From the “team” here at The Estero Story, we wish you a Happy New Year! 🙂

When it comes to the New Year, a lot of people make New Years resolutions. Dieting, more exercise, and some vague concept of “being healthier” are among the most common.

Disclaimer: This post will be discussing weight loss, dieting, eating healthier, and related topics on that theme. This content may be triggering for those struggling with eating disorders, so discretion is advised. I am also not a nutritionist or dietician, so don’t take what I say as official advice, professional, medical, or any other form of ‘proper’ dietary advice. I am just a dude who has read some things and experienced some things, and this is what worked for me. It may or may not work for you.

Typically when I think of diets, “eating healthy”, or “getting fit”, I think of drastic change. I picture salads,

5 AM runs,

and a variety of other such things. In my experience, it can be difficult to stick with drastic change, as it is easy to follow the new regimen at the beginning when your enthusiasm for getting fit is high but difficult to stick with it when it’s four weeks in, you’re tired of eating salad for lunch for the 28th day in a row, and would trade your right leg for a Domino’s pizza.

I think another pitfall of these classic New Years regimens is that you often don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. What makes a salad healthy? Why are 5 AM runs a good idea? Bottom line — what does “being healthier” even mean?

I think a sense of vagueness pervades the concept of “being healthy” for a lot of us — why is whole wheat bread “healthy”? I honestly had no clue until about a year ago — I had just trusted that societal belief that it was. Developing a basic understanding of nutrition and what makes healthy things healthy and then implementing a series of small (read: no salads or 5am runs necessary) changes will ultimately help you reach and then sustain your goals far better than any diet or regimen will. If you then want to go above and beyond and eat salad or run, you can do so with a foundational knowledge of what you’re actually doing for your body, as opposed to mindlessly signing up.

This is why I am here today to talk about little changes — 5 small ones you can make.

The little changes I am going to be talking about today are not revolutionary or anything extremely profound. Because often times, the answers are relatively simple and fairly obvious, and that’s what makes them so difficult to implement. We go through our lives seeking magic bullets — ways out. Ways to accomplish our goals without confronting the simple obvious, perceived to be difficult tasks. But that’s just it — perceived to be difficult. I am here to tell you that these small changes we’ll be talking about today aren’t actually very difficult. Sure at first there may be some inertia, but within a couple weeks, you’ll have completely adapted. That’s another fundamental difference between what I am here to propose and what is typically talked about in diet plans. I’m talking about small modifications on your existing regime, as opposed to adopting a completely new regime. I will also keep this list brief – 5 items. As personally, when I am reading a list of 10 or 20 possible changes, this can feel overwhelming. Both the author and I know that I’m only really going to be doing a few of these, so what’s the point of the other 17? I probably will barely even remember more than the handful I’m interested in! That’s why I decided to keep this brief. 5 items, 5 things to remember, 5 things to pick from.

1. Eat more vegetables.

Yeah, you all saw this one coming. But I’m here to tell you — it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. You don’t have to suddenly start eating salads for lunch if you don’t want to. Fun fact: I’ve been vegan for > a year and I’ve eaten like…5? 10? salads in that time. It’s not the only way to get your veggies! Pretty much all veggies are fair game! It doesn’t have to be romaine lettuce…mushrooms, chilis, spinach, tomatoes(okay they’re a fruit but still counts), sweet potatoes, eggplant, asparagus, bell peppers, carrots… these are all completely fine and encouraged! There’s no reason you have to stick to salads and other stereotypically “healthy” forms of vegetable consumption. You can add these to an existing recipe (tossing in some spinach in with your pasta, putting more veggies on your pizza, veggies in your omelette, etc.) or try a completely new recipe (Trader Joe’s mushroom ravioli anyone?, palak paneer, chili relenos, etc.). In fact, a variety here can be really helpful in making vegetable consumption both fun and more nutritious.

Okay, but why should we be eating more vegetables?

Vegetables are great for a few reasons.

For one, they provide an incredibly rich source of vitamins and minerals in contrast to most other foods we eat. Vitamins and minerals (called micronutrients by nutritionists in contrast to things like protein, carbs, fat called macronutrients) are incredibly important, and something that we often don’t get enough of if we don’t purposefully seek them out. In fact, roughly ~75% of Americans don’t eat enough fruit, and >80% don’t eat enough vegetables. [1]

With a majority of Americans developing preventable chronic illnesses throughout their life, we are often left to wonder how that person’s life may have been different if they incorporated more fruits and vegetables into their diet. Perhaps they never would have developed their illness, and would have led an entirely different life. This is not to diminish the ability or experience of people struggling with these illnesses or to blame them, but simply to ponder what might be preventable and changeable in the future. In the documentaries What The Health and Forks Over Knives, researchers were able to prevent, mitigate, and in some cases reverse a variety of illnesses among patients. Some patients were heavily debilitated by their illnesses and had to take a medicine cabinet worth of pills every day. Perhaps you know someone like this. Some of these patients were able to make incredible dramatic recoveries from their illnesses by switching to a whole food plant based (read: vegan with minimal processed food) diet.

While the purpose of this post is not to advocate veganism (though I think it’s an excellent choice, feel free to check out my article on the ability of a vegan diet to fight climate change at https://theesterostory.com/2050-how-diet-causes-catastrophe/) and I don’t think these results are replicable in all cases of illness, I do think that a lesson here can be learned about how simply about adding more fruits and vegetables to ones diet and scaling back a bit on meat, dairy, and processed foods can improve your health substantially.

Another reason vegetables are great is due to their low caloric density. 4 cups of broccoli? 120 calories. 4 cups of rice? 800 calories. For those 800 calories, you could eat 116 cups of spinach. That’s over 7 gallons. While I’m not suggesting you eat 7 gallons of spinach, you probably get my point here. Vegetables are extremely low in calories/volume, which can be great for weight loss, as it allows you to eat far more food in terms of volume for the same amount of calories. This can be great in combination with grains, proteins, etc, as you can get the bulk of your calories from the grains and proteins, and then add vegetables for nutrients and volume, making your meal far more filling. By adding spinach/broccoli to your meal, you could easily double the volume of your meal while barely adding any more calories. The high fiber content of lots of fruits and vegetables is another contributing factor to help make you feel full.

This works extremely well at helping you cut down on calories (if that’s what you’re after) successfully, as if you don’t have a highly volumetric filling food like vegetables, you will often feel very hungry on a lower calorie diet due to your stomach being fairly empty. Even on a non-low-calorie diet, you may still feel hungry. Vegetables are a great way to solve this and to help quell your hunger without adding tons of calories. Veggies also offer you some protein when consumed in enough quantity. Those 4 cups of broccoli mentioned earlier? 10g protein. Granted, that’s a lot of broccoli, but you get the gist.

When possible — try to eat a variety of different colors of vegetables. This may sound silly at first glance, but often different colors of veggies offer different vitamins and minerals, so one of the best ways to make sure you’re getting all the different micronutrients is simply to buy a rainbow of veggies when you go to the store. This has been dubbed the “Rainbow method” and I myself have started doing this recently after reading about it. It isn’t the “end all be all” of nutrition, but it’s a great easy starting point, especially for those who don’t currently eat much produce. Here is a link for more information: https://www.goodnet.org/articles/5-color-guide-to-eating-rainbow

2. Incorporate small amounts of exercise into your routine.

Little exercise >>>>> no exercise is the message here.

Walks, yoga, dancing, physical labor around the house, all of these are fine. Quick, easy, low-intensity, you name it. ANYTHING physical that you feel you can regularly do is infinitely more beneficial than that hard-to-sustain “exercise regimen” you’ve been dreaming up for the New Year. That is not to disparage “harder” forms of exercise — I personally love long hikes and the occasional run. But ultimately, consistency is what matters. If you feel that it will be difficult for you to stick with a routine of “harder” exercise, start with smaller ones! There’s no shame in that, and that’s honestly where the lion’s share of the benefits are at in my experience.

As a personal anecdote, I experienced my greatest change in physical fitness and weight loss not when I was training ~10+ hours a week for cycling races my sophomore year of college, but when I was biking ~20 minutes a day riding back and forth from my off-campus dorm room to class during my freshman year. This shift from no regular exercise and a fairly sedentary lifestyle to a small amount of daily exercise in the form of a 20 minute bike commute combined with higher activity levels throughout the day simply by walking between classes, to the dining halls, to friends on-campus apartments was enough for me to lose ~15 pounds over the course of the school year and to dramatically improve my daily fitness and capability. Though I eventually went on to spend far more time on the bicycle and use it as a means of getting even fitter, it will never hold a candle in terms of actually feeling different in my day to day life to that of my freshman year commutes. These made me feel more confident physically, more physically capable (I could go out and do things with more energy and not be concerned about getting too tired from walking places), and more energized (bizarrely, as exercise oddly enough can give you energy) than beforehand.

I would highly recommend incorporating a small, easy, fairly-low intensity, regular routine of exercise into your life if possible. It will make you feel healthier and happier, and will be far easier to pull off and stick with than some David Goggins-esque workout routine. If you’re feeling eager or that you want more, slowly begin tossing in harder workouts here and there as a cherry on top, but not the cake itself. A consistent exercise routine (in whatever form that may take) should be the goal, not any specific level of intensity or expenditure.

3. The 80-20 Rule aka focusing on the Big Picture.

The 80-20 rule (in terms of dieting) basically says to shoot for picking the healthy option 80% of the time and to allow yourself 20% of the time some indulgence, be it chocolate or a cheeseburger. While I don’t follow this diet exactly (there’s no percentages present in my diet), I do think that the principles here are pretty good and worth extracting, even if you don’t follow the particulars of the diet to the tee. A typical pitfall of restrictive diets (read: sticking to those pesky romaine salads that appear at every pizza joint in the history of man) is that adherents may find themselves longing for foods from “before” and that this missing of foods can make these diets really hard to sustain and leave its adherents more susceptible to binges. The thought then that is worth extracting is that letting you eat a little bit of the good stuff helps the longevity of your eating habits. We are all about maximizing sustainability here, and enjoying the occasional indulgence won’t matter in the long run.

Repeat: don’t sweat the small picture stuff, sweat the big picture stuff. If you want to have a little bit of cake here and there or some oreos, go ahead. That really doesn’t matter as much in the big picture as your overall habits, what your typical meal looks like over the course of the week. Not what one specific meal looks like. Not every meal has to be incredibly healthy, it’s about the overall picture and if you’re eating your veggies or not, if you’re getting your macronutrients or not, etc. Analogous to how little pieces of exercise are eons better than the absence of exercise that is often the result of overambitious exercise plans, a diet of mixed “healthy foods” and occasional junk food, no matter the ratio of these two things, is eons better than the absence of “healthy food” that’s often the result of overambitious dieting plans. Indulgence is fine and is a part of a balanced lifestyle. So try to take it easy, eat some chocolate and wine here and there, and don’t beat yourself up for being human. Show yourself that same kindness and love you would offer a friend trying to eat healthier, to the extent that you can. 🙂

4. Find a specific motivation and learn to enjoy the journey.

I’ve found this to be a really important part of any sort of goal setting or purposeful change. Although it may sound obvious, this is often a step that I find myself overlooking. Going into the New Year wanting to “be healthier” is great, but why and how? These are two important questions that will affect your journey. I have found adding specificity, often with connection to either daily life or a certain feat, is a great step to help answer these questions. For example, instead of saying “I want to get stronger”, I could say “I want to increase my upper body strength to help with everyday tasks around the house, and will accomplish this by lifting weights a few times a week”. You can see the difference between these two. Or instead of “I want to get fit at running” I could say “I want to be fit enough to run a half marathon, so I will start running a few times a week and begin building distance over time”. They don’t all have to be that specific — It’s okay for it to be somewhat vague. But adding some level of specificity really does help. Even just “I want to improve my cardiovascular health so I feel better throughout the day and have more energy” is great. Identifying a motivation for your plan will help you greatly, because when you’re a little deeper into it and the regimen is testing you, you will have a pillar to fall back on and remember why you’re doing this, letting you see the long-term over the short-term.

Something that has helped me in recent years is to focus (or try to focus) on getting stronger/fitter as opposed to thinner. Easier said than done, and this may or may not be applicable to you, but felt it was worth a mention as it has been helpful for me. A simple reframing of what “healthy” means can help us greatly in how we approach things, how we feel about our progress, and how we see ourselves.

On another related note, learning to enjoy the process is another great step when possible. Sure, having it be a complete blast the entire time might not be possible for everyone in every scenario, but finding ways to make the process a little more fun and just to enjoy it while it’s happening really help and are important for both longevity and sanity. Because ultimately you will be devoting time towards this goal somewhat regularly, and you might as well enjoy it the best you can. Live for the journey, not the destination, as there will always be “more fitness” to gain. In some senses, your goals will likely continue to grow and balloon as you achieve them, and you will always be in a place of chasing your goals. So learn to embody that space and to enjoy it, to the best that you can. As you will spend 99% of your time in the “training to achieve X goal” stage, not in the 1% of the time actually achieving said goal, so make that time a fun place to live. Learn to enjoy the routine, whatever it may be. Whether it be adding something small like lighting a candle during your yoga, wearing a funny shirt during your workout, or wearing your favorite shoes during a run, or just learning to appreciate the experience itself, if you are able to find ways to enjoy the activities in one way or another, it will help you greatly in making the routine task of “working out” be a fun hobby instead of a chore and help you mentally reframe your activity.

5. Do a little bit of basic research on nutrition.

(This step requires extra discretion for those struggling with disordered eating, especially orthorexic behaviors.)

I highly recommend doing a bit of basic research on nutrition. Understanding some of the basics of macronutrients as well as micronutrients will help you greatly. If you get to the point where you understand why whole wheat bread is healthy, you’ve made it. Seriously though, this will pay dividends for you in the long run as understanding the caloric and nutritional capacities of various foods will give you an understanding of exactly what you’re eating and exactly why pieces of it are and aren’t “healthy”. As I am not a certified anything, I don’t really feel qualified to give in-depth advice here, but I will provide a series of links as starting points. Googling about nutrition is also another great place to start, but look for advice from certified dietitians when possible.

Links:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/healthy-eating-for-beginners

https://www.nutrition.org.uk/healthyliving/basics/exploring-nutrients.html

https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/guidelines/section-1-foundation-for-healthy-eating/

https://www.pickuplimes.com/single-post/2018/02/18/protein-an-uncomplicated-guide-for-vegans

https://www.pickuplimes.com/single-post/2018/02/04/the-plate-method-a-nutritionally-balanced-meal-for-vegans

(side note: Sadia at pickuplimes.com is amazing and you can find more specific nutritional advice on her site as well as a ton of plant-based recipes for both vegans and non-vegans alike)

An optional add-on to this step is to track your nutrients/calories for a week or two. cronometer.com is a great website for this. This would help you gain an intuitive knowledge of what is what in terms of food, what nutrients and calories you are consuming in a day, and what you may be lacking. This intuitive knowledge is something most of us don’t have, and it can be helpful to have an idea of what 100 calories or 1000 calories actually looks like. What your daily intake of iron looks like. I tracked my calories a few years back, and although it’s been years since I’ve done it, it helped me gain an intuition for what 1 tbsp of peanut butter actually looks like, amongst other things!

6. (bonus) Drink more fluids.

Alright, I couldn’t resist throwing in this bonus tip. Drinking more fluids (water, sparkling water, tea, etc.) throughout the day will help you feel a bit fuller and will provide you with proper hydration, as most Americans are dehydrated. Just trying to drink a little more, even if you don’t measure it (I don’t) will help you feel better throughout your day, help your sleep, help with headaches, etc.

Thanks to Andrew for the idea for this piece, many moons ago 🙂

If you enjoyed this piece, don’t forget to subscribe (link in sidebar) to hear about new content, follow our Instagram for updates, and share this post with friends / family 🙂

Resources Cited

[1] U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 8th Edition. December 2015. Available at http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/.

[2] https://www.forksoverknives.com/wp-content/uploads/Caloric-Density-FINAL-1.jpg