Healthy eating sabotage.

Healthy Eating

You have made the decision and it’s time to lose weight. You are excited about your mission and this time you are prepared and ready for action.

You are armed with recipes and calorie counters and your exercise regime is under control. You even have tips and tricks for dinning out on special occasions or when you are hanging out with friends.

Healthy Eating sabotage

But you hit a few road blocks that want to sabotage your mission. What do we do?

We need to arm ourselves. These tactics will help overcome obstacles navigating you around this minefield and get you back on track.

Healthy eating tactics

1.       Hoarding calories.

Counting your calories does lead to weight loss but don’t make the mistake of skipping meals and saving up your calories for the end of day, in one supersize meal. This can make you go erratic. Your hunger hormones ‘Ghrelin’ will signal you’re starving and your brain will move in food troops to rescue you, making you consume more food than intended. However, by eating three main meals daily with the same number of calories will keep you on track and rebalance your day, so you don’t set yourself up for an evening of binge eating.

2.       Eating sporadically.

Grazing throughout the day may contribute to weight gain. However, when you set a routine and stay on task, you are more likely to burn more calories when eating than if the meal was unplanned. This is because planning meals requires you to be more organised, you know exactly what you are going to eat and how much. Whereas, when you are grazing who knows where the food and its motives will take you, eating little bits here and there may turn into mindless eating and this is where you get unstuck and the calories add up.

Decide on how many times a day you may need to consume food and stick to the schedule. Also by keeping a food diary or record may help you by indicating food patterns and trends and listening to your body’s internal hunger cues.

3.    Portions out of control.

3.    Portions out of control.

Just because a food is healthy does not mean you can eat as much as you like. All food items healthy or not contain calories and when you consume too much of a good thing it can still lead to weight gain. A hand full of nuts, for example can add up to 200 or more calories and items such as cereals and dried fruits can leave you dizzy with extra kilojoules. So be more conscious of how many calories a food contains, such as ½ cup of cereal or a piece of dried fruit. That way you will be more aware of how much you’re using and more prudent in how much you will consume. 

4.    Setting short term goals.

You are on track and making progress and reach a small goal. You want to celebrate and relax a little and this is totally OK. However, don’t fall into the trap of getting too relaxed and letting old habits creep on back in. The aim here is to continually keep track of where you are headed, even if you do stop for a breather. You want to focus on healthier eating habits every day and make it part of your routine not only when you are trying to lose weight.

Healthy eating perse is a work in progress, not a diet with a beginning and an end. Making small significant changes that are achievable will lead to long term healthy habits. By creating a list of habits you want to break will keep you accountable. Tackle them one by one cutting back slowly but surely. For example, reducing two teaspoons of sugar in your tea to one and a half. That way when you reach your target you will start again until you can break the entire habit once and for all.

5.     A hiccup on the journey.

You are going well with your focus, you have lost a couple of kilos and then all of a sudden you have a little hiccup. You have eaten something that is not healthy and makes you feel obsessively guilty and the little voice in your head starts to put you down. All that hard work and effort has been wasted and you make a decision and convince yourself you might as well eat crap for the rest of the day too.

Hang on! You had a little hiccup. Did you say you are human?

Don’t beat yourself up. Congratulate yourself. Suffering setbacks is part of the weight loss journey and it means you are even closer to succeeding. It’s not about how hard you fall but how quickly you pick yourself up. So go on GET UP and dust yourself off.

Set your focus once more. Your weight goals are not a 60 second sprint but a healthy trek of a life time.