MiniTip X: Break Cooking Up

TL;DR

When you are cooking, listen to your body and take breaks as needed. Separate cooking into its individual parts: get ingredients, get measuring cups & spoons, 1st step, 2nd step, etc. After each, you may be able to take a break. Take it if you need it.

Take a picture of yourself or whatever you are doing while you break up cooking while cooking and share it with me on Facebook or twitter at @ill_chef

Tip Expanded

The worst thing anyone can do is ignore their body. With every sense we have, our body is trying to tell us something. Pain, pleasure, all of those things are our body trying to communicate something to us. Our job is to try and figure out what it is saying and give it what it needs.

So if you know that pain is coming on after you gather all of the ingredients, take a break. Sure, some of the ingredients may come from the fridge, but a few minute break will be better in the long run than pushing through it and then needing a week or more to recover.

Break the act of cooking into smaller parts:

1. Gather the ingredients
2. Gather the measuring spoons
3. Start with step 1
4. Step 2

Assess how your body is doing after each of these parts and take breaks as needed. Sometimes it won’t work because everything is time sensitive. Stove recipes are usually really time sensitive since you don’t want it to burn. But one thing you could do is turn down the heat if you need a break. It may mess up some stuff, but again, it’s better to take a break than not be able to finish because the pain gets worse and worse.

Another really important, if not the most important, is to learn your body’s signals. What is your body trying to communicate to you.

What it looks like in action

When cooking, I often start having severe pain in my back. There are two kinds of pain, one is just an achy pain, the other feels like stabbing needles. I know roughly what each one means and how to relieve it. I know that the stabbing needles is that I am getting overheated and need to cool down somehow. I get overheated very easily because I have anhidrosis, meaning I don’t sweat. The back achy pain is just that I’m in a position that my body does not appreciate.

So, the stabbing needles, cool down in front of a fan or away from the heat source if I am standing over a stove. For the achy, I use a slow yoga moveset to stretch out my back. I got the moveset from when I first started getting sick when I signed up for DDP Yoga (The first 10 seconds of the video below). I don’t do the screaming because I don’t like screaming when cooking since that would probably give my parents a heart attack since screaming coming from the kitchen does not bode well.

I just spend a few seconds in each position trying to breathe and move on to the next position slowly, listening to my body. I can do this in the kitchen and it helps with my back pain.

So, find things that work for you. They may be weird, they may be normal, find things that work for your body.

Call to Action

This week, make something and break it into small parts. Listen to your body throughout the cooking process and take breaks as needed. Break the cooking process down so you can take breaks, so that’s why I call it break cooking. Okay, maybe that doesn’t really make sense, but still.

Take a picture of yourself or whatever you are doing while you break up cooking while cooking and share it with me on Facebook or twitter at @ill_chef