New Years Resolutions

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work

Change the thought first, and the change will follow — a story about my son, my table, and my father.

A while back I opened an email from my kids’ karate teacher, Mr. Bernard, with a title that stopped me: New Year’s Resolutions — They Don’t Work. The whole message was about how most of the goals we set never get reached, and the changes we long for never quite arrive. His point was simple and a little bit revolutionary: if you truly want to change something, you have to change the way you think about it first. Once the thinking shifts, the change follows almost on its own.

He opened with the example of quitting smoking. The man he quoted had been a three-pack-a-day smoker for over twenty years, and had tried to quit more times than he could count, using every tool and technique he ever heard of. Nothing stuck — not as long as he was white-knuckling his way through it. What finally set him free wasn’t more willpower. It was falling in love with a picture of himself as a non-smoker: breathing clean air, tasting his food again, his clothes and his body smelling fresh instead of smoky. He began thinking and acting like a person who simply didn’t smoke — and once that took hold, the cigarettes fell away. He says that in all the years since, he’s never once wanted another, or even thought about wanting one.

I read that and immediately thought of my own quiet resolution: to start exercising again. Somewhere along the way I had gone from being the girl who moved her body every single day to the woman who filed it under “maybe later.” How, I wondered, could I possibly change my thinking about that? And then, over a single weekend, the whole principle came alive for me — not through exercise at all, but through the one thing most of us wrestle with: the honest desire to eat well.

The day my son taught me

If you’ve followed the blog, you know our family recently watched Food, Inc. together. I hadn’t thought much about what my children took from it — until we were down in St. George for the weekend. My husband had headed out on a mountain-bike ride with a work buddy, which left me solo with our four kids, doing my best to keep everyone happy.

When lunchtime rolled around, I knew there was good food waiting back in the refrigerator at the resort. But the kids were hungry now, and right there, close enough to reach out and touch, sat a Carl’s Jr. I felt the rationalizing start up in my head — would it really be so terrible, just this once? So I turned around and asked the kids if they’d like to eat there.

The answer that came back floored me. My eight-year-old, with real disappointment in his voice, made it very clear that he did not want to eat at that place, or any fast-food place. He wanted healthy food.

So I pulled out the town coupon book I’d bought to save on activities, flipped until I found a page for a local health-food store, and off we drove in search of a better lunch. The whole way there I kept turning his words over in my mind — “I want to eat healthy food” — a little surprised, a little bewildered. When had that taken root? And then it hit me: Food, Inc. had quietly rearranged the way my little boy saw fast food. His thinking had changed, and so his choice changed right along with it.

There it was — Mr. Bernard’s whole principle, acted out by a hungry eight-year-old in the back seat of my car. Change the thought, and the action follows.

So how do we change a thought?

The same way my son did: by taking in the ideas that shape the people who already think the way we want to think. We read what they read. We picture ourselves living the way they live. We come to understand not just what they eat, but why they eat it — and what moves them to keep going.

That’s exactly why I keep a list of favorite books here on the blog — and I don’t mean the cookbooks. I’ve worked hard to keep that list down to only the titles that genuinely reshaped my own life. The one that stands out above all the rest, the one that has done the most good in mine, is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price.

When I saw the photographs of people who ate a diet completely free of processed food — and read about their strength of body, mind, and spirit — I wanted that so badly for my children. That book gave me a complete change of heart toward God. I had carried a hidden resentment toward Him, formed years earlier when I saw the sickness and suffering of people in Chile who’d never been taught about dental hygiene. I’d quietly thought of Him as a harsh Father. But I came to see Him as a kind and loving one — a Father who never required His children to know their way around a toothbrush, as long as they ate the food the way He made it.

A note, so no one misreads me: I am wholeheartedly for good dental hygiene! What amazed me was reading about whole cultures in the early 1900s — people who had room in their jaws for their wisdom teeth and went to their graves with a full, cavity-free set of teeth — despite never once brushing them. It says something powerful about the food.

When I finally understood what “healthy” meant

Back when we lived in Kaysville, we had a sweet little ballerina who babysat for us — petite and delicate for her age. One day she watched me make my gluten-free food, and I mentioned, a touch proudly, that “we like to eat really healthy.” She didn’t look terribly impressed. She just said she knew a lady who didn’t feed her kids any sugar at all. The comment caught me off guard at the time — but I understand now exactly what that little girl already understood.

Because back then, I thought I was eating healthy. Gluten-free breads and pastas, plenty of meat, a salad at lunch — that was my picture of health. I remember a dentist once telling me that something in my daughter’s teeth traced back to how I’d eaten while I was pregnant with her. I was insulted; I was so sure of how “healthy” I ate. Looking back now, with everything I’ve since learned, I understand what he was reaching for — and I don’t hold it against myself. I just feel grateful to know more now than I did then. That’s all any of us can do: learn, and then do better with the light we’re given.

Once the books had done their work on my thinking, the changes in my kitchen came easily. Out went the table salt, in came sea salt. Out went the refined flours, replaced by an entire world of new grains, seeds, and nuts. Out went the white and brown sugar, and in came gentler sweeteners — a little raw honey, molasses, stevia, and when I want that brown-sugar warmth, a form called rapadura.

Just this morning I opened my pantry and actually smiled at it — the chia seeds, the buckwheat groats, the amaranth and quinoa, the stevia and raw honey, the jars of nuts and seeds, my little sprouts. Foods I’d never even heard of a few years ago. I leaned hard on the raw-food teachers to help me make that leap, and I’ve loved nearly every meal it’s added to our family’s table. None of it happened by gritting my teeth. It happened because my heart changed first — because I’d read the stories of people whose lives were transformed, and I wanted that same health and happiness for my own children. ♥

On a more tender note — my father

I need to share something heavier now, because it’s woven through everything I do here. My father lived most of his life with clinically diagnosed bipolar depression. My mother has told me she never would have divorced him if she’d truly understood what he was carrying. In 2001, after a long war with it, my father took his own life.

Years after I learned I had celiac disease, my grandmother on his side was diagnosed with it too — her symptoms were textbook, so her doctor caught it quickly — and I later found out I have a great-aunt on my mother’s side with celiac as well. So when I stand in my kitchen preparing food for my children, I pray over it. I pray that I might be the link that helps break a long, painful chain in our family.

I watched my dad fight some fierce battles. He was brave enough to check himself into the hospital more than once, trying with everything in him to understand his illness and get well. I’ve come to believe, with my whole heart, that how we nourish our bodies touches every part of us — even our minds and our moods — and food is the piece of caring for the whole person that I get to put in my children’s hands every single day.

But I want to be honest and gentle here, because someone reading this may be carrying the very weight my father carried. Food is not the whole answer to something as heavy and complicated as mental illness — it isn’t, and I’d never want anyone to hear that it is. The people we love who bear that burden deserve every kind of help there is: good doctors, good medicine, and good people who won’t let them face it alone. Nourish the body, yes — and reach for that help too. Both. Always both.

I remember my father in a hundred small ways. How he’d scrape the leftover scraps off each of his kids’ plates onto his own, stir it all together, and eat it down. How slowly he drove everywhere. How hard it was for him to hold a job for long — the one he kept longest was a swing shift, which, strangely, was the very shift I functioned best on back when I was undiagnosed and fighting my own bone-deep fatigue. Little echoes of him show up in me all the time.

Why celiac runs in families

Celiac is far more likely to show up when it already runs in the family — and it often seems to switch on after some kind of hard, traumatic experience. For me, it may have started on my mission. I was given a shot for a bug bite that had swollen to the size of a cucumber on my forearm; it numbed my whole body and left me sleeping for two days straight. The swelling went down, but a strange numbness lingered — and I’ve always wondered if that was the moment celiac was triggered in me. For my grandmother, I believe it was the tragic loss of her only living son. For someone else it might be a pregnancy, or an illness, or a grief. The triggers vary as much as the symptoms do — and the odds only climb in places where processed food is everywhere and eaten in great quantity.

My prayer is that one day someone — someone like my dad — will somehow find their way to this little blog, read the books I’ve pointed to, and have their life turned around. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone wrestling with their mental, physical, or spiritual health and searching for answers. Please, start with Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price — one of those great souls I fully intend to run to and hug on the other side of the veil. And right beside him, I will run to my father, and I will weep. I pray that because of his story, and mine, that one searching person will choose to live — and will feel truly alive again.

If your own heart is heavy right now — if the dark place my father knew is a place you’ve been — please don’t stay in it alone. Reach out today: to someone who loves you, to your doctor, to your bishop or pastor. In the U.S. you can call or text 988, any hour of any day, to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Your life is a gift this world isn’t finished needing. Please choose to stay.

So if you want to eat healthier — or change anything at all — but you keep setting the same goal over and over and watching it slip away, try what Mr. Bernard suggested. Start by thinking like the people who already live that way. And to think as they think, begin by reading what they’ve read.

With much love,

Steffi E.