This is the second of five articles on Transformation: Being New in Our Thinking, the missing link to speed and ease our journey to healthier, happier eating, for life.

A previous post began the conversation around Meal Making Transformation, starting with why it’s a worthwhile concept to know about. As mentioned there, the parts and pieces of Meal Making Transformation came to me bit by bit. Eventually they “self-organized” into three areas of “new-ness:” Being New in the Kitchen, New in Cooking and New in Thinking.

Put these three pieces together and you become a powerful, unstoppable meal making force, capable of easily and efficiently assembling meals that deliver good health. So let’s take a look at each of these areas:

Being New In Our Cooking This piece of Meal Making Transformation is all about learning how “cooking” can be vastly simplified so it becomes entirely manageable and sustainable in our modern time-starved lives. Just a few basic techniques combined with just a few basic recipes (not hundreds and thousands!) makes it possible to create dozens of totally doable, deliciously healthful meals on a short timeline.

All too often, however, the thought of “cooking” brings up visions of slaving away for hours in the kitchen, trying to make some fancy recipe, figuring out what to make with it, hoping everything gets done at the same time and praying that it all turns out ok. In other words, “cooking” has a baggage problem.

That’s why I used the words “Meal Making” in the term Meal Making Transformation. Being a new term, “meal making” is baggage-free. What’s more, it is a far more generous term that can include simple but healthy and tasty meals like wholesome sandwiches, hearty salads, easy skillets and quick soups and stir-fries.

This new way of cooking is what I have shared in hundreds of cooking classes and demos and I encourage you to check out the videos on my Vimeo channel so you can get started and turn everyday healthy “cooking” into an entirely manageable and sustainable lifestyle.

Being New in the Kitchen Believe it or not, the kitchen doesn’t have to be a highly stressful and crazily chaotic place where making meals is like pulling teeth. Turning the kitchen into an efficient cooking environment is a key piece of Meal Making Transformation. It provides the foundational structure, i.e., the infrastructure, necessary to be New in Your Cooking.

Creating a supportive kitchen is not as hard as it might seem. There are six, straightforward KitchenSmart® Strategies to guide the way. Bit by bit, as those strategies are put in place, the kitchen is transformed into your friend and ally on the healthy eating journey, i.e., a place where we can capably and naturally make meals that serve our health and fill our hunger for flavorful, yummy food.

Learning to be new in the kitchen is the subject of my first book, Take Control of Your Kitchen. I hope you will check out its step-by step guidance for putting the six KitchenSmart® Strategies to work in your kitchen. A wonderful surprise awaits as we transition from chaos to calm in the kitchen and find it to be a place of comfort, fulfillment, engagement and even fun.

Being New In Our Thinking Although last in the lineup, becoming new in our thinking is actually the most important of the three areas of Meal Making Transformation. It’s how we “get our heads behind our actions.”

I have found that truly believing in the value of an action makes it a lot more likely that we will take that action. In the case of meal making, truly valuing it provides a foundation for more successful, long-term change in the meals we assemble and eat.

I doubt there is anything too novel about connecting our values to our ability to make changes in our lives. However, I’m not sure we have considered how understanding the thinking-table connection could be the key to achieving the healthy eating success we long for. What if it is the missing link on the healthy eating journey?

Unlike the first two areas, however, I have yet to develop a comprehensive resource on Being New in Our Thinking. Over the last several years, however, it has become ever clearer that a thinking transformation is the key to healthy eating success–and in fact is really the critical first step. That’s why this blog series is devoted to this area of Meal Making Transformation.

But are you scratching your head wondering what in the world does thinking have to do with making healthy meals? That may sound far-fetched. But the next post will shed more light on this Thinking-Table Connection.