How “Healthy” Recipes and Meal Plans Sabotage Healthy Lifestyles

Whenever people find out that I’m a food & lifestyle (wellness) coach they get all excited to see what kind of foods I think are healthy or unhealthy, and new and creative ways to make the healthy foods taste good. 

But when I tell them I don’t have any of that, they wonder what the hell it is that I do, anyway? Because recipes and meal plans are what many health and wellness coaches provide. So they think that because I don’t, I’m just sitting in a circle singing KumBaYa or something. But I’m not.

I’m taking a much deeper and more nuanced view of what healthy living looks like, one that doesn’t require external validation or usurpation of personal values and culture. A healthy lifestyle really is not and cannot be about following some prescribed eating plan, no matter if it’s from a medical professional, a thin Instagram influencer, or even your identical twin. There are a million different factors that determine the state of a person’s health and how they can maintain that health and no two people are alike.

For one, eating is only part of a lifestyle. It’s an important part but should not be planned in a way that clashes with how a person actually lives. But this is what happens when you sign up for some diet or meal plan because the desperation to lose weight causes temporary blindness to the disconnection of pleasure and eating from health and happiness. A lifestyle of stress and anguish can’t be corrected with some servings of leafy greens any more than painting your car will repair a busted engine.

So, instead of distributing a useless set of food rules that have no regard for preferences, family dynamics, occupation/time constraints, availability of items, cost, or social life, we work on interpreting your body’s signals about what foods give you energy without ignoring what tastes good and what brings you peace and happiness. Food is love and carries valuable histories and traditions that can’t be just swept away in favor of some bland, emotionless bunch of arbitrary directives from people who don’t know or care a lick about you.

We as a culture have forgotten or dismissed the idea that happiness is even related to health, let alone recognizing its status as absolutely imperative to health. What has been put in front of our faces as health goals and aspirations often don’t even fit in with what we really want from life. Does lying by a swimming pool in a bikini all that it takes to make you genuinely happy? Would admiration from strangers on the internet meaningfully impact your life? 

Most of us want to feel good. That’s both physically and emotionally. We want to reduce the stress in our lives and make healthy living enjoyable and effortless so that it can be maintained for the rest of our lives. But this message is being pushed aside and replaced with diets and food rules that promise not to give you peace, joy and serenity, but superficial and temporary fame and acceptance that doesn’t actually improve your quality of life at all.

So I provide guidance towards maximizing quality of life, with a positive relationship with food included. Telling you what to eat and when is way too narrow to make a real difference in your whole life. Creating your highest quality of life involves:

• Mental detox
• Mindset, thoughts, beliefs and emotions
• Prioritization of values
• Joyful and calm relationship with food
• Balance
• Taking time for self care
• Stress reduction
• Self empowerment
• Body/spirit connection
• Mindfulness, intuition and manifestation
• True happiness for health
• Logistics–pantry stocking and meal planning
• Social life and food

Joy, beauty and happiness are attainable not through diets and food rules, but through a holistic realignment of values in such a way that they work towards a sustainable healthy life that honors who you really are and what you really want. And this is what I provide instead of recipes and meal plans. 

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