Tips To Help You Stick to Your Healthy Eating Goals

Most people slip up or cheat at some point when trying to eat healthier but it’s important to not let these instances discourage you and to focus on the things that will help you stick to your goals. Be proud of what you do accomplish and don’t allow yourself to be wracked with guilt over what you can’t. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you shouldn’t learn to be strict with your eating habits.

Be Honest and Realistic With Yourself

Decide what your healthy eating goals are and be realistic with yourself about what you hope to achieve. Making goals that are too easy will prevent you from pushing yourself while making impossible goals will just discourage you and could cause you to give up. When you accomplish your goals, reward yourself and set new ones, but avoid rewarding yourself with junk food as that will only undo all of your hard work.

Don’t Give Up Everything You Love

You don’t have to swear off snack foods entirely, just make healthy eating choices when you can and start your efforts off slowly. Rather than watching TV with a bag of potato chips, snack on a small bowl of plain popcorn. Plan your snack alternatives in advance and have a choice ready for every different taste you crave. Trade sweets and candy in for fresh fruit or eat a smaller piece of dark chocolate in lieu of a sugar loaded candy bar.

Don’t Starve Yourself

Feeling full throughout the day will prevent you from giving in to the urge to snack on something full of sugar or fat. Be sure to drink plenty of water and have healthier snacks during the day rather than saving your hunger up and going crazy on the cheese puffs in the evening. Try eating multiple smaller meals a day rather than three larger ones if this helps you to feel satisfied and less hungry.

Clear Out Your Junk Cupboard

If it’s there, you’re far more likely to grab that convenient bag of cookies sitting at the back of your cupboard when you don’t feel like taking the time to prepare a healthy snack. Throw out all the junk food you have and when you really can’t fight the urge make sure you only buy smaller packages of your favourite treats so you don’t have leftovers sitting in your kitchen to tempt you.

Your healthy eating habits should be a lifelong journey rather than a crash diet, so don’t get too down on yourself when you eat a little more than you should have or just can’t resist that delicious looking pastry. Rather than thinking all hope is lost, throwing your goals out the window, and finishing off the whole pizza because you’ve had one piece, just start over then and there and stay positive about your goals.

Little Changes Can Make a Big Difference for Healthy Eating

If you want to start leading a healthier lifestyle, you don’t need to do an overhaul on your whole life to see results. Even if you do plan on making drastic changes, these changes should be done slowly to give yourself time to adjust and improve your chances at long-term success. A little exercise along with some healthy eating habits can help you feel slimmer and more fit in no time.

Choose the Healthier Alternative

In the grocery store, go for the plain popcorn instead of the super drenched movie theatre butter flavour. At a restaurant, substitute your fries for a salad or change your carb loaded potatoes to a lighter vegetable. For breads and pastas, give the whole wheat types a try. Even when you just have to have your chocolate fix, try one of the darker types of chocolate that contain less sugar. Whatever you’re choosing to eat, take a moment to consider what a healthier option would be.

Portion Control

Limiting how much you eat is one of the most important tips for healthy eating. Some people can’t bear to give up their favourite foods, but cutting your portions in half still allows you to enjoy what you love with half the guilt. Getting the “100 calorie” packages of the chips and chocolates you can’t live with out will remind you how much you’re consuming so you know to stop when the package is empty.

Alcohol and Those Extra Calories

When you’re going to a social event and you want to have a few drinks with your friends, you don’t need to throw your healthy eating plan out the window. Switching to a lighter beer or drinking spirits with a low calorie mixer can reduce the amount of calories you’ll be consuming. To cut that number in half again, alternate your alcoholic beverages with a glass of water or another non-alcoholic, low calorie beverage.

Break Your Bad Habits

Pay attention to your eating habits over the course of a few days and pinpoint the times you snack the most. If you tend to blow through a bag of chips while sitting in front of the TV, stop snacking in your living room or switch your snacks to veggies and fat free dip. If you tend to binge eat after a stressful day at work, reflect on the things that have upset you and find other ways to deal with your stress.

Healthy eating habits can be learned little by little until they’ve become second nature to you. The more you learn, the less you’ll need to struggle with your eating habits. As it becomes easier you’ll be able to make more and more changes to reach your healthy eating goals.

Healthy Eating Strategies to Teach Your Kids

Teaching your kids the importance of healthy eating while they’re young will not only ensure they’re getting the proper nutrition they need to grow, it will help establish good habits for when they’re older and start making their own food choices. By sticking to healthy eating rules, your children will become accustomed to making better choices and will hopefully carry these lessons with them through life.

Involve Them When Deciding Meals

By giving your kids a choice of which vegetable to have with dinner or what type of healthy snack to have between lunch and dinner, they will feel more invested in what they’re eating and less like they’re being forced to eat something they don’t want. If they really hate one type of vegetable, give them the option of something they prefer and you’ll have far fewer battles at dinner time every night.

Make Healthy Food Fun

By cutting food into interesting shapes or making pictures out of the food on their plate, eating becomes a game that they’re now interested in participating in. Letting them help you prepare their food can also get them more excited for meal time because they may feel like they’re playing a bigger role and have made some of the decision regarding what they’ll be eating.

Lead By Example

Telling your children they aren’t allowed to eat ice cream while you’re sitting there with a big bowl of it probably won’t go over very well. When your kids see you eating the same things as them and having veggies as a snack instead of a bag of chips, they won’t question why they’re eating healthy food instead of anything else. If junk food just isn’t an option in your cupboards, your kids won’t be asking for the bag of chocolate chip cookies instead of the bowl of grapes.

Substitute for Healthy Alternatives

Giving them carbonated flavoured water instead of pop will still seem like a treat. Watering down their sugary juice will reduce the amount of sugar they’re consuming. Changing the white bread for whole grains will add some extra nutrition to their diet. By making small changes to the ingredients of all their meals, you’ll be sneaking healthy food in and they won’t even notice most of these changes. The more they become used to healthier alternatives, the easier it will be to establish healthy eating habits.

Why Cholesterol Screening for Kids is the Wrong Idea

If your ears are tuned to the health-o-sphere, I'm guessing you've heard that America's National Institute of Health's NHLBI has recommended screening children starting at age 9 for hyperlipidemia, and doing so by means of a blood test.

While I won't debate the gravity of the rising tide of childhood hyperlipidemia, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc., I really do scratch my head about their recommendations.

Firstly I don't believe in ordering blood tests where there's a low likelihood of clinically relevant consequent intervention. What I mean is, doctors shouldn't order tests unless the results have a clear cut, reproducible and clinically effective response. So what type of response will there be? Obviously it won't be the kids intervening themselves as it doesn't matter what you tell a 9 year old about their cholesterol, they're 9 years old! Does anyone really think a 9 year old has the necessary insight to react rationally to an elevated serum cholesterol? The problem is, neither do adults. In fact we as a profession seem to be almost wholly incapable of inspiring lifelong change even in supposedly insightful adults with elevated cholesterol. I wonder therefore why we think we're so good at it so as to ask a child to endure a screening blood test at age 9.

Secondly, even if we could affect lasting change, are the recommendations provided proven to be a clinically reproducible, useful and efficacious dietary pattern?

Well, from what I can gather, fancy expert panel or not, they seem to have simply regurgitated the same low-fat message that recent years have pretty much proven to be non-helpful in preventing cardiovascular problems in adults. And despite regurgitating old, proven to be ineffective with adults advice, what's perhaps more shocking is what they didn't recommend. From what I read there's not one word about whole-food cooking, and not one word about the processed food environment in which these kids are drowning.

I find that absolutely astonishing. Much ado was made about how we have to work with best available evidence in terms of testing 9 year olds rather than wait for the clinical trials. How about the best available evidence that from a dietary perspective society's nutritional fracture is the loss of the ability, desire, time, and/or motivation to regularly transform raw ingredients into meals? Where's the advice to actually cook from scratch? To minimize all meals out and not just "fast" food? To stay away from boxes? Instead all I see is the DASH diet, a call to avoid eggs (good grief), and a call to avoid full fat milk.

Lastly, do we really need 9 year olds to endure a blood test to know that they're on an unhealthy path, and moreover and more importantly, are high cholesterol, sugar or blood pressure really the barometers of dangerous dietary or lifestyle dysfunctions? Does that mean that kids who eat atrocious diets and live unhealthy lifestyles but don't have signs of traditionally adult diseases are safe?

Whether they've got elevated cholesterol, sugar or blood pressure or not, how about we teach doctors to take detailed eating and lifestyle histories from every kid, at every annual visit?

What sort of history?

Well for starters, how about questions like:

How many meals out a week (including cafeterias, take out and restaurants)?

Who, if anyone, is booking?

How much juice?

How many sweetened beverages?

What are their patterns of eating like?

Do they struggle with any disordered eating?

What are their usual meals for breakfast, lunches, dinners or snacks?

How often do they exercise (and what do they enjoy doing)?

What does their parental healthy living role modeling look like?

How many hours of screen time?

What time do they go to sleep?

How is their body image?

How is their self-esteem?

In medical school I was taught that over 90% of diagnoses can be made on the basis of history alone. Rather than recommending a blood test, how about recommending physicians take lifestyle histories and that way, instead of just focusing on those kids who are unfortunate and predisposed enough to be developing "adult" style chronic diseases at a frighteningly young age, we can focus on all kids, including those whose youth might still be protecting them against an awful lifestyle. Don't those kids need help too?

My view from the trenches for those folks in their ivory towers?

We don't need a blood test from a 9 year old to know if a kid needs help, and looking at the actual recommendations these experts have put forth, I think it's pretty clear they need some help too.

So my two cents addition to this expert report (and I'll keep it short and sweet)?

Lifestyle history from all kids starting at birth (obviously with parental input until the kids are old enough to answer for themselves).

As a family: Cook. From scratch. More often than not. (oh, and mixing things from packages together isn't actual cooking).

Live the lives you want your children to live.