#149 How To Successfully Transition To Healthy Eating

This is my very first blog post of 2016! Hope you have all been enjoying my blog posts so far. To start off the year, I thought I would provide you all with some ways to make healthy eating a part of your daily life this year. Here we go!

Don’t Think Of It As A Diet

No one ever wants to be on a “diet.” Diets make you think that you need to deprive yourself of all of the food you like, and is often more of a temporary change. Afterward your diet, you can go back to eating “normal” again, and often you end up back in bad habits and gaining back all the weight you lost on your diet.

So cut out the word diet and instead focus on changing to healthier eating habits. You should never have to diet again yay!

Make Small Changes

Rather cutting out every single little bad food that you ever eat all at once, make some small changes. Identify your 3 worst habits, whether that be not cooking dinner or lunch and relying on takeaway, eating chocolate every afternoon, not drinking enough water, not eating green vegetables, etc. Just pick what you think are your worst 3 habits.

In the first few weeks, just aim to tackle one of these. Sure you’re not going to be perfect but that’s OK. Do your best. After a few weeks of sticking to your new healthy habit, it will become much easier! You won’t even have to think about it, it will be coming a habit without you even realizing it.

Once you have fixed one of these bad habits, start on the next one, and so on. It may take time, but that’s OK. It’s not a quick fix; you are genuinely trying to change so that you have a healthier lifestyle for the rest of your entire life. You’ve got all the time in the world so don’t worry about how quickly you’re making change.

Can I Ever Eat Junk Food Again?

Of course you can! But maybe just not as often. I think I would go crazy if I was never allowed to eat junk food. The more you deprive yourself of something, the more you want it. So allow yourself to eat some junk food, but just try to limit to once or twice per week.

I like to allow myself to be more flexible with what I eat when I’m out with friends or family. I do try to pick healthy options, but if we’re out for dinner and everyone’s getting dessert, I’m going to get dessert. 

What If I Fall Off The Bandwagon? 

So you ate some cake at the work morning tea. Not a big deal! This doesn’t mean that you’ve ruined the day and can go and have some chocolate for afternoon tea and then fast food for dinner, and then start again tomorrow. Don’t think of it that way. You’re allowed to eat junk food, remember? You haven’t ruined anything. You’re aiming to have a healthy lifestyle but that includes having balance and allowing yourself to eat junk food occasionally.

It Gets Easier, I Promise!

When you start out, everything seems really hard. And this is why I recommend starting out with just one bad habit at a time. You don’t need to make things super difficult for yourself.

Every day that you succeed with these healthy habits, it becomes easier and easier. Having a piece of cake doesn’t feel like a big deal. Saying no to pizza and making yourself a stir-fry instead gets easier. Drinking 2L of water per day gets easier. You start to not overthink things and it eventually becomes part of your lifestyle. It may take you a year or so to get there, but it is worth it!