Could Weird Wednesdays be the Solution to Food Boredom?

Music. With food, the podcast hosted by me, Kyla Holley.

With many years experience as an eating disorder and bariatric therapist, I know exactly what it takes to help you break free from your diet history and. Music. Develop a more healthy relationship with food. Please follow this podcast to make sure you don't miss a thing. My question this week is, are you bored? Are you stuck in a rut with food? food. What's going on in your pantry and your fridge as you listen to this?

What lies there within? Are there lots of really boring foods in there, things that you've eaten a million times? Do you buy exactly the same thing at the supermarket every single week and you have this real limited repertoire of foods that you eat? I interview a lot of people on a day-to-day basis about what they eat. And I say, how does a regular day shape up? How does a regular week shape up? What are the regular meals that you have at dinner time, for instance?

And quite often, people start reeling off the meals that they have, and it's almost like they have them on rotation. And they're not so set so that they're saying, every Monday we have this, every Tuesday we have this, but they might have maybe eight or 10 meals that they tend to rotate fairly regularly.

And then they decide that one day they say, no, I'm gonna try and be healthy, or I wanna try and lose weight, or I want to try and improve something to do with my relationship with food or my day-to-day diet. And they decide they're gonna do things differently. Quite often, we enter that phase of saying to myself, right, I want to be healthy, where some part of that leads us to believe that it's going to be boring. It's going to involve a lot of vegetables.

If we don't know how to cook very well, vegetables can be really bland and a bit boring if you're just putting them in a pan and boiling them. So quite often healthy eating, when we think about it, we think of things like, you know, grilled chicken and vegetables, tuna with salad. Cottage cheese on a crisp bread. You know, these are all the real common foods that people come to me and they say, this is what I've been eating because I'm trying to be healthy.

And what happens after a little while, which is expected, is people get bored. They get bored. They decide that they've had enough mini cans of tuna. They've had enough cottage cheese. They've eaten too many apples, a tree full of apples. And they reach the point where they go, oh, no more. I can't keep doing this. And that's the moment where the desire to break free hits. And how do you break free? Imagine yourself in this situation.

You've been being in your mind healthy, maybe for weeks now, and you've reached a stage where you're just mind-numbingly bored and you say, right, I want to break free. What is it you go and buy yourself? Do you go and say, right, I'm going to buy a really amazing tomato? Is that what you do? Do you pick for yourself a really incredible cauliflower. Or maybe a really expensive top brand can of tuna.

No, you don't do any of those things. I would bet you go for something like a chocolate bar, or a bag of potato chips, or a slice of cheesecake, or maybe even a whole cheesecake, I don't know, a bottle of wine. Something where you go, I want to break free, I'm mind-numbingly bored. So then it's almost like we go to the other extreme. What's the most stimulating piece of food we can think of in that moment? And for many people, it is those things.

It's chocolate, it's chips, it's alcohol, it's cake, it's doughnuts, it's all those sort of foods that we go for. So how do we remedy this? Well, I suppose the obvious way is to say, well, let's not get bored in the first place. If you're bored with what you're eating, and this is going to sound tough, but this is your fault because there's really no excuse. There are hundreds of amazing, delicious and nutritious foods out there.

Foods that are going to be good for your body, but good for your brain as well. Things that are delicious, things are going to give you that food satisfaction action that you desire so that you don't feel deprived, so that you don't feel the need to break free.

You have Google at your fingertips. You have social media where if you just pop onto Instagram, there's so many people that are putting up videos of delicious, quick, easy meals that are incredibly nutritious and they show you how to do them. If you see something that looks delicious on Instagram, follow that person so that these things enter your life. You're scrolling through and you're going to see a whole load of delicious, amazing recipes.

You've also got, as I say, Google, Google recipes, whatever you've got in your fridge, chicken recipes, halloumi recipes, who knows? Try and do something interesting with your food. Keep it exciting. I don't know about other countries, but over here in Australia, we have two main supermarkets and each of them each week produce a little floppy sort of magazine that you get free at the checkout.

And again, that contains amazing ideas. All these different recipes and quite often with those magazines, they're very seasonal as well. So during the winter, they'll produce those winter foods that you crave, things like casseroles and hot pots and those lovely sort of warm comfort foods that we desire. And then in the summer, it will all be about light salads and using fruit and vegetables that are in season at that time. So they're really useful as well. And they're completely free of charge.

Pick them up, look through them, tab which ones you like, and actually make the effort to expand your repertoire with food. There's something that I do with families quite often. I get a lot of families that come to me where they've all got stuck in their individual food ruts. So what you'll have is maybe a son that has a very limited repertoire of things that he will eat. So the parent is having to cook a separate meal for him because he won't eat certain things.

And then you've got maybe another child who's got either food allergies or food intolerances, or maybe even just likes and dislikes. So the family can get themselves into a situation where the poor old parents are having to cook a meal for them and a separate meal for each child.

So the parents are having to produce sometimes four different variations on food, or if it gets way too difficult like that, they just give up and they just say, look, just get your own, make yourself a sandwich or here's the money, pick up a takeaway on the way home because it all becomes too difficult. Especially if you've got young children, there's something that I talk to parents about introducing and it's called Weird Wednesdays.

You can call it Strange Saturdays or Freaky Fridays or whatever you want to call it. But I call it Weird Wednesdays because I think that having one day a week, which we allocate to trying something new, is really valuable as far as not only the family unit as it is at the moment, but if you have children, expanding their food repertoire for the future.

So that if they visit foreign countries, if they go out on dates in the future, or they go around to friends' houses that maybe have a different cultural background, they're not completely in shock because of those things. So what does Weird Wednesdays involve? It involves going to the supermarket, ideally as a family, but this is also something you can try, even if you're single and you live on your own, you can also do Weird Wednesdays.

They are fun. And this is a way of you learning to have fun with food and also breaking up some of those set traditions, set ideas you have around food. So on any given day of the week, you go to the supermarket and you choose something in the supermarket that you have never had before. It could be food or it could be drink. It's really up to you. Weird Wednesdays. You decide on what you're going to choose. So it can be anything.

And by that, I mean, don't think this is about just expanding the healthier foods into your repertoire. This is about having fun with food. So it could be, you know, a strange sort of cake that you've never tried before. It could be a bar of chocolate that you've never tried before. Don't get fixated on the health side of this. This is not what Weird Wednesdays are about. Weird Wednesdays are about adventure, trying new things, having fun.

Also, Weird Wednesdays sometimes are going to be about failure. They're going to be about you buying something and the whole family trying it and all deciding together that it's absolutely awful. So you're not going to win every time with this, I promise you. But even if the family decide that this thing is the most disgusting thing that they've ever tasted, I promise you there'll be laughter involved. There'll be funny faces involved.

There'll be noises involved of people agreeing with each other. And it can also be a really bonding experience, even if the thing you're trying is absolutely hideous. So try and get everyone involved with this. Try if you've got children, get them choosing the item. If you're out at the supermarket, say to them, do you want to pick the weird Wednesday thing this week?

And get them to choose something. Have an adventure. Look for things on those shelves that you've never experienced before and see what you find. You are going to find some absolute gems. You're going to find some foods that you all agree are absolutely delicious. And you're going to say to yourself, can we have this every week? How could we fit this in? This was amazing. You're going to have some foods that you're meh about, some foods that you go, it was okay, but I can take it or leave it.

And you're going to have some things that you absolutely hate, but try and get everyone to be open-minded. This is all about just trying and leaving yourself open to the possibility that it could go in any way. This is great for increasing food flexibility. With young people. The idea of just try it. If you decide you hate it, absolutely fine. Perhaps we'll all hate it, but give it a little go.

So what I've decided to do to share the experience with you and to hopefully get a little bit of a movement going in this, I'm going to be doing weird Wednesday videos. So that will mean that every Wednesday, I try something new. This might be something that I have purchased at my local supermarket. I've got one all set up for next week. So that's going to happen. It may be something like that. Or for example, if I am out and about, there may be a food that I haven't tried.

And so there could be some sort of live stuff going on when I'm at an event, or I know I'm going to a music festival shortly, so there might be a food there that I've never tried. So those sort of things, I'll be filming them live with me trying whatever it is I come across. Also, if I visit a foreign country, and unfortunately, over the last year, I've visited a few that would have been incredible for Weird Wednesdays, but nothing on the horizon at the moment.

But if I do go to a foreign country, I'm taking the audience with me for Weird Wednesday and we're going to try foods that we've never tried before. It would be really interesting if we could all do this together. So what I'm going to do with this is not going out in the form of a podcast as such, but it will go out every Wednesday on social media. So please follow me on Facebook, change your relationship with food on Instagram.

Let's get that following happening because I want to get your feedback. If I try something, I want to know, have you tried it as well? Have you got any suggestions of something else that I could try in future? Or are you getting involved with this movement? Are you getting into weird Wednesdays? And what do they mean to you? And what changes, hopefully, over the weeks have you seen because of the impact of Weird Wednesdays.

You can hopefully share some videos with me as well of things that you've been getting up to. So hashtag Weird Wednesdays into there. I don't know whether anyone has this hashtag already, so. I suppose I ought to look into that first. But anyway, let's hashtag it. What the hell? We could call it change your relationship with food, Weird Wednesdays. That's a really long hashtag, but we'll see where we head with it.

But Weird Wednesdays are going to be a thing for us, and we're going to try new things every week. So I would really like you to join me on this food venture. I don't know where it will take me and what I will end up trying. I'm fairly open-minded with food. I will try most things. I do, like most people, have my limits. There's some things I genuinely just can't stand. One is celery.

Can't stand the stuff. It looks delicious when I see other people eating it, when they crunch away a bit of celery. I love the crunchiness, but I hate the taste. Can't stand it. And I can taste the tiniest bit of celery, even if it's hidden in a salad or hidden in a casserole, I actually guarantee I will be able to taste it because I hate the stuff that much. And also olives. I really can't stand olives. It's the same. If there's even a speck of olive

on a pizza or something, I can taste it. It's absolutely disgusting. So I won't be trying those two things. And I probably have a hard limit on any sort of insect that sort of pops when you eat it. Anything like a witchetty grub. I don't know if anybody in another country knows what they are, but they are a traditional food eaten by our First Nations people here. And they are found in probably more remote areas of Australia.

And apparently, apparently they're delicious, but I have no wish to find out whether they're delicious. Likewise, you see on travel programs, they're eating insects on sticks and things like that. I don't mind so much if they're fried and they're sort of fried to a crisp, so they're just a crunchy thing. But if there's any element of something gooey inside and something that sort of. Oops, then yeah, that's probably not for me. You can imagine the face that I'm pulling as I describe this.

So I'm going to have limits like we all do, but I'm going to take it as well as a bit of a personal challenge to try new things. Even though when I travel, I'm quite adventurous. To be honest, when I'm at home, I'm like most people. I buy the same things every week and I need to mix it up a little bit and try some new things. So I'm really hoping you will join me on that journey. I would absolutely love to have your company on that and get involved in the

social media side. That would be great as well.

I really hope you join me next week because I do have an incredible guest next week. Her name is Elsa Hitchens and she has written a book called everything they told you about menopause weight loss is wrong. So we're going to be talking to her about all things menopause, all things middle-aged and things that change for you as a woman when the menopause hits you and what you can do about that. Her book is fantastic. I have read some of it. So please join me for next week's chat.

I would love to have your company then. Thank you so much. Goodbye. Don't forget to check the links in the episode notes to our six-week Change Your Relationship with Food course and to the Change Your Relationship with Food workbook and journal, which is available on Amazon. Music.