Eating like our forefathers is a thing now! Enter the Paleo diet, which advocates the ancestor way of eating. But this article isn’t about the Paleo Diet. It’s about how our ancestors lived a far healthier life and how they managed to live so healthily? Was it just the way they ate or what they put on the plate?
Well, it was a combination of factors that made them the way they were, healthy without ever succumbing to the perils of modern life. In the last century, our eating traditions have changed dramatically. The way we shop, cook, or dine has also changed our food attitude. So, here are some ways that our grandparents followed to the T.
A Strict Routine
Suppose you check with our grandparent’s mealtimes with your own. So, how are our meal times changing? Our grandparents’ routines were more strict. They used to have their breakfast at around 7 am, lunch at noon, and dinner around sunset. Our bodies have circadian rhythms, that it is in sync with the timings of nature and our ancestors followed just that.
This discipline in food helped them maintain their slim waistlines and also helped minimize food wastage. We have lost that disciplined lifestyle today. And we continue to graze throughout the day instead of sticking to a three-meal-a-day routine. It might surprise our ancestors to see the way we skip breakfast these days and consume coffee instead.
Eating At Desk
Eating is a lost art. In the earlier days, people savored every morsel with their loved ones by their side. However, the same does not hold now. People prioritize their gadgets and work over meals and are staring at their screens even while dining. Takeaways have replaced homecooked meals.
The attachment to the food we eat has become a lot lesser. It’s not as we don’t love food. It’s just as we have lost the art of enjoying good food. We don’t need our gadgets to eat our food, do we? Food and eating are more convenient today, and we would instead go to our nearest supermarket and get things ready-made. Who has the time to spend time boiling, braising, frying, baking, the works?
The Change in Eating Habits
Modern-day cooking allows far less time than days gone by. Long gone are the hours spent slaving over the stove. Instead, convenience food has become much more popular, with people reaching for convenience foods and microwave meals several times a week. Contrast this with the 1930s when convenience food meant food in tins – a convenience because it allowed people to eat fruit and veg out of season and provided them with easy-to-prepare meat and fish.
Convenience is a real selling point for people these days: many people in the modern world don’t make time for food and believe that they’re always too busy. Yet cooking fresh food doesn’t have to take hours – compare making a quick fresh pasta dish with standing in a queue at a fast-food restaurant – the amount of time is likely to be the same.
In with the microwave, out with the stove
Today we are spending a lot of time spending time dining at restaurants than our grandparents. Eating out was a rarity those days and was more of a treat. Now, eating out is the norm and, not the exception.
May this paradigm shift in our way of eating has resulted in our expanding girth. Maybe this is what we should be doing to take a page or more from our ancestor’s books and stop eating out quite so much and strike a balance. Also, now we rely on microwaves to heat/cook our foods, We want things quick, and microwave cooking does just that.
The movement was the key.
Too much sitting has proved to be the bane of the modern-day lifestyle. That’s why we are way more overweight than our forefathers or even our grandparents. They walked or cycled to run their errands and buy stuff at nearby markets.
Evenings were spent not poring over our gadgets or still trying to finish our work in vain. In contrast, our grandparents spent it either walking or cycling and gradually lowering the activities to the bare minimum and hit the bed at the right time.
If we look at their lifestyle, it isn’t too difficult to follow. Move a little more than you can, sleep and wake up on time. Do not forget to spend some time cooking your meals. Trust us, while convenience is good, it can cost a lot in terms of health!