You are what you constantly do. Building healthy habits is less about willpower, or hard work, effort or grit than it is about the environment. Environment shapes behavior. Over the long run, your personal habits are controlled by your environment. In many instances, the environment is more important to your habits than all the willpower in the world. So if you are considering building healthy habits, you have to think in terms of optimising your environment and that starts with designing a healthy kitchen.
A healthy kitchen design can help automate good health decisions. A study by Brian Wansink of Cornell University found that people reduce their food ingredients intake by 22% by simply changing from 12-inch dinner plates to 10-inch plates.
A healthy kitchen design can also get good habits into the flow of your everyday behaviors. For instance, a big counter with ample space for all your kitchen utensils, will make it easier to prepare meals, rather than going for take-outs. This is because the space that the counter provides makes it easier to organize your kitchen space, removing the headache of trying to figure out where to put containers and fit in all the utensils are needed when cooking.
FInally, a healthy kitchen design helps remove negative influences. For example, foods placed at eye level are purchased and eaten with greater frequency than foods outside of eye level.
The most important design question is whether the kitchen design allows for ease of use. If it does, then it will be easy to integrate using the kitchen into normal behaviors, and if the design is health-focused, it will be that much easier to integrate good eating habits into your life.
Space is one of the easiest ways that designers can encourage use. The bigger the space or sense of space, the more easily people can circulate throughout the kitchen. Making all the parts of the kitchen easily accessible is essential to encouraging use of that kitchen. That can mean having an island in the kitchen, or, having the cleaning, cooking and cooling station in a triangle that is away from the traffic going through the kitchen. It may mean having a pastry center near the oven to make baking that much easier.
This is why open-plan kitchens have become so popular. Open kitchen layouts make it easier for traffic to circulate through the kitchen and make all the functional elements of the kitchen easily accessible. They allow for the most intricate food preparation because preparing food is not constantly impeded and discouraged by some obstacle. Because of the ease of use of an open-plan kitchen, it is easier to imagine and get round to preparing healthy food, rather than just eating the easiest, and usually least healthy option.
Legacy Quartz Countertops can be customized according to your cooking style. For example, many people have opted for a galley sink because it can be used to prepare, serve, entertain, and clean up all in one place. Counters can also be optimized by incorporating drying racks, cutting boards and other such sections, to make your food preparation more efficient and perhaps even more appealing.
Learn more about the effect of location and environment on one’s mental health, on this website: www.herbalonlinedenature.com