Healthy Eating Week 2

This month's goal in the Zenhabits Sea Change Program saga is to form Healthy Eating habits.  The first week, I started eating avocado everyday.  I have continued doing this with great success.  This last week, I started drinking Green Tea.  This has also been very successful.

To make these changes, I didn't make myself stop doing anything that I normally do.  I only added.  In the case of avocado, this is easily accomplished by adding it to my regular lunch meat salad (I put a LOT of meat in my salad).  For Green Tea, I experimented with different times.  So far, a (mid-)morning cup works very well while I read or write something.  It gives me time to enjoy the heat and flavor as I sip it.

Ultimately, I would like to replace my other sources of caffeine (mainly Diet Mt Dew) with tea, and then reduce my overall caffeine consumption from there.  That is not the goal here.  My goal was only to get comfortable with drinking tea.  Which I have done.

Next week is a new habit.  Although I am supposed to be doing all of these new habits mindfully.  I am not very consistent on that and don't treat it as a priority.  To improve this, this week's habit will be to mindfully eat breakfast with Angela.  

Mindfulness is a consistent theme on Zenhabits.  It's also very related to my own tenant of Single Tasking.  Single Tasking for eating is a precondition for Eating Mindfully.  The first step is to not do other stuff: Facebook, TV, book, thinking about all the crap you have to do…  That's Single Tasking.  The second step is actively thinking about the eating by paying attention to the flavor, texture, temperature…  That's Mindfully Eating, and that's the goal for the next week.

Mindfulness is actually pretty difficult for the majority of people (including me).  It takes effort to bring your mind back to the present activity.  That's why I'm limiting it to breakfast.  I considered limiting it to 5 minutes at breakfast.  However, I don't want to watch some clock (thus taking my mind off of the task), and it shouldn't take much longer than 5 minutes to eat anyway.

I'm having Angela do this with me.  This could be a double-edged sword.  Having Angela work with me often helps me stick with something, but if she falls off it may bring me down too.

I'm continuing to set and track my Most Important Procrastination Task from January's Sea Change focus: Procrastination.  It hasn't gotten much better.  I need to force myself to do my MIPT first thing (like this post).  If I push it off until the night, I'll never do it.