Nutrition, Satisfaction, Practicality and Dietary Change

Nutrition, Satisfaction, and Practicality. The NSP model and dietary change

Fortunately, basic nutrition is a science and not so hard to learn. You need to learn the general ranges of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that are consistent with health and the food values that will land you in the normal ranges for these macronutrients, as well as the appropriate calorie goals for your gender, age, and lifestyle. That's the easy part.

As you are developing your diet or revising it, it may help to look up food values and weigh amounts. Knowing the macro-nutrient profile of a breakfast, lunch, or dinner helps you add things up on a daily basis. Once you know that your diet is healthy, you do not need to track it quantitatively. Once you know the food values of many foods, you can predict the values of new foods pretty well.

It is also helpful to understand a variety nutrition topics, including: the value of phytonutrients, micronutrients, and vitamins, as well as the effects of refined sugar, and the effects of different kinds of fiber, fats and carbohydrates. If you consume alcohol, you should understand something about how it metabolizes and adds to calories. You should understand the concept of "empty calories" and the risks associated with different kinds of meat consumption.

There are many advanced nutrition topics that have to do with complex things like your personal metabolism and research on the health effects of various chemicals that you find in industrial foods. This is still science, but it is more complex, so reliable knowledge is harder to come by.

Our diets have to fit with the way we lead our lives, and sometimes we need to adjust our schedules to the practical demands of our diet. Practicality is a core part of dietary design since you can know how to make a nutritious diet that is satisfying, but if there is no time in your schedule to supply yourself with food or make your food, you will not be in control of your diet.

You can think of practicality in terms of the follow diet design principles and the challenges related to realizing them.

You always have something great to eat and plenty of choices about dinner, (Assess your need for variety)

Challenge: Make a good assessment of your need for variety and think about how you make meal choices.

Challenge: Making a shopping list is the easy part. You also need to engage in meal planning so that you are not going to the store too frequently.

Challenge: You don't just need nutritious and satisfying meals, you need meals that can actually be prepared under the time constraints of your schedule and lifestyle. Sometimes you need to adjust the latter to the former.

Challenge: Taking your meals, usually lunch, on the road might be as easy as boxing them up. But you may need to think about how to keep portable meals fresh and food safe.

Challenge: A challenge of cooking with fresh foods is that they have a relatively short shelf life, a constraint on flexibility. And sometimes you want to be spontaneous about joining friends for a happy hour or meal out. Flexibility is about managing constraints without sacrificing nutrition or satisfaction.

You have plenty of opportunities to prepare food when you aren't busy, but you never have to do it when you are too busy.

Challenge: "Time shifting" meal prep time and having an accurate idea of meal preparation time is the remedy here, but this design principle also requires some "discipline" to use free time for meal preparation.

Challenge: Even if it doesn't bother you to waste food, it is an impractical waste of money.

Challenge: There's no point designing a great diet that you can't afford or being unrealistic about the cost of a nutritious and satisfying diet.

It might be helpful to use "design" and "optimizing" approaches to review or improving your diet and food practices. By design, I mean that things have to fit a certain way to meet all of your requirements. You can think of it like a puzzle, but you can also think about it like an engineer might. Choose your own metaphor here.

"Optimizing" can involve individual foods, dishes, meals, etc. Of each of your current meals you can ask the N S P questions. "Trade-ups" are another way of thinking about optimizing.

Appeal of design metaphor: More consistent with an aesthetic approach, beginning with the space and mood of the kitchen.

Appeal of engineering metaphor: diets have parameters and requirements. They are "systems" with supply chains, production and storage process, and quality (satisfaction) requirements.

Some measurement and goal setting challenges:

How much time should you "afford" for food preparation and enjoying. How often? Slow Food thinking supplies some answers to this.
How much time do you (should you have) have for making meals? When is that time available to you during the week?
What are the main strategies for "time shifting" your meal preparation? for batch preparation?
How many different dinners do you need?
On any given night, how many different dinners could you choose to make quickly?
When you make food from scratch, how often do you make multiple dinners?