throw it in reverse
Once upon a time, I published a cookbook titled Fl!p Your K!tchen. (Okay, it was 2016, and after 2020, it feels like it’s been a lot longer! It’s now only available in PDF format, but who knows—maybe there’ll be a third printing?!?)
The book’s mission is to reverse the way we think about showing up in the kitchen. To cook 21 meals a week—that’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily—from scratch, most of us need to flip the way we come to the kitchen: rather than panicking at 5 pm every day about what to cook for dinner that night, we can, with a little forethought, always be cooking for more than one meal.
And I don’t mean cooking a huge pot of chili that we’ll eat all week—although that’s certainly an option.
The goal is to stock your pantry properly and know enough basic formulas and techniques that you can look at your shelves and immediately come up with a meal in less than an hour plus options for breakfast and lunch the following days.
Of course, you need to be in a headspace where you recognize that cooking whole foods from scratch is an important health goal. You have to be able to step outside your day-to-day busy-ness and see that the wait-until-5-pm-then-panic strategy is not serving you.
Only then are you open to other ideas and strategies.
reverse poetry
I recently came across this “reverse poem” by Daniel Abrahams:
I’m a failure
So don’t try to tell me
There’s so much potential inside me
Because at the end of the day
I’ll never find a job
I need more experience
I’ve been out of work too long
And don’t try to convince me that
There is real value inside of me
Because deep down I know
I am useless and unemployable
And nothing you say will make me believe
I will make it in this world.
(Now read it bottom up, line by line.)
If you have never seen a reverse poem, you’d think, “Ugh, what a sad, pessimistic piece!”
And once you know “the trick,” you see that flipping the poem on its head makes it rather magical—and you’re more able to see that sometimes things are not what they seem, that maybe you were wrong about something.
As Brad Klontz wrote, “Don’t always believe what you think.”
put your car in reverse
Who are the most successful coaching clients—the ones who reach their holistic health goals?
They’re the ones who have been obliviously driving down the road toward poor health mile after mile. Sometimes, they’ve hit a speed bump or been stopped by a road block thrown up by the health police.
In any case, they have reached a place where they realize that their food and lifestyle choices are not serving them: their heads are in the right space to hear other options and take action on new strategies.
They’ve reached a place where they need to put the car in reverse. Hopefully, it’s before they slam into the wall that’s at the dead end of that road.
make the connection
How’s your health? Where’s your head at?
Are you reading your poem forwards or backwards?
Where are you on the road: driving over the speed limit in the wrong direction? Ready to put it in reverse?
If you’re ready to throw it in reverse, apply to work with me—and there are two ways to do that!
- If you want to work with me 1:1, apply here.
- If you want to join my group program, apply here. The next cohort launches March 1, 2021, and scholarships are available!
