Last week I had a bit of a melt-down when it came to cooking plant-based meals and eating healthy food. I’m not a keen cook or a foodie in any way, I’m happy with basic flavours and simple recipes and can eat stir-fries or vegetable stew type dishes for days in a row. However, as my partner is very good at eating “my type of food” (plant-based) when he’s with me and he’s much more interested in food than me, I try to cook something other than a ‘bowl meal’ when he’s coming over.
So back to last Wednesday – Date Night – and my unenthusiastic chef head could not work out what to cook for tea. Having done several weeks of Date Night cooking and weekend meals I had run out of motivation and ideas. If only I wasn’t trying to eat healthy wholefood I could buy something to put in the oven. If only I wasn’t trying to eat meat and diary-free I could buy a pie.
Then I remembered what the BOSH! boys had said in their book ‘How to Live Vegan – save the planet and feel amazing’. To summarise, they were talking about the wide scope of things we could try to perfect when deciding to turn vegan. Not just dropping the meat, fish and diary, but also making vegan choices around clothing and other goods. When you look into it there’s so many things that you could change if you become vegan but to jump in and try and change everything at once would be over-whelming and would stop the majority of people making any change at all.
What they were advocating was making small changes – those add up and make a difference – and then when you’re used to that change gradually add more small changes. Whatever reason you have for making lifestyle changes – animals, environment, health – striving to go from where you are to perfection in something that might be quite different to what you’re used to is going to be a hard call and will inevitably fail. Striving to take one step at a time from where you are towards where you would like to be, eventually, is much more likely to succeed.
And so I decided that I wasn’t up for perfection on this particular Date Night and I bought a luxury fish pie that I could put in the oven then went out for an extended and calming walk with the dog!
I’m trying out a lot of new things in my bid to live a healthier, more environmentally friendly life and I doubt I shall ever reach perfection in any of them, but making small positive changes in lots of areas will help to improve my health and well-being and the well-being of the world around me, so I’ll keep taking small steps and I won’t beat myself up if I have a minor glitch every now and again.
I’d love to hear about the changes your making and how you’re getting on with them.
