Aug 3, 2009
How To Change Your Eating Habits
Dieting is hard. It’s a tough committment that many people can’t make. However, if you ever want to live healthy and have good physique, you might want to start changing your eating habits right now. Problem is that it’s easier said than done.
When I started changing my diet, it was tough man. Real tough. Especially living on an university campus, finding healthy food was difficult and often expensive (or so I thought). I ate nothing but chinese food, burgers, fries, pizza, pasta and all that shit daily.
The more I kept eating this way, the shittier I started to feel in general. I finally stepped up and got my diet in check.
Immediately change your portions.
This is something you can do right now. As in, this instance. You don’t need to eat until your stomach can’t hold anything more. Remember, the size of your stomach is about the size of your fist. Try not to expand it any further.
Eat until you’re satisfied, not until you’re full. If anything, drink more water so you feel full quicker. It’s gonna suck but within the first 3-4 days, you’ll adjust.
Make a slow transition.
Face it, unless you have the willpower of a buddhist monk, chances are you’ll utterly fail if you make an abrupt transition to eating healthy. That’s why you should start slow and take it one step at a time. I started eating lettuce in my burgers (how insignificant), then slowly started to eat broccoli.
Eventually I started to drink water exclusively instead of soda and juice, and from then on I ended up on a balanced diet of good stuff. You just have to eliminate and replace things little by little until it just becomes habit.
Get an enforcer.
Eating well in one meal is easy but you have to keep it up. The temptation to eat poorly is irresistible and we break our habits often. On campus, my roommate was my enforcer. He made sure that I wouldn’t slip since I had a tendency to do so.
There were so many times that I’d try to sneak in a donut or large fries and he’d snatch it away from me. I won’t lie, I got into a ton of confrontations with him whenever he just threw away my food infront of me. A month or so later, I was fairly glad he did.
When we can’t do something ourselves, it’s okay to ask somebody for help.
Imagine the results.
What would you look like 4 waist sizes down? What about with 6 packs or more? Imagining the results have been a great source of inspiration for me. What could be the benefits be if you started to eat healthy and getting fit? More energy? Girls noticing you more?
Think of all the possible benefits and concentrate on them. You’ll grit and bear it and force your way through your diet for a while until it becomes habitual. Plus, when you start to see results, they’ll inspire you to keep on going.
After having lost 25 pounds, here’s my biggest set back:
It wasn’t the break in diet or the missed day in exercising, it was getting back into it. A bad meal doesn’t hurt as much as the negativity you take it to be, which actually makes it harder for you to get into the positive mindset you need to be in to improve yourself.
Bottom line: When you screw up, admit it, accept it, and move past it.
You know, I’ve honestly never thought of it the way Paul explained: “A bad meal doesn’t hurt as much as the negativity you take it to be, which actually makes it harder for you to get into the positive mindset you need to be in to improve yourself.”
It is very true that in adding the negative connotation to bad eating whilst in a diet causes a very dramatic mental strain (speaking for myself really) when you do give in the temptation. I’ve always made it such an evil to myself, and perhaps that really does hold back from the optimism you need to succeed at strict diets. Thanks for the perspective Paul, I’ve never truly stepped back an observed it myself, and this is something I think is important to correct in my mental approach to the “diet”
Hmm, I never thought of it that way. You two bring up excellent points!!
I agree, a bad meal doesn’t hurt, but if you’re in the state of mind that “eh, it’s not a big deal, I won’t do it again”, thing is that YOU WILL do it again. Rather, you’ll do it often. You never want to be in that comfort zone.
I used to have that mentality to but I realized that the only way to get results is to stick to the program. If I go way out of line, I have to remind myself why I shouldn’t have. It’s not really beating yourself up, but keeping yourself in line.
I don’t let the fear and guilt bog me down. In fact, my motivation is to keep it up so I WONT have to feel guilty. I used to be 240 pounds (currently 175) and the only way I made such a transformation within a short time span (about 5-6 months), is that I was serious about sticking to my plan.
Yes, you should be critical about yourself but not to a point where you aren’t killing any optimistic feeling that you have. Being overly critical will only hurt yourself.