All these questions are intended to get you to take a hard look at your personal eating style. That's the first step in designing a way of healthy eating that works for you. The key to developing a healthy eating plan you can live with - one that you can easily incorporate into your daily life - is to first discover your personal obstacles to healthy eating, then to make one or two small changes at a time. There are two simple principles behind this strategy:
1. Everyone is not the same.What works for one person may not for another. So a standard cookie-cutter approach for eating to successfully manage weight doesn't exist.
2. If you try to change too much at once, you can overwhelm yourself. It becomes too hard. Your attempt at change becomes just one more ball to juggle.
To get started on your personal eating plan, look closely at your eating style. Then determine one or two priority changes. Perhaps it's starting to eat breakfast, or not skimping on meals in the first part of the day. When people eat an adequate number of calories earlier in the day, they are less likely to fall prey to the night eating syndrome, a habit that can mean loads of excess calories and, eventually, excess weight.
Or maybe you find you're ravenous when you walk in the door at night, even though you've had reasonably well-balanced meals throughout the day. If you plan a snack, such as a sandwich, or crackers and hummus, or a small portion of leftovers, you may be able to cut out non-stop snacking while you're making dinner. Although you may eat what seems like a significant number of calories at that pre-dinner snack, when you compare it to what you usually eat, you can see you've made a great improvement.
If you're trying to follow a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, think a moment about what you're doing. You're following a diet. It's fairly different from your usual eating style, and it often means you can't enjoy the same food as your friends and family. And you probably find yourself frequently going on and off it.
Instead, the *Food Guide Pyramid is your best guide to eating for successful health and weight management. According to the Food Guide Pyramid, all foods can fit in an eating plan to manage weight and health - even high-calorie, high-fat yummies that are so hard to give up. Thank goodness, because most of us aren't successful in giving them up. When we try, we end up overeating them instead.
The bottom line as far as changing your eating habits go is to aim for improvement. Because eating habits are difficult to change, successfully making small improvements in your eating style paves the way to making more small, livable changes. After a while, when they're all added together, you find you have developed a whole new personal way of eating that works for you!
Getting Started
1. Complete the |Food Diary| using a "typical" day for you.
If you have a "typical" workday and a "typical" weekend day, complete this process for each type of day.
2. Identify your obstacles to eating healthfully.
(e.g., you don't eat breakfast; you skimp on meals during the day but eat all evening long; you grab whatever is in the fridge to snack on before dinner, etc). Get help overcoming these obstacles by visiting the |message boards|.
3. Decide on one or two changes to make right now.
For example, you could start eating breakfast and eat a more substantial lunch, even a snack or two, to help manage evening hunger better.
4. Use the Food Diary to track how well you're doing in making your changes.
5. Once these changes become a habit (usually after 6 weeks or so), begin the process again to work on other obstacles (if necessary).
Review your Food Diary to see how your healthy eating obstacles have changed. Once you have taken care of your "priority" obstacles, you may find the others have become less of a problem - or have even disappeared.
