Eating healthy can be hard.
I spend countable minutes (hours?) in a day managing my food cravings and reminding myself to make good choices every time I pass a pizza shop. And if you’ve never been to New York City, you’ve got to understand – pizza shops are EVERYWHERE.
Funny thing about healthy eating is it’s not only about WHAT we eat. A lot of getting healthy and losing weight has to do with HOW we’re eating.
This right here is your healthy eating motivation in 7 simple habits. They’re necessary enough to help make or break our healthy eating and keep our healthy lifestyle goals on track. They also work together to get you to a place where healthy eating happens a little more easily.
6 simple but necessary habits for healthy eating success
Mindful eating
Does it sound hard? It’s not. Mindful eating is really straight forward and simple to do (even if it doesn’t feel easy). It’s the kind of thing that makes everything better once you get the hand of it.
One of the best things about mindful eating is how much it slows you down. I’m a FAST eater. I think I got it from my father, who could easily qualify as the world champion at inhaling a meal. Mindful eating makes sure this doesn’t happen. It forces you to actually NOTICE that you enjoy the food you’re eating.
This is mindful eating, quick and dirty. Without the fluff:
Before you take your first bite, look at and smell your food. Smile if it looks good, breath good and deep if it smells great. Once you start eating, put your fork (or spoon, or sandwich) down between bites. And then chew your food all the way down, the way we do when it’s the last bite of something delicious. After you swallow, pick up the fork and repeat.
A meal that took you 10 minutes to finish should now take you about 20 minutes.
Unplug and limit automatic multitasking during meals
So TV. I really like TV. I also really like to eat something delicious while I’m watching something really good. I’m ALSO a huge eat-on-the-run kind of girl (like in the car or walking down the street). Both of these things only lead to one outcome: eating too fast. And when I eat too fast, I usually eat too much.
Why? Because it takes at least 20 minutes for our bodies to realize how full it is. The slower we eat, the less often we’ll eat too much, without even knowing it. When we sit in front of the computer and eat our lunch, or have our dinner while we catch up on Netflix we risk forgetting about how we’re feeling while we focus on what we’re watching.
Are you starting to see the connecting with mindful eating? It’s GOOD, right?
Snack right
Mindless snacking. Man, this is a biggie. I know I’ll start off maybe a LITTLE hungry or just feeling like having a bite of a cookie the office just put out, and before you know it I’m 3 cookies in and can’t even remember what they tasted like.
When you snack (WHEN, not if) there are a few rules to follow that will save your waistline, EVERY time. First, keep your portions crystal clear. Know how much you’re going to eat, when you start eating. Don’t put the big bag on your lap and hope for the best.
Which brings us to number two. Keep snack portions in their own containers.
Once you’ve decided on your snack and you know how much you want to eat, put it in a whole new container. Put it on a separate napkin. Dirty up a brand new plate. Whatever it takes to keep you apart from everything outside of your portion size, you should do.
Lastly, do whatever you can to pick your snacks in advance. If you’ve already decided on what your snack will be and how much of it you’ll eat, you’re less likely to eat more than you set out to eat.
Related post: Snack better with this one essential hack
Stay hydrated
Drinking enough water can make or break us. When we’re dehydrated, we don’t just get thirsty. We also get hungry, so we eat more than we normally would. We also get hangry, and that can have us reaching for the snacks we don’t really need just to ease the stress.
On top of that, our bodies need to work so much harder to do things when it’s dehydrated. When you take that away or limit it, it’s harder to do what we’re supposed to be doing. Things like digestion and using the nutrients we feed our bodies in the first place, is way more difficult when we’re dehydrated.
Staying hydrated can happen in a lot of ways. You don’t have to stick to a plain glass of water to get it done. Soups, fruits and vegetables with high water contents, teas all work just fine.
Related post: 5 ways to make your water speak to you
Habit stacking
Have you heard of this?? A whole new world opened up to me when I discovered this. It also works almost immediately, which kind of changes everything. It was developed by a guy named S.J. Scott on the belief that we will create new habits more easily if we attached them to habits we already have.
The focus is on things that are easy to achieve, small wins that you can get done without a lot of extra effort.
So if you want (for example) to drink more water, you would drink a glass of water after every meal. Or drink a glass after you brush your teeth in the morning. The water habit gets stacked on top of the every day thing you’re doing already.
Maybe you want to have healthier snacks with smaller portions after dinner while you’re watching TV. Every night after dinner, you put a pre-portioned snack on the coffee table ready for the Netflix marathon. There are a hundred ways you can do habit stacking. And as long as you remember to give yourself big credit for those small wins, it’ll help a lot.
Keep a pantry stocked with good food
We can have the best intentions in the world. But at the end of the day, if we surround ourselves with temptation and crappy food, then we’re going to eat more crappy food. If we keep healthier foods around us, we’re more likely to eat more healthfully. Simple math.
Even on those days when every good habit you’ve been working on suddenly goes out the window, and you’re only interested in ice cream and bag of chips, the chance of OVER doing it is less likely if there are only so many options lying around looking sexy. Or if there’s only a small amount of those things in the first place.
I’ve also learned (the hard way) that you’ve got to keep quick food around, so you don’t feel the need to order out or run to the store. Keeping easy to make snacks around and foods that you can eat as is without any extra prep makes all the difference. I can’t tell you how many times my fridge stocked with things that need to get cooked got tossed aside for a Seamless order.
The easier you make it for yourself to eat well, the more often you’re going to eat well.
Related post: Pantry staples for easy healthy eating
There you have it. None of these are HARD to do. But simple doesn’t always mean easy. Keep going, and keep practicing. We’re all going to have a bad day and no one gets things perfect the first go round.
The idea is to keep the bigger picture always in the back of your mind. It’s not how today went, it’s how the week went.
Don’t worry! You’re doing great.