The Power of Choice: Your Health Depends on It

You go to the grocery store and you enter the snack aisle. As a kid, there used to be maybe ten choices of potato chips on the shelves. Go to the store now and you are bombarded with at least 72 options of brands, flavors, packages, shapes, textures, styles, thickness, prices, and sizes. What should be a simple snap-decision becomes a major decision-making process. It’s a potato chip, for crying out loud!

Potato chips are just a tiny example of how we are barraged with choices when it comes to food and our health. Did you ever stop to think about what you are eating? If you have, that in and of itself could make you go on a diet. Flash frozen, freeze-dried, dehydrated, vacuum-packed, canned, chemically preserved, powdered… all such scrumptious words when associated with food.

The food that you eat now may not even resemble food in its natural form, but manufacturers keep making our life simpler by producing easy-to-prepare-and-inhale meals full of chemicals and preservatives. All of this is done in the spirit of saving us time, but it does nothing to save our health, money, calories, or fat.

Remember when food used to be made from scratch? Many younger folks don’t even know what that means. When was the last time you made homemade bread or apple pie?
With today’s lightning pace, eating on the run is normal. Therefore, we don’t give much thought to how much we eat, or what we eat let alone with whom we eat. These poor eating habits are being passed on to our children. Not good.

Fortunately, you are in control of what you put on your table and into your body, but first you have to stop long enough to assess your current eating habits. Set a course for your future food choices and meal routines that meet your family’s values.

Before you go grocery shopping, arm yourself with a meal plan and a list of what you need. You will buy fewer items on impulse and as a bonus, you will spend less time and money. Plus, you won’t have to make as many choices since you know what you are looking for before you go. (Call it a mission, not shopping).

Some of my favorite memories are around the dinner table; we ate dinner together at the same time every night. Do you? Can you? Simplicity involves quality time with your family and with those you care about. A family eating dinner (or breakfast or lunch) together even three times a week is more the exception than the rule. See if you can make time in your life to spend an hour around the table with the most important people in your life. After all, isn’t family what life is all about?

Bottom line: eating has to be done. Why not make it a good experience all the way around with good choices? Go back to the basics by covering the four food groups (sorry, chocolate is not a food group), invest some time in your body, stay aware of what you eat, and watch the energy in your life increase.

You see, when it comes to your health, the power of choice is yours.

Here’s to simplifying your life! •

Patty Kreamer owns Kreamer Connect, Inc., where she makes life simple…again. Patty is a professional organizer, speaker, and author of “…But I Might Need It Someday!” and “The Power of Simplicity” available at www.ByeByeClutter.com. Email Patty at patty@ByeByeClutter.com or call her at 412-344-3252.