🥗 If you browse through your Instagram feed you soon get the idea that every meal you’ve ever made is boring and not unhealthy. You could call this a positive stimulation to add more variety to your diet.
🕵️♂ Based on my personal and professional experience, however, I believe there is also a ‘dark side’ to this that is often overlooked.
📝 When I ask my clients to compose what they believe is a healthy diet for 1 week, I often see 7 different types of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
💰 Clearly, this feels very natural to many people and you’re surely gonna score a lot of likes if you manage to put only half of this on Instagram #doingitforthegram. Further inquiry often reveals that it does come at a cost though.
🧠 Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are known to preserve their brainpower by reducing their ‘cognitive load’ or ‘decision fatigue’. Simply put: they minimize the amount of ‘stupid’ decisions they need to make to preserve brain power for other things.
👕 The most visible result: billionaires wearing the same clothes every day. I believe the same applies to diets.
📈 The need for variety by cooking up different recipes every day is often overestimated and comes at the cost of being able to persist in the long run.
🥑 Moreover, even though variety can add vitamins and minerals to your diet that you otherwise wouldn’t eat that often, it can also increase the chance of eating sub-optimally, as you cannot eat that perfectly nutritious and macro-balanced meal every day.
👉 Self-coaching tip:
Ask yourself: ‘Could your believed need to come up with new recipes cost you the mental energy that you need to persist a healthy lifestyle in the long run?
