2. Cook

Simple.

“Blue Diamonds” by The Long Winters, off When I Pretend to Fall

Ingredients:
Leftover tuna (seared)
A couple handfuls of chopped kale
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Kosher salt

Supplies:
The Top
A good family
A large skillet

Method:
Get in touch with your wife on a Friday afternoon and explain you have no ideas for dinner. Have your wife suggest going out, and agree on The Top*. Work through the rest of your day, then meet your lovely wife and awesome son at the restaurant. Sit outside and order a glass of Spanish white wine. It’s going to be fish or chicken for dinner because you gorged on meat-lover’s pizza at lunch and you can still feel all four slices parked in your gut.

Play ninjas with your son and his little Imaginext figures and point out the different skateboards displayed in the gallery window next door. Watch people walk by and smile as the sun sets and downtown Gainesville begins to light itself all gold and red.

Order the ancho bean cakes and ask for the sushi-grade tuna. Order it seared, and when it comes marvel at the texture. The black bean cakes, too, are delicious. Eat them and some of the tuna and a few of your son’s fries. Enjoy the wine and your wife’s company and the evening. Be present. Have fun.

When it’s time to go, pack the tuna and some of the delicious sauce in a to-go box and take it home. Plan to have it the next morning, or maybe for lunch, depending.

Wake hungry. Brew coffee, read a book, ease into your day**. When it’s time for breakfast, take the tuna and kale out of the fridge. Get your kosher salt and some lemon juice and a large skillet. Set the tuna on the counter and set the skillet on the stove

Add some olive oil (just a splash), and set the burner to medium-high. When the pan comes to temperature, toss in the kale. Listen to it sizzle a moment, then sprinkle on a pinch of salt. Gently stir the kale in the pan, add a small splash of lemon juice, and give it another stir. Keep moving the kale until it cooks down and is a little tender.

While the kale cooks, slice the tuna.

When the kale has cooked down, transfer it to a bowl and top it with the sliced tuna. Wait. Let the kale warm the tuna through*** (it won’t take but a minute), then sit down with a knife and fork and enjoy.

*Substitutions can be made. Keep in mind the place must be friendly, have good food, offer excellent drinks, outside seating, and it should speak to you in some way. One or more of the people you go with should feel at least a little at home there.

**You shouldn’t eat right when you wake up. You need to give your body a little time to get its metabolism started. If you’re really looking to lose some weight or tighten up a bit, try to get a little exercise before you eat. Wake up, have some coffee, read some news, then go take a walk around the block. When you get back, you’ll probably be ready for a good breakfast (though not too much, and nothing made out of candy).

***Reheating fish is incredibly tricky business. In fact, it’s usually best not to bother, especially with shrimp, which often ends up overcooking and getting rubbery. If you are going to reheat fish, it’s best to start with cool, not cold fish. So if it’s been in the fridge, let it come closer to room temperature. If you can, let other things you’ve made heat the fish (like the kale in this example). This will ensure it doesn’t cook too quickly and will also help keep the fish oils from overcooking and going stinky. If you have to heat fish all by itself, you can use a pan on low heat, a steamer, or the microwave. If you’re using a pan, let it come up to temperature, set the fish in the pan just enough to heat that side, then flip it. Let it sit a bit longer (again, just enough to heat the side), then move it to a plate. Let it sit a moment so the heat can disperse into the middle. Then enjoy it. It won’t be hot, but it’ll be warm, and still taste (and smell) fresh. Don’t keep fish around for long. If you can’t enjoy it the next morning or for lunch the next day, don’t take it home. And I wouldn’t recommend trying this with deep-fried fish. Battered things just don’t keep.

One of the problems people have meeting goals is the goals themselves. It strikes me that many of the goals we set are too vague or open-ended. Consider this one: lose 10 pounds. You hear it often enough. “I want to lose 10 pounds.” Or let’s say five. Seems easy enough, right? When we start asking questions, though, the goal begins to show its holes. By when? Using what methods? And if you haven’t lost five pounds by next week, do you push it back to the week after? The week after that?

I set two firm goals related to health this year: walk every day at 10 and 2, and live better. So far, they’re working well. The first is simple. I either walk at 10 and 2 or I don’t. There’s no fudging it. I have reminders set on my phone. After they go off, I get up as soon as I can and I head outside and I walk.

I’m lucky. I live in Florida and can survive outside these days (though sometimes it’s a little warm and I have to roll up my sleeves). But if I lived in a place that tried to freeze me, I’d have a slightly different goal. Maybe I’d just walk up and down the stairs in my building. Maybe I’d go visit Mary in accounting on the far side of the office complex. Or maybe I’d do fifteen minutes of Wii fitness before I left for the office and another fifteen after I came home. Whatever my goals might be, I think it’s important to be able to answer yes or no. And if no, then why “no”?

And just so we’re clear, “I didn’t feel like it,” is a shitty answer and darkens your soul. Seriously. It can lead into a serious feedback loop of feeling sorry for yourself until finally you give up all goals. Better: today I was lazy. Tomorrow I won’t be. And mean it.

The other goal, live better, seems incredibly vague, but I don’t think it is. Rather, it leads to a binary question I end up asking myself, very briefly, with every decision I make that’s somewhat health related. When I begin heading to the elevator, I ask myself, “Is this going to be help me live better?” When the answer’s “no,” I change course and head for the stairs.

There are millions of small decisions we make every day, and if we can attach some kind of simple, binary question to them, we can help ourselves immensely. When you reach for the M&Ms, is that living better? When you dodge a call from a friend, is that living better? When you decide to make an impulse purchase (oh, how I need to become more self-aware on this one), is that living better?

Again, this all comes back to mindfulness. You can’t ask yourself the living better question if you’re not aware of your actions. If you’re reaching blindly for a dish of M&Ms on your desk, then you’ll never be able to ask the question. Instead you’ll be asking, “Where did all my M&Ms go?”

I split mine into two, fifteen-minute walks, which leaves me over twenty-three hours ever day to do whatever I want. Not a bad deal, if you ask me.

How would you spend your twenty-three-plus hours?

Either way, I’m happy with my choice. Yes, sometimes I feel guilty riding the elevator, but it’s the choice I’ve made, and I think that makes all the difference.

Every day we’re given opportunities to be a little healthier. This sounds like complete self-help schlock, and it partly is. But I think the important first step isn’t to make the right choice. It’s to realize those choices exist and to be conscious of them. When you drive into a parking lot, you can choose to park close to the store or farther away. When you’re going to get a snack from the machine, you can choose a Twix (oh, delicious Twix!) or a dinky bag of mixed nuts (or you can go ahead and stick with your plan of eating the apple you brought from home). Or, when we’re walking in to work, we can choose to take the stairs.

So as we embark on this journey together, let’s try to remember to be mindful. Honestly. The first step in making healthier choices is being aware those choices exist.