All You Won't Eat Buffet

My friend watched me make my daughter large spreads of food options, for every meal, only for her to want something else. What we called the "All You Won't Eat Buffet."

Some of it is the same type of food but with slightly altered variations. A banana whole next to a banana cut in pieces, a toasted bagel plain next to an untoasted bagel with cream cheese. A charcuterie board of contingency plans. Then on days when we're out of the house and we don't have a lot of options, we pull over to the only restaurant open in town - she'll scarf down some mystery food without any issues. Why is this!??

The more options we have in front of us, the more we see what's NOT there, as opposed to all the things that ARE there. I'm sure it's a more common scenario with only children; there is more attention and more food in the fridge for the one. As the last of three larger and hungrier older brothers, it was a race to eat what was in front of us, not a leisurely dining experience with à la carte options. Whenever I ask "why?" (as I'm cutting crusts off the third sandwich brought back to the kitchen), there is a NY Times bestseller and neuroscientist somewhere out there ready to break it down.

Michael Easter wrote The Comfort Crisis. He studies our current comfortable culture and younger generation, and how they are lacking growth and resilience. In short, we have it too good. The ease and speed of things, at our fingertips with limitless options, have become such a priority for the majority of folks. So much so that we forget there was a reason for physically going out and doing the harder things: grocery shopping instead of Instacart, running outside and not on a treadmill with a screen in front of us, complimenting a stranger in person instead of hiding behind a screen and hitting a pixelated heart. Taking the long, uncomfortable path will reward you with something far more valuable than followers. Benefits like unspoken confidence, a sense of achievement, patience, deeper empathy, and feeling connected to yourself, which helps with self-awareness. Then there's just being physically more connected to nature and other humans around us. All the things that our young generation is craving. When I think about it, my most soul-filling adventures and trustworthy friendships came out of a hard, vulnerable time.

Easter said on a recent Podcast, (How to Grow from Doing Hard Things) that at every moment of our day we get to decide; the hard way or the easy way.

Stairs or the escalator, walking to the corner store or driving, having a hard conversation in person or via text, sitting in silence instead of turning on a device. He calls this the 2% study. According to this study, only 2% of the population choose the harder path. The rest choose the easier route every time. He says the ones that choose the more inconvenient physical paths, what he calls "incidental movements," these movements outweigh the benefits of those who exercise once a day. Not just calories burned but an increase in lifespan. Those who choose less convenient but more personal interactions are less lonely and foster closer relationships. Those who choose the quieter and boring option are choosing improved mental health, a sense of calm, and the chance to sit in your inner Ted Talk. You can be your own great teacher of the human spirit. Discover the badass inside you.

Going back to my initial dilemma of how to get my insanely stubborn child to eat whats on front of her, Easter would call this Prevalence Induced Concept Change. Which is a study conducted by David Levari, it shows what happens when a community or person has too many good options. They took a group of 800 people, all types, and lined them up. The focus group had to decipher which faces were threatening or non-threatening. In the first round, they felt pretty decisive and had their number of threatening faces (let's say it was 200 out of 800). The next time they conducted the study, they took away half the threatening faces. The focus group became a little pickier; faces they would have let slide before as non-threatening, they started to find a way for them to look threatening. So even in the less threatening lineup, they still found the same number of threatening faces as before. In the same way, my daughter will find flaws in a pretty flawless food spread. It shows that as people experience fewer and fewer problems, we don't actually become more satisfied. We lower our threshold for what we consider a problem. As the world has become a lot more comfortable, and we're experiencing less of what life is about, we're not appreciating all of our luxuries. We are just broadening our definition of what a problem is.

This doesn't mean I'm going to start force feeding my child gizzards and lima beans. It does mean our kitchen staff and meal planning will look very different. We basically switched out the chef. We pick one meal as a family, just ONE. Then we gather all the ingredients from the store together, and she cooks it herself. This mini chef could not be happier. In fact she is insisting on cooking all the meals for the family and tries to kick us out of the kitchen (*eye roll* ... chefs and their egos).

It's kind of working though! Now that she is fully experiencing the process and putting in the hard labor, she sees food so much differently. She made a sun-dried tomato, pistachio nut crusted, baked chicken. Something she would never have touched before because of all the "disdusting" seasonings and sauce. She loved it. I also couldn't help but giggle when she came home the other night super frustrated because no one from her beach picnic wanted her fruit skewers. "I worked so hard on it!" Apparently the little kids she shared them with were "too picky." Oh how the chef tables have turned.

This week in the studio, instead of finding ways to fast forward through hard stuff or moving the goalpost before we even let the first post settle, we're going to hang out in that shaky, quivery zone. We'll tap into stamina and a smorgasbord of muscle work, the same way our little chef is diving into our seasoning cabinet. We'll get salty, probably a little sour, only from there can you fully experience the sweet. That rewarding exhaustion is the best way to get to the most alive feeling there is, which is feeling present. In my daughter's case it's feeling proud of herself.

Excited to make your bodies sweat, smile, and persevere through a hard process to gain perspective.

XO,

Celeste