Cooking for a Healthy Self

One of the life lessons that continues to come back to my attention is the importance of cooking for yourself. Modern convenience, and unfortunately necessity, have driven most people to eat prepared foods. The one thing that we cannot deny about this scenario is that in making this decision we have waived the ability to customize our personal nutrition goals.

This lesson came up during my coaching certification. We were taught to guide clients to make healthy food choices based on what gives them energy and what takes it away. A major component of making this choice is understanding not just the final dish you eat but the ingredients that make it. The easiest way to get to this understanding is to cook for yourself.

To help my clients get started with cooking I’ve created a YouTube playlist of introductory cooking videos. I will continue to add to this playlist as new videos come to my attention, but I’ve started it with one of my favorite on-screen chefs, Sohla El-Waylly.  Sohla is the host of a cooking 101 series with the NY Times and these 7 videos have been added to give you a place to start with cooking rice, eggs, chicken and several other staple ingredients.

I have mixed feelings about the accessibility of the NY Times content in general, but they are a trustworthy source and have made these resources available for free. Sohla is great at explaining her techniques and is a joy to watch. I’ve already started to preview other content to add to this playlist, but if you have good sources or delicious recipes you would like to share, please leave them in the comments.