Healthy Eating: A Lifestyle Change

Forget everything you know about dieting. Anyone who expects to go on a diet for a few months, and then go back to their old ways of eating and still keep the weight off is living in a fantasy world. There's a reason why people often gain back the weight they lose, and more often than not that reason is a return to old, familiar habits.

I want you to embrace change, because if you want to eat healthy you will have to change your dietary habits. And not just for a month, two, or three, but for life. You need to seriously consider if that's a decision you want to make and stick to, because if you decide to eat healthy and then decide not to, you've only wasted your own time. A few months of healthy eating will not help you become healthy; in fact it will hardly put a dent into an unhealthy lifestyle.

There are a few tips and tricks to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, because I'll be the first to admit it isn't easy to pass up delicious baked goods.

1. Don't buy anything unhealthy - If there's something unhealthy in your house, it's ridiculously tempting to eat. However, in the grocery store, you can always say to yourself, "I want it, but I don't need it and it's not worth the money". This rationalizing has made me put things back on the shelf more often than not.

2. Instant gratification - Before eating anything you know you shouldn't, ask yourself how eating this will feel when you're eating it, five minutes after you've eaten it, a few hours after you've eaten it, and a year after you've eaten it (especially important in preventing weight gain for the long-term). Then decide if it is important for you to feel instant-gratification weighed against the negative way you'll feel for much longer.

3. The nutrition approach - Ask yourself what nutritional benefit will the food give me? If it won't give you any, determine why you're eating the food. Some eat for pleasure and some eat because they're bored. Based on why you're eating, determine what foods will be best for that reason (pleasure = cookies or brownies, boredom = chips, pretzels, and other snack foods) and then follow tip number one and do not buy those foods. If you eat when you're bored, but you have no snacks to eat, you will gradually break that habit; the same goes for pleasure eating. Instead of eating for pleasure, exercise for pleasure and then when you want that pleasure-fix, you'll work out instead of eating unhealthy foods.

Eat healthy, stay happy!

-Ben