Last week we looked at which habits were making you fat. If you did the exercise you will now have more information about what personal eating habits you have, which are not good for you or your weight loss. Perhaps you found out that you were a Random eater, a Snack Attacker or a Supersizer; or maybe you had a mixture of these bad eating habits.
As promised, in this blog I want to share with you how to transform your bad eating habits, so that you can make changes, which will enable you to lose weight.
So here is the “changing eating habits” success process:
1) Ascertain what your current habits and behaviour are around food. – This is what you would have done after last week’s blog!
2) Work out which habits are not helping you.
3) Tweak those habits into better habits that will support you in losing weight. Continue to repeat the new positive behaviours until these become your new healthy eating habits.
It has been suggested that it takes between 20 – 40 repetitions of a new behaviour to transform it into a new habit!
TAKE ACTION:
So now you have a list of your personal eating habits which are not supporting your weight loss, I want you to choose one bad habit to work on first. So maybe it’s always eating a sweet pudding after dinner. Write down how you could change this habit for the better, here are some ideas:
– get up and wash up after dinner and give your body a chance to digest the food you have eaten
– swap the sweet pudding for a piece of fruit
– choose a healthier option for a pudding like a low calorie yoghurt, jelly or something less fattening
-decide that you will have a pudding after dinner maybe only twice per week, decide which nights and stick to it
– load your plate for dinner with more veggies and healthy food to see if you still fancy a pudding or have room for a pudding afterwards
– change the portion size of what you are eating. Would a much smaller portion satisfy you?
1) Now choose one of your new behaviour options and put that into practise for the next few days and see how you get on. If that doesn’t feel right, try another option until you find a way forward that changes this habit into a more healthy behaviour.
2) Repeat this process with the remainder of your unhealthy eating habits. Try one a week until you have got rid of them all. How many weeks would that take. Work it out and plan your course of action.
As you work through making these healthy changes, your weight will start to change too. Remember that you have spent a lifetime, using these old negative habits, so a few weeks of working on transforming them into better, more healthy habits is a short time in comparison! And think of the bonus: if you transform your habits into new healthier habits, you are not going to have to diet anymore and you will start to love what you see when you look in the mirror!