Is it possible to develop healthy eating habits that you can stick to over a lifetime? Read on to find out…
Warning: If you follow the 1 tip that I will share, you’ll never need any diet program again. This one tip completely turns on its head the entire weight loss industry. There goes Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers and all of them. You won’t need them anymore because you’ve developed your own healthy eating habits.
People constantly ask me how I’ve been able to develop my healthy eating habits. You can read my diet page or the about me page to learn how I had a huge addiction to processed and refined carbohydrates my whole life. White flour products were my staple. Do you have this problem? Is eating a healthy meal something that you struggle with?
Before I begin my sermon on the diet chart that I follow, I need to inform that everyone has a different immune system compared to others so the eating habits may vary from person to person depending on the metabolism factor of the body so at the outset, what I see as healthy may not be good for a fat individual but regular exercise and yoga can do wonders, which you can learn more about through Yoga burn review online.
Healthy Eating Habits: Is It Possible To Lose Weight While Increasing Calories? Find Out Here.
In this article about healthy eating habits, I’m going to give you some tips about how to make better food choices as somebody who’s struggled with extreme food addiction. I’ve never been obese, overweight or even fat, but I have struggled with very intense food cravings and have been able to change my diet and life 100% by following 1 simple tip. I’ll reveal this tip later.
My goal in this article is not to try to convince you to eat a certain way, it’s simply to help you make healthy eating habits easier.
According to dictionary.com a habit is: an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary: the habit of looking both ways before crossing the street.
Notice how healthy eating habits are aquired or learned. We grew up learning unhealthy eating habits. Now it’s time to learn the habitual nature of healthy eating habits. First you must unlearn what you learned as a kid growing up. What did you learn then? You learned to eat your meals based on taste and flavor and to follow your cravings because there were no consequences to unhealthy eating habits.
Now that you’re an adult, you need to eat for nutrition. You need to eat for nutrients, vitamins and minerals. You can no longer eat just because something is sweet, savory or sour. I call it eating with intention.
The next time you eat that twinky, ask yourself, these questions:
- How is the food going to affect me?
- Where is this food taking me?
- What kind of impact does the company that “manufactures this food” have on the earth around me?
You see, we are like a cliff with waves crashing against it. You may not have understood the question above about where this food is taking you. But food takes us places, as do herbs and plant medicines. All food takes us somewhere. It is my contention that a Twinky will take you somewhere radically different than a salad, piece of fruit or a grass fed piece of bison. Two foods (even though a Twinky can’t really be considered a food), two places. In my best guess, those two places might be a trail on the side of a mountain vs a hospitle bed with a priest reading you the last rites because you have stage 4 cancer.
Trust me, you’re not going to be lifting any weights or working out when you in a hospital bed dying of cancer.
It’s your choice in the moment.
If you want the same thing everybody else has, just do what everybody else is doing. If you want something different, then you have to do something radically different on a daily basis.
Use food as a tool to reshape yourself. Start working on creating healthy eating habits now.
Back to the cliff analogy. As the waves of the ocean slam up against that cliff, it can completely reshape and transform the form and shape of that cliff. But from one day to the next you notice no difference. After 30 or 40 years you’ll start to see big changes. Food is like that. What better way to build and develop daily disciplines than through the use of food? Developing healthy eating habits is a life long process that is going to take you either to that hospital bed or hiking the side of a mountain. When you’re 75, where do you want to end up? If you want to be hiking and enjoying life, now is the time to start developing healthy eating habits.
How long does it take a habit to form?
Creating new habits can vary greatly bewtween people. Some people say 3 weeks or 21 days, some people say 100 days or even 66 days. The answer is going to depend on you. How do you know when you’ve creating healthy eating habits? The answer is when you can say that you’re no longer addicted to whatever food it was you were addicted to.
If you’re a carnivore and love meat, that’s okay. If you’re a raw foodist like I am (who also eats meat and animal products), that’s okay too. Perhaps you’re a vegetarian, that’s okay too. Your diet doesn’t matter here, what matters is following the tip I’m going to be talking about and the other essential step is to value yourself and to love yourself enough to want to make a change.
You see people especially in the bodybuilding, fitness and weightlifting worlds, only seem to be focused on outer changes. If you’re going to make healthy eating habits a life long journey, your motivation must and cannot be coming from something on the external. You have to value yourself more than that to really make healthy eating habits something you can stick to for the long term.
You must love yourself enough to want to have longevity, vitality and energy when you’re older. Losing 10 pounds in 2 weeks ain’t gonna cut it.
So now that you value yourelf and want to honor this temple we call a human body, let’s discuss what this tip was that changed my life forever. Developing healthy eating habits was easy for me after following this one profound yet simple food choice.
Are you now wondering what this tip is and how you can easily develop heatlhy eating habits? I bet you are.
So here she goes….
Focus all your energy on addition instead of subtraction.
There you have it. If you stick to this one dietary principle your whole life, you’ll be amazed at what your diet will look like 5 years from now.
Pick a bunch of foods and focus on adding 1 food into your daily life that you’re going to eat. It doesn’t matter when you eat it either. And it also doesn’t matter what your current diet is.
Just as an example let’s use a salad. No matter what you’re eating each day, just add a salad into it. You could be eating the worst food ever. Don’t worry about that. You’re not concerned with quick changes or whether or not you fit into your skinny jeans. You will see physical changes, trust me. But they will pale in comparison to the emotional and mental changes you will notice.
Whatever you do, do not let a day go by where you have not had your salad. Eat all the other food you want but do not neglect that salad. Remember you pick the salad so it can be anything you want. Continue with this one discipline until it becomes second nature. Then pick another food and add it into your diet and complete that discipline for a few weeks or months.
So pretty soon after 6 months you’ll notice a few things. You will no longer crave the bad foods as much. You’ll lose weight and feel healthier. You’ll sleep better and feel more rested. You will not yo yo diet. And the biggest change of all, you’ll start to actually crave the foods that are good for you. Think it’s not possible? I used this same approach. I care about my body way too much to eat french fries or twinkies. Oh and by the way, you’ll lose tons of weight and look sexy too, if that’s the sort of thing you’re into.
Another reason why I like focusing on adding foods in, rather than eliminating foods is because it doesn’t focus on counting calories, fat content, sugar content or it doesn’t follow any specific diet plan. You can be a meat eater, a person who loves starchy foods or anything. This approach to health is long term. It’s main aim is to use food as the primary daily mechanism to reshape your habits so you start developing healthy eating habits easily.
Don’t get me wrong, all of the negative things I mentioned above DO matter. But our focus is developing healthy eating habits, not physical changes. They will come and later on, when you’re more in control of your diet you can start to be concerned with sugar intake, fat content etc. But for now focus soley on the daily discipline of adding healthy food into your diet. Worry about the other crap later.
Healthy Eating Habits: Is It Possible To Lose Weight While Increasing Calories? Find Out Here.
By not focusing on removing “bad” food, you’re able to manage cravings and counteract the yo yo dieting affect. Food is just a tool to start to reshape your cliff.
And after 6 months you’ve got about 5 or 6 healthy foods you’re doing each day and you don’t have room enough for the fatty or fried foods.
The good food naturally crowds out the bad foods. Your stomach can only hold so much and the bad foods will slowly start to drop away cause you don’t have enough room for them any more.
Does this sound a bit more natural to you than always fighting food cravings your whole life?
So you see healthy eating habits are something that takes years to change. But if you start slow, and focus on you on the inside rather than the outside, you’ll start to notice some amazing changes in your body.