This happens frequently to me. I get going well in the whole healthy eating scheme for weeks or months, until, gradually, my go-to meals lose appeal. I stumble on for a while, either choking down what I no longer really want to eat or succumb to convenience food or stand around and stare at my pantry for a while having no idea what I want to eat. As I mentioned in last week’s post, I have fallen into one of those ruts.

At times, these ruts feel like those old Life Alert commercials, the ones where the old lady has fallen and cries out “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” only no one can hear her because she doesn’t have a Life Alert. I get stuck for a few reasons. One, I lack creativity in the kitchen. I may have it with words but when it comes to thinking up basic ideas of what I could eat for lunch? Nada. Two, I dislike many foods that most other people commonly eat like onions, peppers, celery, and nuts of all kinds. This is me with an expanded palate. Ten year old Jen would not even eat sandwiches. (I often tell my mother that I have no idea how she fed me as a child.) Three, during 80% of the calendar year, I have exceptionally little time to prepare meals. If I do not prepare something on the weekend, I end up scrounging or making a quick stop on the way to school to pick something up, my least favorite option. That limits the type of meals I prepare on the weekend since the meals need to last all week. Clearly, I can’t do salads.

When I fall into these ruts, I often turn to the internet for help, or at least ideas. Every time, I walk away from my computer frustrated carrying away with me maybe one or two ideas for a snack or something. I craft search term after search term after search term, hoping for the combination that will yield profitable results. I end up with a plethora of results, none of which work. The suggested meals usually require significant (to me) prep, cannot be made in bulk or ahead of time, and include many ingredients that either I do not like or choose not to spend that much money on. If I add “teacher” to the search criteria, I end up with 99.999% lunch ideas, meals that consist of nibble snacks or unhealthy, heavy casserole dishes.

The usual cycle with these food ruts consists of a few fruitless, frustrating attempts like the one described above in between which I frequently stand and stare at the pantry wondering what I could possibly eat for [insert meal here.] I usually end up falling back on some old reliable ideas with perhaps one or two new ones thrown in. My frustration grows each time though, especially lately. Over the past few years, specifically in this marathon training cycle, I have known that I need to clean up my diet, to tweak it for optimal performance. Yet, life got busy and I fell into a food rut, one I have been half heartedly trying to pull myself out of for weeks.

So, I plan to take a little bit of time each day this week to try to figure out ideas for prepare-ahead meals and for easy to transport snacks all while pushing my diet towards whole foods without added sugars and chemicals. I put this out into cyberspace today for accountability. I can say all these grand things, and have been saying them silently to myself for weeks, but the real change will not come until I put it into action. Hopefully, this will be the last food rut I get caught in for a while.