Improve your EATING HABITS! SIMPLE and EASY tips and hints to change your diet!

On my last post I spoke about the fundamental aspects to achieve and maintain you ideal physical shape, and today I will give you some simple tips about how you can work and improve your eating habits to the rest of your life!

If you ever tried a diet, you know that they don’t work because they are not sustainable in the long run, and any other radical change in your lifestyle probably won’t last long!

Any kind of lifestyle that you have at this moment, even if it’s not a healthy one, your body and your mind are used to it, and they will keep asking for what they know.

How can you work on permanent changes then? Actually is quite simple, one or two at a time for a few weeks or months, until you get used to them and they become a permanent habit in your life. When they solidify, you add new changes.

Keep in mind that is a long journey and you need to take one step at a time! If you spent your whole life having bad habits, it will take time to build good ones!

You also need to consider that the processed food you are used to eat have a lot of chemicals that literally leave your body highly addicted! I don’t know if you know but it’s proven by science that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, can you imagine what all the other chemicals do to your body?

Maybe you don’t realize but food is an addiction and it can kill you! And it’s worse than the other ones because if you want to quit drinking and smoking, it helps if you stop buying them… But what about food? You need to eat everyday!

When you eliminate processed food from your diet, the withdraw symptoms might be hard to deal with! When you change the food that you are used to eat everyday, your whole body functioning also changes, and that might be a challenge! That’s why I recommend you to make small changes, one at a time, to detox your system slowly and teach your body to enjoy natural and healthy food.

I managed to change from a completely unhealthy diet, full of burgers, pizzas and highly processed processed, to a healthy and natural lifestyle! Of course took years and a lot of trials and errors, and based on my experience, I will give you some tips and hints about how you can work on your eating habits to have a smooth and easy transition.

Don’t Eliminate, Replace!

It’s much harder to eliminate a food that you are used to eat from your diet, it’s much easier to replace it for a better version! And to do that, I used a lot the app Pinterest!

I used to search things like healthy burger, healthy pizza and even, healthy pasta. That was a good way that I found to teach my body to like more natural ingredients without having cravings!

In sandwiches, instead of bread you can use lettuce or kale leafs, and spaghetti might be replaced by spiralized zucchini. When you eat creamy things like guacamole and hummus, you can use carrot and cucumber sticks. When you eat pizza, you can make cauliflower dough!

Beverages

Beverages are also important and you shouldn’t drink anything that comes in a package!

So basically you can drink water, infused water with mint, lemon, fruits or even cinnamon, fresh juices, fresh coconut water, and tea and coffee without sugar or sweetener!

Soft drinks might be replaced by sparkling water with lemon and honey for example, and the sugar in tea and coffee, after a while, your taste buds will get used to drink them without it!

Spices

The way you prepare you food and give it flavor, makes a huge difference! The small ingredients also count! You can easily turn a healthy salad into a very fattening dish!

• Avoid chemical seasonings and sauces, prefer natural spices, herbs, onion and garlic
• Avoid table salt, prefer sea salt or Himalayan
• Avoid vegetable oils like corn, soya and sunflower, prefer healthy fats like avocado, coconut and olive oil

Your body needs oils, the right ones and in the right amount! Around a thumb per day!

Portions

If you want to lose weight, instead of changing radically what you are used to eat, cut your portions by a third or a quarter. You can work on the proportions as well, have in mind something like 50% vegetables, 25% meat and 25% carbs!

Avoid restaurants lof the type “eat as much as you can” because most of us have the mindset of making it worth what we paid for, and we end up eating too much! And honestly, it’s not worthy it!

Don’t deny yourself any kind of food, your body and your mind will take as a punishment and they will make you suffer! Just control yourself and have a small portion, you don’t need to eat everything!

Hormones

Another thing that I need to mention, there is a lot of food being sold as being healthy and good for you when they are not!

Don’t look at the front of the package, turn, look at the back! Check the ingredients and the nutritional value, if there are names in there that you don’t know what they are, you shouldn’t be eating it! I know, it’s practically impossible to eliminate all chemicals from your diet nowadays, but you can minimize!

The hormones have a huge impact on your weight and physical shape, and chemical products make them very messy! The cleaner your system is, better it will work!

When you add healthy ingredients to your diet, you teach your body to enjoy what is good for it. Healthy food doesn’t need to be boring! You can prepare it differently to make it interesting, sometimes even tastier than the unhealthy food that you might be used to!

It’s all a matter of habit, when your body gets used, it will ask for healthy food the same way it asks now for whatever you are used to eat. One change at a time and you get there, you just need to act! You have no idea how much power a small change has in the long run!