Californians are known for being fit and active not just across America, but around the world. California is internationally renowned for plastering billboards with the most attractive people sporting the fittest bodies imaginable. And it would seem that California will not relinquish this distinction willingly anytime soon.
The issue facing a lot of people who strive for these aesthetic ideals is that eating healthy and leading a healthy lifestyle in general is getting very difficult for most people, especially with the hectic nature of 21st century urban life. Many who would more than gladly take care of their bodies are saddened when they realize that it is something their schedules can ill afford.
With all solvable problems come an innovative solution. If one of the main impediments of healthy living is the time it takes to prepare and cook a meal, it would sensibly follow that a solution that reduces this activity will receive plenty of attention as well as loyal business.
Enter the World of Meal Prep Kits
The phenomenon of meal prep kits, especially low carb meal kits, is novel but increasingly popular one. The basic idea is that you will subscribe to a meal kit delivery service. You will be asked to make a meal selection and enter your preferences and allow the delivery service to sensibly space out the different meals you have selected.
Depending on how frequent your orders are, the meal prep service will deliver meals right to your doorstep on a frequent basis. All that is required of you is to cook the meal. Your macronutrients will be neatly laid out in meal sized portions along with any seasonings required of that particular dish, again in meal sized portions.
There will be a helpful instruction manual that comes along with the meal that will give you step by step directions on how to cook your freshly delivered meal. After no more than about 20 or 30 minutes of cooking, your meal will be ripely ready for consumption.
Many meal kit delivery services have specialized to cater to certain dietary restrictions and preferences. Some services cater to the broad market by offering the full range of regular meals, others cater to vegetarian diets, some cater to people with gluten restriction, and still others cater to the Atkins diet aficionados.
All told, meal kit services are seeing a rapid rise in popularity that, over the coming years, will almost certainly see an increase in market size as well as an increased ability to specialize even further. If health consciousness continues this upward trend it has been sustaining for quite some time, it looks like the meal kit delivery companies will have no choice but to ride this wave.
Fitting the Californian Lifestyle
The Californian diet, as it is currently constituted, places emphasis on minimizing carbohydrate consumption and using protein sources to make up for the caloric shortfall. This is quite a change from previous decades, when the food pyramid dictated a near abandonment of fats and oils in exchange for high carbohydrate meals.
This has been seen by many who pay attention to health and diet research findings as now widely misguided, with this current modification being shown in may studies to be the optimal way of eating. As such, Californians, who pride themselves as paragons of health and fitness for the rest of America and indeed the world to follow, have adjusted their eating habits accordingly.
With this mad dash to low carbs and high protein, meal delivery services have certainly taken notice, doling out new selections seemingly every week that cater to this current diet obsession. Meals packed with lean meat and other healthy proteins but scantly much else are flying off the virtual shelves at these websites. Indeed, many meal kit services can hardly keep up with the volume of orders.
Just A Passing Fad, Or the Dawn of a New Era?
Many of those who study lifestyle trends believe this current craze to be just another footnote in the pages of modern cultural history. They believe this too shall pass as soon as new research begins to contradict the orthodoxy rather than reinforce it.
On the other hand, there are some others yet who believe this new trend to be properly supported by objective science previous trends could never have hoped to claim. These watchers believe that this is indeed the start of a new paradigm in lifestyle choice and will be here to stay for the foreseeable future.
As with many such phenomena, only time can tell which side of the argument will truly prevail. What can be counted on though, is that whichever side wins out, the Californians will be the ones blazing the trail for the rest of us to follow, regardless of whether we admire or detest that fact.
The issue of what to eat and what not to eat is indeed one of the pressing questions of our time. In a world of increasing affluence, more people around the world will be increasingly enthralled by lifestyle issues such as this, with seemingly no end in sight, for better or worse.
–