In my work as a paid professional innovation architect for governments, philanthropies, startup ventures and even entire communities, I figure out how to design project participant engagements so people start and continue newly improved behaviors.
Here are two proven techniques used on all my innovation projects, and my Eat Simply clients:
- Pacing – personal change at any level depends upon how quickly and continuously one experiences positive effects. Ongoing good feelings generate momentum for new behaviors. I design forward pacing change projects to deliver early, positive milestones so people will enjoy and appreciate their change experience – Goldilocks pacing matters greatly – if a milestone takes to too long to achieve people loose interest; if it happens too soon, people devalue the experience and don't commit to the ongoing progress; AND,
- Environment – physical environments determine our options and behaviors, no matter how smart, motivated or willful we are for better change. Upgraded environments propel us forward into change by amplifying our positive experiences and buffering negative feedback; Indifferent or adverse environments prevent and kill our change potentials by being an absorbing barrier – all our environments must be assessed and upgraded to support the desired new normal if our success is to be inevitable. And they can be.
Use these techniques to immediately upgrade your environment and make eating better choices an effortless act of pleasured pacing, instead of an ongoing daily grind of conflicting impulses.
NOTE: food environments and experiences are made to serve many purposes – culture, religion, social relationships, family togetherness, entertainment rewards, emotional comfort, gustatory pleasure, daily energy, molecular structures and on and on; however,
please realize it doesn't matter how multi-dimensional your meal is – your food will either serve enduring wellness, or damage your health.
It's up to you to decide what's more important – your best discipline is merely remembering what you really want.
Food is the best medicine money can buy to rapidly heal your body – or the worst toxin eaten daily to destroy it.
The majority of our ancestors effortlessly evolved their food environments for eat simply practices over millennia. Their diets consisted of in-season local and regional heritage breeds, and whole foods from natural habitats. They proved eating simply worked well for humans throughout our entire evolutionary history.
Unfortunately it's difficult to upgrade our food choices in alignment with ancestral higher grade quality foods.
There's so much crap food now in our local environments, mostly imported from remotely produced, industrial scale mono-dimensional food operations lacking in nutritional diversity, as well as highly-processed, commercially manufactured foodstuffs that never existed on the planet for human consumption at any time prior to our own lifetimes.
We honestly don't know what the hell is in our modern food, or where it comes from....
I know what it is to eat simple and ancestrally well: I was born into a restaurant family of heritage foods, worked seasonally on my grandparents' dairy farm as a child, became an executive chef, served as a private raw food chef for a family medical practice and longevity club, and even owned a couple of my own restaurants.
It is very unsatisfying to have learned so deeply the state of modern industrial food, factory farm and mono-crop food production, supply and distribution. There is incredible variance in our food quality choices determined by sourcing, handling, preparation and even the wide-spread ignorance regarding proper food storage and disposal.
Few of us will ever fully realize how difficult it is to eat as well as our ancestors did because we're now making choices across a buffet of fake, Frankenfoods. There's little to no real whole foods showing up in the usual places.
whole foods are no longer always clean and healthy –
it's not the diet plan, it's food quality that matters most.
Not only are local, in season foods absent, our industrial commercial food supply has degraded global food environments substantially over recent decades and polluted most all of the commercially manufactured foods we eat today. If you believe a tomato today is the exact same tomato our great grandparents ate 100 years ago – or even 50 years ago – you'd be dead wrong. Industrial scale whole fruits and vegetables (even the organic ones) are now nearly devoid of the highest grade quality, robust trace nutrition previous generations took for granted.
Worse are many more accumulated vectors of dangerous, confounding toxins and pollutants found in the everyday foods we put into our bodies – we can no longer presume whole, natural foods are really "eating clean", because this is no longer true – we've passed tipping points of global scale category food supply contaminants:
Whole Fruits & Vegetables and Glyphosates (e.g. Monsanto's Roundup) and most pesticides used today are “systemic,” meaning they are taken up by roots and distributed throughout the plant — so no amount of washing will remove them. According to one analysis, systemic pesticides now account for about 60% of dietary exposure. Glyphosates are particularly a cause for concern due to their prevalence – a recent report by US PIRG (I used to work for them in Washington DC) shows even our beer and wine is infected.
Lest we think these are excessive concerns, scientists found that 1 part per trillion of glyphosate has the potential to stimulate the growth of breast cancer cells and disrupt the endocrine system. And the first court trial over whether Monsanto's Roundup causes cancer ended in October 2018 when a San Francisco judge upheld a jury's $238 million verdict that the weed killer did make a groundskeeper who used the herbicide sick; DeWayne Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma when he was 42. Bayer AG (the German multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences company and one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world) purchased Monsanto in 2018 and is now facing over 11,200 lawsuits related to Monsanto's criminal misrepresentations of glyphosates toxicity as being safe.
This is just one pesticide among hundreds in our natural food supply. The Environmental Working Group's annual hit parade of the "Dirty Dozen" shows foods most infected by pesticides each year.
Water Supply and Microplastics are so pervasive they're not only found in seafood and land mammals, they're now being found in human poop.
Animal Husbandry and Antibiotics & Growth Hormones used by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs, or factory farms) deliver sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics to improve feed efficiency and accelerate animal growth. By 2001, this practice had grown so much that a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 90% of the total use of antimicrobials in the United States was for non-therapeutic purposes in agricultural production.
Staples and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), or "biotech crop plantings" have increased ~113-fold since 1996, with an accumulated area of 2.5 billion hectares, showing that biotechnology is the fastest adopted crop technology in the world. In countries with long years of high adoption, particularly the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and India, adoption rates of major crops are at levels close to 100%,
Yes, you need to be knowledgable about these issues. You need to be super–motivated to overcome them. You need to cultivate desire in knowing what to look for that is high grade quality food and then where to find it locally, or import it to you.
And the challenge of eating simply can be the most difficult thing to do well in a life full of cherished family, friends and work colleagues effortlessly influencing what we want to eat in the entirely wrong direction.
Fortunately, I've started off slightly ahead of the game and have been on my own eat simply path for decades. I've had to figure out many options and overcome lots of challenges to find what works well in creating better food choices, without sacrificing a social life or family meals. And it can be done in almost any circumstances.
It's what I do to ensure my own and my clients' ongoing eat simply success...
Because it works.