Slow Down

"Take your time,"  my dad used to tell me.  As a kid I was often impatient and in a hurry.  He knew with all the rushing around I tended to be sloppy and often made more mistakes.  I heard a carpenter say once that the key to building quality products was to "measure twice, and cut once."  I want to say, "take your time", to my grown children sometimes when I'm riding in a car and they are driving.  They can drive as though they're carrying transplant organs in a cooler to a dying loved one.  My wife, Cindi, has shown me how important this is with food preparation because when you grill hamburgers too quickly they end up like charcoal briquettes on the outside but need a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood inside!  If you take your time you will do a better job at food preparation.

Being in a hurry often causes us to buy less healthy foods as well.  It takes longer to prepare something from scratch than it does to just heat up a can of mash, or to microwave a dinner.  If we are going to improve our health as a nation we are going to have to cook more like our grandmothers did. When we make our meals more of an event then we will take the time to make healthier choices at the grocery store.  We need to get much more intentional about what we eat.  We need to lose our focus on convenience, and gain a focus on consuming fresher, healthier food.  Then we will enjoy it more and live much longer.

James Gandolfini died this week of a heart attack.  He was Tony Soprano to many of us, and he was a great actor, but he was only 51 and much to young to die.  This kind of senseless early death is just one of the reasons I am challenging you to eat healthier.  Our food choices are killing us and I am on a crusade to change that.  Join me in this crusade.