1. Focus on fueling your body, not weight loss. Your
number one focus should be your health. Weight loss will follow
naturally. When your aim is to fuel your body, you will notice the
benefits almost instantly as you, for example, sleep better, feel more energized, and suffer from less stress and mood swings.
2. Keep a food diary. This is your key tool. You
should start keeping it before you change your diet as it will really
highlight where you need to make changes.
3. Understand that changing your eating habits is a
good thing. See it as a positive thing you want to do because you
respect yourself enough, not a punishment you must suffer because you
hate your body and must improve it. There’s no greater show of self-love
than honoring your body with healthy, nutritious food that’s going to
keep it strong and healthy. See processed junk food as it really is–pure
rubbish that is going to make you lethargic, sick and overweight and
understand that you deserve so much better.
4. Educate yourself. Learn a little bit about basic
nutrition and understand the damaging effects of processed foods.
Healthy eating is very simple, eat unprocessed wholefoods, the closer to
their natural form the better, and avoid processed foods.
5. Learn to read food labels. Never trust food
packaging. Read the small print at the back, particularly the list of
ingredients and avoid anything that contains added sugar or other
additives.
6. Make small changes, one at a time. Depending on
your current diet, take two or three issues you want to address each
week. For example, start with making sure you have a healthy breakfast
every day. When you’re in a good routine with that, change your snacks,
then work on adding more green veg into your diet and so on. Don’t try
to make all changes at once. You’ll only be setting yourself up for
failure. Think long term, if you’re patient now and take it slow, think
how different your life will be in a year?
7. Change your attitude and get excited. A positive
attitude is a key to success in anything so get excited about the new
journey ahead of you. Spend some time researching new recipes and
ingredients. Healthy eating doesn’t have to be boring or bland, you can
still enjoy food. The internet is full of inspiration for delicious
healthy recipes. Instagram and Interest are great places for finding
these. Try new things like some raw food or vegan desserts that can be
delicious and nutritious.
8. Allow yourself some treats. It is important to
allow yourself some treats every now and then. A little piece of cake is
not going to do any damage if the rest of the time your diet is
healthy. Never call treats a ‘cheat meal’ and always enjoy them, guilt
free.
9. Fix your relationship with food. This is the key.
Once you have healthy relationship with food, you won’t need much
willpower to eat healthily and you’ll be able to enjoy some treats
without it leading to a huge binge. Signs of unhealthy relationship with
food include; you often eat for emotional reasons (boredom, anger,
depression, stress), you always view food in terms of weight and see
some foods as good and others as bad, you feel you need to use a lot of
willpower to control yourself around food and you often feel guilty for
eating something wrong.
10. Change your self-talk. Be nicer to yourself.
Stop focusing on the things you should and could do better and focus on
the things you’re doing well. Every day, list five things you did well
today. Observe your self-talk and always ask yourself, ‘Would I say this
to a friend?’ If the answer is no, then you sure shouldn’t say it to
yourself. You will notice that as you start being nice to yourself, as
you start focusing on the things you do well, however small and start
respecting yourself more, you’ll naturally start eating better too,
whereas constantly criticizing yourself leads to more emotional eating
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