grilled naan ) using basic ingredients and this counts as processed food 🙂 It's just mostly ( because I didn't make the flour ) processed by me 🙂