Healthy Recipe Card

The core function of the healthy recipe card is never to let you copy and strictly implement the standardized menu, but to shrink the dietary principles that suit your physical condition and living habits into a palm-sized visual tool, helping you to make error-free dietary choices in 10 seconds when you are in a hurry, too lazy to use your brain, or unable to make up your mind, saving you the trouble of flipping through the app and counting calories.

I used to catch the subway in the morning for most of the year, and I would stand in front of the freezer of the convenience store downstairs for seven or eight minutes. I took teriyaki rice balls for fear that my blood sugar would rise too fast and I would feel drowsy all morning. I took vegetable salads but I was afraid that I would be hungry before 11 o'clock. Later, I followed nutrition. A friend of mine made his first recipe card, which was a little bigger than a bank card and put it in his wallet. He took it out and glanced at it to know what to choose: a whole wheat sandwich with a hard-boiled egg, no salad dressing, and that was it. In the time saved, he could buy an extra cup of hot soy milk.

Xiao Zhou, a fitness instructor next to me who is doing ironwork, has very hard-core cardboard. The weight ratios of carbohydrates, protein, and fat for each meal are printed on the front, and the raw and cooked conversions of common ingredients are densely marked on the back - 100g of cooked uncooked rice weighs about 300g, and 120g of cooked raw chicken breast weighs exactly 100g. He said that when preparing meals, he can just take it out and take a quick look, and there is no need to check the phone back and forth to calculate the calories. The time saved can be used to train two more sets of shoulders.

But Sister Li, who I know and works as a nutrition educator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, completely disagrees with this approach. She said that ordinary people are already tired from work, and picking weights to eat is just to hinder themselves. The cardboard she uses only has three lines of large characters. The characters are very large and are posted on the refrigerator door: staple foods as big as fists, egg whites as big as palms, green leafy vegetables in both hands. At the bottom, there is a small note circled in red pen: drink milk tea up to three times a week, and each time three-point sugar without pearls. It's that simple. She has been using it for almost two years, and all the indicators in her physical examination are much better than those of people of the same age.

When I first started making cardboard, I made a mistake. I copied the Mediterranean recipe template that was popular on the Internet. I wrote down exactly "eat 10 almonds a day" and "eat deep-sea fish twice a week." However, I threw it away in a drawer after less than 3 days of use. I am slightly allergic to nuts, and I couldn't buy fresh deep-sea fish at the vegetable market near my home. I ate frozen cod twice, and it was so fishy that I almost threw up my dinner. Only later did I realize that there is no standard answer to this matter. Everything you write must be something you can easily do, otherwise no matter how scientific you are, it will be useless.

When I read the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)" before, I also saw that the diet of ordinary people does not need to be overly precise. As long as it meets the intake proportions of major categories for a long time, it can fully meet the health needs, and there is no need to eat every gram. I later made one for my diabetic grandma, and wrote down a few things she couldn't remember at the front: drink less white porridge, mix half of the rice with corn crumbs, and add half a spoonful of salt when cooking. She now keeps it in the cloth bag when buying vegetables.

Of course, some people think that this thing is completely unnecessary. A friend of mine used to criticize me: I really want to eat something high in oil and sugar, how can I think of taking out the cardboard to look at it? This is actually quite true. When I was under great pressure last week, I took a detour and bought an entire popcorn cake and ate it without feeling any guilt. Cardboard is not meant to be a restraint, it is just to help you avoid the internal friction of "regret after eating and feeling uncomfortable if you don't eat" when you don't have such a strong appetite and just don't know what to eat.

The piece of cardboard I have posted on the refrigerator is already wrinkled. In addition to the basic matching principles, I also added a lot of improvised notes: If you work overtime late, eat oden, and if you want radish, egg, and kelp, don’t get the meatballs.； A friend made a hot pot appointment and had half a plate of vegetables first and then the meat. ； If you want to eat ice cream, buy a small cup of ice cream instead of a big box to keep at home. These are all scraps of thoughts that I have accumulated after going through countless pitfalls. They are a hundred times more useful than those Internet celebrity recipes with exquisite layout and precise proportions. After all, health is never about perfect implementation of a standard answer. Small habits that can be adhered to for a long time are the most effective.