What is an easy healthy eating plan? Here I am going to be sharing some of my own thoughts and ideas that I have developed over time, as a result of my sometimes-conscious, sometimes-subconscious drive, to eat simply, cheaply, and healthily. We’ll see where this goes.
Some of my thoughts have developed over the past 10 years, because over that period of time I have been a long-haul truck driver who wants to stay healthy on the road. Most of the food readily available at truck stops is very tasty, but not particularly healthy! If I want “healthy,” it costs a lot. I have limited means of food preparation in the truck, so having an “easy” plan has been very important for me.
But no matter what your station in life is, life is generally busy for most of us! So being able to navigate “easy, inexpensive, and healthy” is no doubt just as important for you as it has been for me.
Cornerstone Foods
Allow me to introduce a new, yet very old, concept: “cornerstone foods.”
Cornerstone foods could be described as foods that meet all three of these criteria: simple, relatively healthy, and relatively inexpensive.
Cornerstone foods are intended to provide an inexpensive and simple foundation for a healthy diet, to which other foods can be added to “spice things up,” as needed. The less “spice,” the lower will be the cost of your grocery bill, of course! So this method can be adapted to fit your budget at any given point in time.
If you really and truly are very “strapped” at any point in time, if you use the “cornerstone foods” method, you can stay alive! – and healthy – at a very low cost. You simply revert to the basics.
As your budget increases – you get a job, let’s say, or a newer and better-paying job! – you can flesh out your diet according to the amount of money you have available to spend. You simply build on the cornerstone foods!
Re-orient Your Thinking
Start from nothing – and build up.
“Nothing” means – you starve to death, you don’t eat! That’s very radical, for sure – but hear me out.
None of us want to starve to death, so we need nothing – plus something. We need enough to stay alive.
Since we don’t merely want to stay alive, but also be healthy, we can’t just keep ourselves alive with candy bars and potato chips! These are not inexpensive, either – so let’s say Ramen noodles as an example, which are cheap – but not all that healthy.
I’m not saying Ramen noodles don’t have a place – I have nothing against the people who make them! – but I don’t think the manufacturers promote them as particularly healthy foods either, so I think we’re on safe ground!
So we start with nothing – and we add cornerstone foods that will keep us alive and…healthier than eating junk food, in any case!
Taking the thought further…
In the Bible, in the Lord’s prayer, Jesus taught his disciples to pray: “Give us this day our daily bread.” So in essence, he taught his disciples to be satisfied with enough. You will note he did not encourage the disciples to pray, “Give us our filet mignon, give us our tiramisu, and give us our rich wines and cheeses!”
Aha. Maybe we have a clue here. Bread! (Just my personal thought here: if you have enough bread, and are thankful, you are rich! But that goes off on a different tangent, we won’t go there for now!)
But is bread healthy? Could bread be considered a cornerstone food? That might depend… No one should take “my word” as the final word – you have to come to your own conclusions!
Not Recommending Prison Camp, But…
The story has been told of a prisoner of war in one of the world wars who was fed basically only bread for several years. When he was out and back home, he went to his doctor, concerned about how healthy he would be, having had such a restrictive diet. Much to his surprise, his doctor confirmed: “You are actually very healthy!” It had not been such a terrible diet!
This is not a recommendation for a prison camp life, of course, but…it makes the point!
We can only assume, though, that the bread was not the modern “white glue” that has passed for bread for many decades now…
The point here is not to decide whether or not bread is a cornerstone food – we’ll almost certainly look at that in a different post – but rather the concept of starting from the starting point: we need nothing – plus something.
Get Rid of Pre-conceived Notions
You can see that we start here from a different platform. The typical person on a budget – and we’ve likely all been here – might say: “OK, we have only $50 to go shopping with. Here’s the grocery list: We need milk, we need sugar, we need Raisin Bran, we need…” And when you get to the end of the list, it totals $100! “Oh dear – what do we cut?” That’s stressful! Maybe it gets put on a credit card. Then the stress comes when you have to pay Visa!
Instead, the cornerstone foods method starts from the ground up. We need to stay alive, and we need to stay alive in the most healthy way we can afford. Staying alive could mean just having enough bread. Or oatmeal. Or…some cornerstone food, in any case, that is not going to break the budget!
In Summary…
We want to live. We need food to live. So we need nothing – plus something. And we need something healthy, so we don’t just live, but thrive. It needs to be easy and simple, we don’t have unlimited time and energy for “complicated” – and we need to be able to afford it!
That’s our starting point!
If you have any thoughts or questions, please feel free to comment!
