Eating healthily is so hard, especially when there is bad food everywhere and even things that are advertised as healthy are often not. We all crave unhealthy food sometimes and even if we have the best intentions, a lot of people find that they still can’t lose weight. Sometimes, that might be because you aren’t exercising enough or you’re making a few basic bad decisions when it comes to food. However, weight gain is often caused by an unhealthy relationship with food in general. If you can learn to change your attitude toward food and approach it in a different way, you will find it a lot easier to stay healthy and start losing weight. These are some of the best ways to change your attitude toward food.
Stop Looking For A Quick Fix
The most common reason that people struggle to eat well is that they’re looking for an easy fix. If you look for advice on how to lose weight, you’ll be faced with so many fad diets but the truth is, they just don’t work. Even if they help you lose weight initially, they’re not sustainable and you’ll just put the weight back on. That’s why so many people are constantly gaining weight and losing it again in a cycle, but they can’t keep it off for good. If you’re ever going to lose weight and retain that healthy weight, you need to accept that there is no easy way out, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication and you’ll have to stick to it.
Instead of thinking, how can I lose lots of weight in the next month, you need to start thinking about long term changes that you can make to your lifestyle that will make you happier and healthier.
Stop Separating Taste And Health
One of the biggest misconceptions that people have about food is that taste and health are mutually exclusive. They think that all of the delicious food is unhealthy and if they want to eat healthy stuff, it’s not going to taste good, but that just isn’t true at all. There are plenty of delicious healthy foods out there that will help you to lose weight and they’ll taste great as well. People often struggle to eat well because they’re forcing themselves to eat things that they don’t enjoy. They might keep up with it for a few weeks but then they’ll just go back to eating the unhealthy food that they enjoyed before because they’re not satisfying their cravings for tasty food.
What you should be doing instead is finding healthy foods that you love and learning new recipes that you can cook with them. Once you realize that you can enjoy food and eat healthy at the same time, it’ll be a lot easier to lose weight.
Stop Comfort Eating
Comfort eating is one of the most unhealthy ways that people treat food. If you’re using food as a crutch to make yourself feel better when you’re down, you’ll never be able to lose weight effectively. Most of the time, people eat very unhealthy foods when they comfort eat but the problem is, they feel worse about their weight gain and that inspires more comfort eating. Breaking out of this vicious cycle can be tough but it’s vital if you’re ever going to lose weight effectively. Usually, there are more deep rooted issues that cause the comfort eating in the first place and it’s important that you deal with those first. Some people find that weight loss hypnosis works very well here because it can help them to break out of those behaviors and stop using food as a crutch by getting to the underlying issues. It’s also important that you learn to recognize when you’re comfort eating and try to find other ways to vent your frustrations rather than binging on unhealthy food.
Stop Feeling Guilty About Food
When people are trying to eat well, they often feel a lot of guilt around food. If they have a bar of chocolate, they convince themselves that they’ve undone all of their hard work and that’s when people start to give up. But one bump in the road doesn’t undo everything else that you’ve achieved and it’s important to remember that you’re still making progress. You also need to realize that putting unrealistic expectations on yourself isn’t going to work.
If you say that you’re never going to eat chocolate or cake again in your life, that’s just a lie. You will eat unhealthy food sometimes and that’s fine. If you’re eating well the majority of the time, the occasional bit of unhealthy food isn’t going to cause excessive weight gain. It’s all about balance. But when people guilt themselves into abstaining from unhealthy food entirely, they’re constantly craving those foods that they can’t have. Eventually, they’ll give in to those cravings and that’s when people start overeating.
It also creates an unhealthy relationship with food because it turns it into a punishment in some ways. Eating is no longer about enjoying good food, it’s about being told that you can’t eat the food that you love and you have to eat things that you don’t like.
Stop Feeling Like You Have To Clear Your Plate
Wasting food isn’t a good thing, but the idea that you always have to clear your plate just leads to excessive portion sizes. If you make a meal and you eat until you’re full up, but then you carry on because you’ve still got more on your plate, you’re going to gain weight. Why not just save what’s left and freeze it so you can have it another time? If you find that this is happening a lot, that’s an indication that your portion sizes are too big and you should just start making less food. Don’t just eat it because it’s there, otherwise, you’ll never be able to lose weight.
By changing your attitude toward food, you can build a healthy relationship with it and you’ll find it a lot easier to lose weight.