I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but eating healthy food is really, really expensive. It also takes too much time to prepare, and besides that, all healthy food tastes like cardboard.
Those are a few things you might want to say to me if you’re interested in picking a fight. Not that I like to fight…unless you offer me a light saber or a plastic sword, of course. ;)
Trust me, I’ve heard all of the excuses. Shucks, I used most of them myself back before we began our healthy eating journey. I hated spending money on food. And I thought eating a healthy diet meant that I had to live on rice cakes, fake sugar, and some sort of fat-free cheese like product. (Let us all now pause for a moment of simultaneous gagging.)
Yes, I’ve used all the excuses to avoid eating healthier foods. I have had all the fears. I thought I would get fat if I ate high fat foods. I thought we would go broke if I stopped using coupons for all the “food” I typically purchased at great discount. I thought my kids would hate eating healthy food and feel deprived of their favorite snacks, meals, and treats. I thought cooking healthy would be complicated and beyond my realm of knowledge in the kitchen. Plus, I had no idea where I would find healthy food in our small mid-western town.
But as I was learning more about eating a good, balanced diet filled with whole foods, I realized that something needed to give. I needed to do this for my family.
Therefore, I did a lot of research. I sought the help of friends. I learned that good healthy food is a great investment for my family’s health. I dug deep and found that there are healthy food sources all around me – I just had to know where to look. And I learned that healthy, whole food actually tastes amazingly better than anything else that comes out of a box or a bag.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series exploring the top ten excuses I hear from people about why they don’t eat a healthy diet. I’ll work to debunk all the myths you’ve ever heard about health food, and offer you hope if you are holding back on eating a healthy diet because of some excuses of your own.
As we begin this series, I’d love to know: What are your biggest hang-ups with eating a healthy diet? What are the excuses you use or hear most when it comes to eating twinkies instead of broccoli? If you had to make a top ten list of reasons you can’t eat a healthy diet, what might be on your list?