As I progress further into my fitness journey, I realize how difficult it is to branch out. Not in terms of wanting to branch out in the kitchen or even looking at videos for new meal ideas and executing them but more in the sense that I am letting fear of the unknown keep me from trying new things. It has been exciting and honestly quite exhilarating to learn the new recipes I have learned and can make without instructions now yet I haven't branched out on my own to try a new recipe I find online, regardless of how tasty it looks. Don't get my wrong, trying new things sounds fun! I save lots of videos and even Jennifer sends me tasty looking (and easy) recipe ideas! So why do I have this fear?
I think if I look deep inside of myself (deeper than I would ever venture), I would see that I have a abstract view on failure that probably goes deeper than just in the kitchen. I'm not seeing a professional right now so I certainly won't delve deeper into that than I have to, especially right now. I do, however, think that its ridiculous to feel so fantastic about making a recipe with Jennifer and then when I'm alone, I won't try something new myself. I have had a crockpot since Christmas 2019 and I haven't used it even once (by myself) because I've been afraid of messing up the recipe yet isn't that what cooking is? Someone put a bunch of things together and tried it to see if it worked. Who decided what spices were good with the dishes we love today? Who decided that salt and pepper go great together?
Perhaps I'm overthinking things or, especially, oversimplifying things but it makes you wonder. At least, it makes me want to know more about how the original pioneers of the kitchen were so bold as to try something new and foreign yet come out the other side with a truly original recipe. I often times wonder how I got to where I am in life. I grew up in a very different environment from the one I am in now and if I've learned one thing from my life, its that things DO get better. I went from eating fast food at least six days a week to eating fast food maybe once a week.
I am proud of the person I have become mostly because of the level of progress I've made within myself. Sure, I didn't stay on the writers path and publish a novel before I turned 25 like I had planned but that doesn't make me a failure, it makes me human. I made lofty goals with no ambition to back them. I wanted to read so many books a year but never got to double digit numbers. I say all this because I want to hold myself accountable but yet the accountability never really hits me like it would a normal person. I know I should feel bad but mostly shrug off the failure as another example of the way my life has always gone.
2020 changed something in me. Maybe it was partially because of the Corona Virus keeping me at home all the time but I realized I had more time at home and I couldn't go out to eat at my favorite restaurants. I made one weekly trip outside to the grocery store and that was my "outside time". I would stay in my apartment and order Door Dash a lot. Enough to the point where I looked at my bank account one month and realized I was dead broke. I had savings, sure, but my checking was tapped.
That was the wake up call I needed. I cancelled my Dash Pass and started learning to cook.
Okay so it didn't happen all at once but the gist of it is that Jennifer and I were already cooking at her place so when I saw that my Dash Pass was saving me delivery fees but my ordering out more was costing me more than I was saving in the long run, I realized I needed to make a change. I have always been fairly transparent with Jennifer so we had a pretty real conversation about it and I came to the conclusion that perhaps what I put into my body wasn't the smartest, at that time or ever.
Jump forward again and you'll see me prepping a meal every week for dinner. Sometimes, I will have something prepared for lunch but usually I just make sandwiches because it's easy and I get to use my 45 calorie multi grain bread. Cooking is great and I'm not at the point where I have a fleshed out catalog of meals I can pull from but I also have the basics down. I make chicken breast almost every week. I sometimes eat chicken breast for lunch and make chicken quesadillas for dinner.
Other times I might make chicken breast, cut it up or shred it and make chicken tacos. There are so many options with chicken, especially when you season it differently. I just love chicken so much. So many people have told me the same thing every week would drive them crazy. I love ground beef, seafood, sandwiches and the like but I have never gotten bored of chicken. I do, however, get bored of making ground beef or other foods so I guess chicken just has that special quality!
So that brings me to my next point, accountability. As you can tell from the title of this post, I was going to transition here somehow and here we are. If you are following my Instagram page (IG: phatlovefit) I started to go side-by-side with this blog, you will know that I recently posted about starting a food diary of sorts and tracking what I'm eating every day, along with checking my blood pressure on a daily basis. It was a rough first week as I forgot to check my blood pressure most days and didn't remember to log everything I ate this first week. With time, I feel like it will improve. Like anything, it will be hard to adjust to a "new" normal but I want to make sure I'm keeping track of everything and with sharing most of what I know in the kitchen already, future posts will be first attempts at new recipes if I can get over my fear of trying something new.
Due to my food diary being lengthy in the way I will format it, I will make those posts separately. I want to make sure I don't make these posts too long as I know some readers will see the length of my posts and wonder why I never DID post a novel (trust me, its on the to-do list)! I appreciate each and every reader who either stumbles across my blog or chooses to click the links I share across various sites. It means the world to me that you even clicked, albeit out of curiosity or support for someone you may know.
Until next time, friends, have a great day!
