VERIFIED CONTENTAuthor: Aleksandra Żyłowska-Mharrab, dietitian, food technologist, educator

Nutrition is not only about diets. Nutrition is related to a whole set of culinary and shopping behaviors, as well as attitudes towards the body and mental he alth. In this post, we have compiled a collection of eating behaviors that are becoming more and more popular, which cannot be attributed to diets or to trendy products. See how the approach to eating, cooking and taking care of he alth will change in 2022.

Nutrition and wellness go online

Consultation with a dietitian via skype or zoom is nothing completely new. They could be found in the offer of many people a few years back. Same as classes with coaches. However, this was only a fledgling novelty, and since the pandemic broke out, the availability of dietary and coaching services over the Internet had simply exploded.

In 2022, this trend continues to do well. People love the convenience of online meetings. Without leaving home, without getting stuck in traffic jams, without wading through the city after work. Thanks to the transfer of consultations with a nutritionist to the virtual world, the availability of services has increased significantly. You don't have to limit yourself only to your city.

It is especially easier for people from small towns, because towns and villages lack nutrition specialists who keep up with the times. And live coach online trainings are much more motivating than repeatedly firing the same video on YouTube.

Home cooking

Home cooking was always good in Poland, but now we have started to treat it a bit differently. It is no longer just a meal preparation that you have to prepare if you don't want to go hungry. Cooking at home has become a pastime. Closing all our lives outside for a few months meant that we were forced to bind ourselves even more to our own kitchen. There was simply no way out.

It would seem that the closure of the gastronomy industry will make us run away from cooking at home, make us sick to the limit. For some people it was like that - at the beginning. Then, after the wave of enthusiasm for eating out, many of us missed having lunch from our own hands. Others were just learning to cook during the successive waves of the pandemic.

In the last two years of popularityonline culinary courses for both amateurs and professionals. We started to play with cooking, treat it as entertainment, as a way to spend time alone or in a group.

Most importantly, we missed being together. Tired of isolation, lack of meetings with family and friends, we began to strongly feel the need to gather around one table and show love with self-prepared food.

Life in traditional societies revolves around meals. Eating together is as obvious as breathing. In Poland, it is normal for everyone to eat separately and when they are comfortable. During lockdowns, quarantines and self-isolation, many Polish families had a chance to remember what it was like to sit down to eat together. And love food together again. The trend of cooking and dining together is doing very well.

"Sober curiosity" - "Curiosity of sobriety"

The "sober curiosity" movement is not the same as choosing to stay sober. It does not presume to give up alcohol altogether, but it focuses on consciously making decisions about drinking, avoiding alcohol, observing the impulses and circumstances that lead to drinking, i.e. curiosity. Curiosity about what drives us while drinking and curiosity about how sober different habitually associated drinking situations look like.

Many people choose to limit their alcohol intake also for he alth reasons - both for physical and mental he alth. Alcohol is a pro-inflammatory product and a depressant.

Polish culture and, in principle, Western culture did not allow for a long time to be sober in many social situations. Every occasion, every celebration, every Saturday night with friends is about drinking alcohol.

Often there is no house party without asking: "What do we drink?". Drinking alcohol has become so ordinary as to be thoughtless. Hence, more and more people wonder what it would be like without alcohol. Hence the "sober curiosity" - spending most of the time sober.

How many people start to quit drinking alcohol or limit its amount can be seen from the constantly expanding offer of alcohol-free beverages. 0% beers are already standard. More and more shops offer dealcoholised wines, prossecco and champagnes, liqueurs and ready-made drinks, such as Aperol Spritz without alcohol. Demand drives supply.

Less waste cuisine and no food waste

Note that in 2022 we are more focused on reducing unfavorable behavior than on the binary approach. Instead of thinking "great sucks", the satisfaction of taking steps reigns supremeachieve the goal.

That is why nowadays people talk about "less waste" in the kitchen, and not about "zero waste". It's easier to reduce food waste than to create a fully biodegradable kitchen. It is easier to minimize the use of plastic than to always have cloth bags for vegetables and glass cheese wrappers by weight with you.

A handful of facts about food waste? You're welcome. 1/3 of the world's food production goes to the trash. That's over a billion tons each year.

As much as 45% of produced vegetables and fruits are wasted. Close to a billion hungry people could be fed to only 1/4 of what Europe and the United States throw in the garbage. These numbers convince more and more of us to verify their shopping and culinary habits.

In 2022, we will recycle even more and dispose of even less. The phenomenon is of course also related to galloping inflation and rising food prices. We are starting to pay more attention to the quantities we buy and to make the best use of them.

In the spirit of not wasting food, we learn to process leftovers (you know that almost anything can be frozen or preserve?), We avoid throwing them away (there are at least a dozen different recipes for stale bread) and start sharing food! This is just something.

There are refrigerators in busy parts of large cities, in which everyone can put uneaten products (still fresh and not started) and everyone can use them. Apps for sharing food and buying for a fraction of the price before the restaurant closes are also becoming more and more dynamic. We're going in the right direction!

Body neutrality

Former body-positivity (in fact, it still is), and the body-neutrality grew out of it, and it will be a much stronger trend in the approach to the body in 2022 than body-positivity. But in order not to get lost, a few words of explanation.

Body positivity is a trend that emerged in opposition to the idealized image of the female body presented in the media. Always slim, always with no hair on his legs, no wrinkles, smooth, no cellulite and no shadows under the eyes.

In line with body positivity, social media was flooded with photos of imperfect bodies, and we finally started saying loudly that a woman's body does not look like it does on magazine covers and on billboards. This is all to increase the level of self-acceptance among women and to fight against the canons of appearance that are impossible for most to achieve.

Unfortunately, body positivity has gone too far into polarization. We have again come to the point where, instead of accepting all bodies as they are, we startedpoint out to the slim that they are thin, to women who put on makeup every day - that they lie to reality, and to those who want to lose weight - that they continue to submit to the pressure of patriarchy. Without thinking and asking ourselves if we have the right to comment. And according to body positivity, we have no right to comment on the appearance of any body, nor to differentiate between bodies.

There was a certain curve here, however. We split again, instead of showing and accepting diversity. We moved from not commenting at all to commenting on what is considered pretty by the canon. (I use the female form here on purpose, because the phenomenon and malicious comments mainly concern women - they are sent out into the world by women to other women). And yet the variety is both a belly with stretch marks and a sculpted belly at the gym. Every body deserves respect and deserves to be cared for.

The disagreement with focusing on the body and looking at a person through the prism of the body - whatever it is - has grown the body neutrality. Body neutrality focuses on feeling your body, not looking at it. So that the appearance (according to the canon or very far from it) does not become the center of attention.

Body neutrality encourages you to take care of your body, to respect and gratitude for the opportunities it gives us every day. To listen to the signals he gives and to fulfill his physical needs, to take care of his he alth. Eating, exercising, sleeping, resting, pleasuring - all these should be based on the body's needs and be good for the body. Nothing exempts us from taking care of he alth, not even self-acceptance in every field. Do you notice the relationship of the neutrality body with intuitive eating and mindfulness? These current fashionable trends go hand in hand.

Category:

Diets