How to make it easier to live and eat healthier
Establishing good and healthy habits take time and effort. Your willpower will be put to the test but the reward if you succeed is amazing. See how you can make it easier to eat healthier!
Many desires a healthier life. We go to sleep at night thinking we are going to make good, healthy decisions the following day. Tomorrow is the day to start a better life! We wake up, make ourselves a healthy breakfast and feel good about the great start of the day. Then life happens. It gets hectic at work, lunch is delayed, and in the cafeteria, you find all of these tempting cakes and sweets. It isn’t easy to eat healthier when life is against us. Hence, changing or establishing healthier habits is something that happens over time.
Behavior change takes time
Some habits are easier to establish than others. It feels more challenging to create healthy habits for exercise and diet than it is to fall into the habit of picking just a tiny chocolate with you on the way to checkout. It’s easy to give in to the temptation of having just one more piece of chocolate. Especially compared to having chocolate only at Saturdays. Behavior change takes time and establishing healthy habits often takes more time and effort than establishing poor habits. Why is that?
Mankind, like so many other species, is lazy by nature. It doesn’t necessarily mean we all just want to lay on the couch eating chips and watching Netflix. It simply means we are predisposed to prefer simple solutions. The simple takes less energy and focus and that’s goodie for the human mind. Accordingly, the conscious mind wants to and is prepared to make healthy, good decisions, but gets overwritten by our subconsciousness that lets us give in for the simple solutions.
Reason vs. emotions
Nobody who has been in a situation where the hunger is overwhelming and the mood hits the floor accordingly thinks it is easier to go home to make a proper, nutritious meal compared to just pick something ready-made on the way. We know the homemade, nutritious meal is the absolutely best choice and many of us wholeheartedly wants to eat healthier, giving motivation to choose the homemade option.
But we also know it will take more time and demand more effort than it does to just pick a ready-made meal and silence the hunger immediately. Your brain is programmed to crave something sweet because sweets often are packed with energy and energy drives us forward. In other words, you don’t just have to fight the increasingly loud rumbling in your stomach. You also have to fight your own brain in order to resist the simplest solution that won’t serve you good over time.
You make about 200 food related decisions every day
Breakfast, lunch, dinner, evening snack. Each of them consisting of several components, such as whether you should choose oatmeal or bread for breakfast. Berries as topping for your oatmeal or butter vs. mayonnaise for your bread. The number of choices quickly adds up during the day and most of them aren’t even conscious. Be base a whole lot of our decisions upon instinct and automation. These choices are often made purely from habits. The habits may be good or bad, conscious or unconscious. Common for all of them is the fact that they are there, and they affect the choices we make day after day.
It is amongst the so-called automated or instinctive choices that you can make the greatest difference when it comes to live and eat healthier. Do you notice that you keep picking a piece of chocolate every time you go to the store hungry? You will stand a greater chance of avoiding it just by thinking of it. Perhaps is it not enough to just be aware of it. Then it might help to walk a different route on your way to checkout?
The grocery stores know their tricks
Sweets and easy solutions aren’t randomly placed in a store. The consumer psychology behind the layout of a grocery store doesn’t leave anything to coincidences. Just notice whether it is a chocolate, energy bar or similar or fruits and vegetables that is the last thing you pass before getting to the cashier. The limit of buying a cinnamon swirl or some chips would be much higher if it was placed in the far away corner. If it did, you would have to make a conscious decision that “today I am going to buy a cinnamon swirl” and then walked all the way over to pick it up, just as you do to get milk and butter.
Simple tricks to eat healthier
- Be conscious of your food decisions
- Focus on the long run over short-term rewards
- Create strategies for demanding situations
Consciousness, focus and strategy
The conscious food decisions can make a huge difference in short time. By consciously avoiding soda for every day’s, or choosing a small Mocca over a big one, you may achieve great results in short time. Avoid picking that chocolate even though you are hungry when walking through the store. If you must have something, choose a portion of unsalted nuts instead of the sweet and sugar-filled chocolate. That way you will be far ahead to eat healthier already.
Focusing on the long run let you concentrate on the benefits ahead in time instead of the short-term rewards most unhealthy decisions give. You will achieve greater rewards over time by making good, healthy food-related decisions in terms of better health and a stronger body. The challenge lays in the fact that we get the reward so much faster when giving in for the brain’s desire to choose the simplest solution. When you eat chocolate, the reward system in your brain is triggered immediately. Therefore, it is no wonder why we give in for temptations. The solution is to be aware of it. Find out which situations forces you to make the worst decisions, and consciously make a change. That way it will be easier to eat healthier too.
By having strategies for demanding situations, you will be even more aware of when and where the bad habits take place. Is it so that you always give in for the temptation of chocolate because you enter the store hungry? Then simply change it. Have a banana or a yogurt before going shopping. If the cravings are so big you just can’t handle it? Make yourself a deal of eating a healthy dinner first and then treating yourself with a piece of chocolate to the coffee afterwards.