Even in normal times, home-cooked meals are a healthier option, and incorporating them back into your life now can help you focus on your overall health, too.
Meals dont just provide us with energy and nutrients, its also a time of pleasure and enjoyment interacting with the people in your house, said Jessica Bihuniak, assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the nutrition and food studies department at N.Y.U.
Dr. Bihuniak added that sharing meals provides emotional benefits, too, and that because so many of us are working and eating in the same area or nearby, cooking and sharing a meal can help us draw boundaries to stave off work-creep into our personal lives.
Now can be a good time to experiment with new types of food and recipes, she added.
Self-control is already challenging without the stress of a pandemic, so as you slowly resume normal-ish daily life, consider simply not stocking foods youll want to phase out of your current diet, added Dr. Li, calling this a golden time to think about not just your health, but your environment.
Its a time for spring cleaning, Dr. Li said. Any processed food, including the wonderful cereals, cookies and juice, they need to be out. Processed food is never doing us anything good.
She added: We want to take a lesson from this virus pandemic to refocus our own health, our familys health, so in the future it doesnt matter what comes along. What matters is good health is our own defense system.
Still, a bottomless bowl of snacks makes for an easy addition to any home office, and as our lives have moved almost entirely indoors, some processed foods, once shunned by health-conscious consumers, have had a resurgence in sales. But those small, seemingly insignificant mini-meals add up quickly and, for many of us, they are far outside our normal eating habits.
Read more:
Eating Is Weird Now. Heres How to (Kind of) Get Back to Normal. - The New York Times
