These 10 principles for a good food day sum up Chef Marco’s philosophy behind Brodo. It’s easy to get bogged down in the constantly evolving, sometimes confusing details of healthy eating advice. The following set of principles is Chef Marco’s stripped-down version of all the nuttrition noise, and it functions as his day-to-day guide. There’s no one-size-fits-all-appropach to a good food day, and your definition of it may change over time. Chef Marco’s hope is that this roadmmap is flexible enough to help guide you, no atter what your interpretation.
1. Eating must be enjoyable.
On a good food day, eating is still a primary source of pleasure. With quality ingredients, a few basic cooking skills, and the recipes in this book, you can create meals that are so delicious and satisfying they feel indulgent. Deprivation isn’t the solution – satisfaction is.
2. Cooking empowers you to eat better.
By cooking your own food, you’re in control of what goes in your body and you won’t eat nearly as much sugar, salt, and fat as what you’ll get with processed foods. As Michael Pollan said, “Cooking, transforming the raw stuff of nature into nutritious and appleaing things for us to eat and drink, is one of the interesting and worthwhile things we humans do.”
3. Proper prior-planning prevents piss-poor performance.
Feeding yourself (and others) the right foods requires thought and planning. You don’t want to have to cook every time you need to eat, so plan to make larger batches of leftover-friendly foods that can be repurposed into new meals. Meal prep might seem overly time-consuming at first, but once you establish a system – planning meals, choosing a shopping day, and making a schedule for cooking days – it becomes a reflex.
4. Get in sync with Mother Nature.
In-season ingredients check every important box: They are better tasting, more nutritious, higher quality, and more afforable. As seasons and ingredients shift, so should your cooking methods. You don’t want a slow-cooked stew on a hot summer day or a cold tomato salad in the dead of winter, right?
5. Quality ingredients are everything.
The closer a food is to its whole form, the better. The surest path to finding quality ingredients is your local farmers’ market, where everything is fresh and in season. At a supermarket, organic becomes more of a priority because certified organic foods are held to a higher standard of production. Choose the hightest-quality option you can afford.
6. Eat real food.
Many processed foods have artificual ingredients, chemicals, additives, and excess salt, sugar, and potentially harmful types of fat. This can be true even if the food is organic or from a health food store, or screams buzzwords like “whole grain!” on the package. If you buy processed foods, ignore the labels and let the ingredient list be your guide. Look for real ingredients that you know are good for you.
7. Be a conscious eater.
The act of eating should be a restorative interlude in your stressful, chaotic day, not a time for multitasking. By giving meals the attention they deserve, you eat at a slower pace and give your body a chance to registar taste and satisfaction. You wind up feeling satiated with smaller portion sizes and enoying your food more. Slow down. Chew. Savor your food.
8. A twinge of hunger isn’t the end of the world.
Most of us shovel food down with such frequency that we don’t know what hungry feels like. Familiarizing yourslef with hunger signals is a key part of learning to feed yourself well. Not shaky, lighteaded, desperation hunger, but the twinge of tightening in your stomach that first alerts you to hunger. When you start from this point, you’ll discover which foods and quantities truly satisfy you. You may need a lot less food than you think.
9. Diversify.
Food boredom is frustrating and leads back to old habits and crappy choices. Eating well for the long term requires choosing foods with a wide range of flavors, colors, and textures. This not only keeps meals interesting and satisfying, but eating a variety of foods also increases your chances of geting all the nutrients you need.
10. Make indulgences a guilt-free part of the program.
Call it a cheat day, the 90/10 rule (eat well 90 percent of the time, splurge the other 10 percent), or whatever resonates with you. Granting yourself permission to say “to hell with it” once in awhile increases your chances of successfully sticking to good eating habits.
Brodo Makes for a Good Food Day
Chef Marco started Brodo with these 10 principles in mind. Its enjoyable, satisfying flavor encourages you to choose it over lesser quality foods. It’s an absolute asset in the kitchen. It fits into any weekly meal plan. We source our ingredients from sustainable farms that prioritize organic, pasture-raised, grass-fed/finished, and the like. It’s a traditional food that has been eaten for thousands of years. Need a moment of calm? Brodo provides. Brodo makes you feel satiated without overeating. We offer many different flavors to keep things interesting. And finally, Brodo may feel like an indulgence because it’s so delicious, but it’s low-calorie- low-carb, contains no sugar, and provides 10 wholesome grams of protein.
