HEALTHY LIVING: Idiot-proofing the pantry to avoid bad choices - Stillwater News Press

HEALTHY LIVING: Idiot-proofing the pantry to avoid bad choices - Stillwater News Press

If you’re lending a ride to your alcoholic buddy, it’s generally a bad idea to drop him off in front of the liquor store. Don’t do the same thing to yourself when you are stocking the pantry.

First, stock it with what you want to be consuming. If you purchase something that you don’t want to be put into your body, you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

Alternatively, by purchasing healthier foods, you make them available to you later when you go scrounging. If the only options are good options, how can you go wrong?

Now that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a bag of tortilla chips or some chocolate squirreled away somewhere. Very few people really want to go through life without the “finer things.” But if you put them out of the direct line of sight when you open the cupboard or pantry, it can decrease the odds of you snagging it when you are browsing for a snack.

Have access to the treats, but make yourself work for it. The converse of that is true as well. If we put the healthy options front and center we can increase the odds that we will choose one of those instead.

One of the biggest reasons we gravitate towards bad choices when we are hungry is that they tend to be easy to eat. They require little to no prep. It’s a whole lot faster and easier to open a bag of chips than to cut up an apple and spread peanut butter on each slice.

While we can purchase healthier options for those quick and easy snacks, we can also do a bit of prep work when we aren’t starving. Prepping our own snacks ahead of time can be a great way to idiot-proof our own decisions later.

Not only are we a little more invested in those snacks (we did put some time into them after all), but the decision making part of the process has already been done. Even when we make bad decisions, we are still making a decision at that time. If we make a healthy choice ahead of time, it makes that option even less work than the bad one.

Fundamentally, idiot-proofing our pantry boils down to being honest with ourselves. As humans, we tend to be lazy. We can choose to struggle with that or take advantage of that to our own benefit.

If we can set up our environment to encourage us to make better decisions, we will be more successful in the long run. Don’t drop your alcoholic buddy off in front of the liquor store. Leave him at the juice bar instead.

Dylan Allen is the health columnist for the Stillwater News Press. He is a certified trainer at the Stillwater YMCA. Healthy Living is published every Thursday.