The unapproved food triangle

A sense of humor is everything. I may joke about the unapproved food triangle (pyramid), but it's still helpful. It's not suggestions on what to eat. It helps make choices easier for me when I'm trying to figure out what to eat.

This can actually be used for all kinds of things, just replace adjectives with something more appropriate. For food, easy can be replaced with fast, for example (easy and fast are often the same for me). If you are looking for furniture, Good quality/cheap/fast may be more appropriate. The point is that you can only usually have two of the three in the triangle. You can get a cheap, good quality table, but you will probably spend a lot of time looking at garage sales or thrift stores. You can get something cheap and fast if you are willing to get something that made out of pressed board and may only last a year or two. And, of course, you can (always) get something of quality fast if you are willing to pay for it.

With food, healthy is very subjective. It can be replaced with filling/lasting (a meal vs a snack that will leave you hungry again in an hour or so). Fresh, yummy (or fun), organic, unprocessed, can all be used instead of healthy. Since I'm recovering from an eating disorder (orthorexia nervosa) that left me refusing to eat unless very strict guidelines were applied, I try to avoid healthy as an adjective with a qualitative meaning. I no longer believe, I can no longer believe, that there are bad and good foods. 

When it comes to food, we have to eat it. Before I relearned to be a normal eater (after re-feeding and treating my eating disorder), I could never have imagined not wanting to eat, or thinking that eating was too much of a bother. I was obsessed with food, thought about it all the time, and also tried not to eat very much (feeling guilty for eating or distracting myself to forget how hungry I was). I'll share more about ED, and normal eating, in other posts. I want to keep this one short.

Each decision I have to make takes energy. When that energy is limited, finding ways to make choices as easy and simple as possible can mean a lot in a day. So, this is one of the things I do. That, and keeping enough easy things to eat (like yogurt and fruit and string cheese) that I don't have to think too hard if I need a quick bite to get me to the next meal, or the next snack. Let me know in the comments what things help you make quicker choices.