Easy Traditional Cooking with Work and Spouse

How to balance between convenience required for a busy work schedule and eating a nutrient-dense diet

Easy traditional cooking balancing spouse and work? Eating a nutrient-dense, old-school diet with a full-time job seemed daunting two years ago. At that time, I discovered the deficits that my current diet. It focused on USDA diet recommendations learned throughout the years in the school system. We only received one nutrition class during my doctorate of physical therapy program.

About two years ago, I listened to a surprising podcast by Megyn Kelly with Dr. Cate Shanahan and Mark Sisson. They discussed seed oils, optimal times to eat, sugar, and nutrient-dense options. Talking points included the difficulty many Americans have with losing weight, feeling good, and functioning without constant snacks, especially as they get older. After that episode, I was hooked. I led an active lifestyle, swimming throughout high school and college. However, I retained an inability to lose weight, aside from times when I ate at a severe caloric restriction. Excessive restriction was unhealthy and always led to short-term weight loss that did not last, affecting me physically and mentally.

This podcast became a rabbit hole for me, and for my poor husband whom I dragged along with me. I immediately bought Dr. Shanahan’s books, threw out everything with seed oils in our pantry, and changed the types of foods I prioritized at the grocery store.

Small Changes into Easy Traditional Cooking Balancing Work and Spouse

Fast forward two years later, and our diet has gone through major changes. At first, I focused on natural foods, an animal-focused diet, and prioritizing eating 2-3 meals a day. This evolved into getting off unnecessary medications, buying more produce and other food from local farmers, and prioritizing homemade foods. New homemade foods started with sourdough (which was becoming quite a trend), and how turned into homemade raw kefir, fermented vegetables, and all-natural desserts such as raw milk ice cream.

Of course, finding local farmers, making fermented foods, and properly preparing foods such as beans and grains and keeping foods such as bone broth in stock takes time and planning. As my husband and I both work full-time and sometimes more than full-time, this is challenging. Also, I have no doubt the challenges and time constraints will increase with the advent of children. However, I believe that we can do it and you can too!

Therefore, strategies to conserve time and planning as well as help from both spouses makes living our chosen lifestyle much easier.

Tips for Natural, Traditional, Nutrient-dense lifestyle (while including convenience)

1. Take it slow and steady
2. Research
3. Plan
4. Enlist spousal help
5. Prioritize
6. Choose what you like
7. Actionable steps/examples

Take it slow and steady!

• If you are just getting started, DO NOT try to do everything at once. The ancestral, health world that is trending right now can feel very overwhelming. But you cannot learn everything at once, especially as someone with a full-time job. Changes can be made in small amounts, with you adding something new to do and researching at your own pace. Even small changes such as going to the farmer’s market one day to pick up some local, regenerative produce has a positive impact.

Research

• Utilize cookbooks, articles, podcasts, and organizations that focus on this natural, healthful living and provide techniques that are EASY to learn.  These days, free resources from influencers and online articles abound. If you are looking to invest minimal amounts of money, there are cookbooks. These include Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morrell, Founder of the Weston A Price Foundation. It gives a variety of recipes and techniques that fit into various lifestyles and schedules, from low-cost and low-time techniques to suggestions on planning ahead and creating leftovers.

Prioritize

• Choose what is most important to you first. When changing lifestyles, it feels overwhelming. Suddenly, everything you use or consume seems to be toxic, and you are not sure what to choose first. Choose one item each grocery trip-for example, do you usually buy store-made salad dressings? Next time you run out, put some olive oil and vinaigrette on your shopping list to make your own. This is a low cost (both in money and time), high reward switch.

Plan

• Planning ahead makes the biggest difference in being able to eat more traditionally with limited time. Many homemade foods small steps a few hours or days ahead of time, a low-level time commitment. For example, sometimes I ferment milk into kefir, which is easy to do, but requires me to choose a time where I can start it and be home and awake at intervals to check on the fermentation process. Another example is deciding ahead of time what I need for the week as farmers market pick-up orders are due in advance. There is decreased flexibility as compared to grocery stores.

Enlist your Spouse

• Eating traditionally would be so much harder without the support of my husband. He often goes along with what I learn once I provide reasoning for any new changes. He also helps out frequently when he knows I am overwhelmed. Having someone who sometimes picks up my food orders, pulls stuff out of the freezer to defrost, and even will stick my sourdough in the oven for me when I have to leave early for work or help chop as needed alleviates the burden. He also tries and eats many new and weird foods (sometimes only after watching me try them first).

Choose your favorites

• Choosing aspects of our diet to optimize that we like the most increases our enjoyment and saves time. For example, making yogurt is easy but would be one more food to make. For now, we found a less expensive, organic yogurt at Aldis that lightens our food prep load. While making yogurt is by itself not terribly time consuming, it requires the planning of ordering an extra gallon of milk, finding time to make it, and creating a fermentation schedule around work. Since I already do this with other foods, it would just add to the burden. One day I hope to make yogurt as making it yourself offers greater nutrient value and control over ingredients. I am still busy learning about other foods and have not devoted the time to researching, developing my own process, or creating my own routine.

Remember, you CAN make small changes! Engage help and find the spots in your schedule that work for YOU!

Easy Steps to Start Traditional Cooking while balancing work and relationships:

• Figure out deadlines of your local farmers market and know what you want to order for the next week
• Plan your meals in advance and take note of preparations you could make in advance. These include soaking beans in water, marinating meat, or defrosting meat that you bought in bulk previously. This allows planned meals to go smoothly at the time of cooking with small investments of time beforehand.
• When you go grocery shopping, see what the store has that is affordable and also healthful, such as Aldis’s organic vegetables or switching out the fat-free regular yogurt for a full-fat, organic yogurt to keep you full.
• If you like to bake, switch out for organic flours that do not have glyphosate, find recipes that utilize butter instead of margarine, or replace some sugar with a natural sweetener such as honey.
• As a product expires in your pantry or you run out of it, replace it with a healthier version.
• Make a list of what you need that you continuously add to or remove from to keep you organized. This keeps me from missing items I cannot remember in the moment I make my list.

Eating healthy, mostly home-cooked meals is within your grasp as a full-time member of the workforce! All you need is to make small, worthwhile changes important to both you and your spouse, continue to learn, to plan ahead for a few minutes, and prioritize what is most important. While you may not immediately or ever have a perfect lifestyle (I certainly do not), you will notice positive health changes that make a difference in your life as well as your family’s.