Motivation for Eating Healthy: 6 Tips to Build Good Habits
How to stay motivated to eat healthy. What are the benefits of eating healthy. Tips to build healthy eating habits and stick with them.
The Benefits of Eating Healthy
Eating a healthy, whole-food diet offers numerous benefits beyond just weight loss. Some of the key advantages include:
- Maintaining a Healthy Body Weight: Nutrient-dense foods that are high in fiber and low in calories can help you feel full on fewer calories, supporting a healthy weight.
- Improved Heart Health: A diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and healthy fats can help lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, reducing the risk of heart disease.
- Reduced Cancer Risk: The antioxidants and other beneficial compounds in whole foods may help fight free radicals and lower the risk of certain cancers.
- Better Mental Health: Diets high in added sugars and low in fiber have been linked to an increased risk of depression and other mental health issues.
- Enhanced Digestion: A diet rich in fiber and probiotics can improve gut health and digestion.
- Increased Energy and Vitality: The vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in a whole-food diet can help you feel more energized and vibrant.
Tips to Build Healthy Eating Habits
Staying motivated to eat healthy can be a challenge, but these strategies can help you create lasting change:
1. Keep a Food Journal
Writing down what you eat and your thoughts about food in a daily journal can increase your self-awareness and help you identify triggers for unhealthy eating. This can be a powerful tool for changing your mindset and behaviors around food.
2. Clean Out Your Cupboards
One of the simplest ways to eat healthier is to remove temptation by getting rid of unhealthy foods in your home. This makes it much harder to indulge in cravings for sugary, salty, or fatty snacks.
3. Start Small and Gradually Build
Overhauling your entire diet at once is often unsustainable. Instead, make one or two healthier swaps at a time and gradually build from there. This allows your taste buds and habits to adjust more easily.
4. Find Activities You Enjoy
Choosing physical activities and healthy recipes that you genuinely enjoy, rather than seeing them as chores, can make eating well and staying active feel less like work and more like a lifestyle.
5. Celebrate Small Wins
Recognizing and rewarding your progress, no matter how small, can help keep you motivated and reinforce the positive changes you’re making.
6. Surround Yourself with Support
Enlisting friends, family, or an online community to share your journey can provide encouragement, accountability, and new ideas to keep you motivated.
Starting Small and Sticking with It
Changing your eating habits takes time and patience, but the benefits to your physical and mental health are well worth the effort. Remember that perfection is not the goal – progress is what matters. By making gradual, sustainable changes and celebrating your successes along the way, you can develop a healthier relationship with food and enjoy the many rewards of a nutritious diet.
Stay Committed, Even Through Setbacks
It’s important to note that building healthy eating habits is not a linear process. You may face setbacks and temptations, but the key is to stay committed to your goals, even when it feels difficult. Over time, as you continue to make healthy choices, you’ll start to notice changes in your energy levels, mood, and overall well-being that can help reinforce the value of your efforts.
The Power of Habit
Ultimately, the key to sustainable healthy eating is to make it a habit. By consistently incorporating small, manageable changes into your daily routine, you can gradually rewire your brain and create new neural pathways that support your health goals. Remember, it takes time to build new habits, so be patient with yourself and celebrate the progress you make along the way.
The Role of Mindset
Your mindset is crucial when it comes to building healthy eating habits. Instead of viewing healthy eating as a chore or sacrifice, try to reframe it as an act of self-care and an investment in your overall well-being. Focusing on the positive benefits, rather than the perceived drawbacks, can help keep you motivated and inspired to stick with your healthy eating plan.
6 Tips to Build Good Habits
Americans are gaining weight and body fat at an unprecedented rate. Almost all of us want to start eating healthier than we are right now, so what’s getting in the way of our clean eating motivation? We’re showing you how to motivate yourself to eat healthy and finally stick with it.
“I want to be healthy.”
Almost all of us have uttered some form of these words to friends, family, and ourselves at some point.
While we often have the very best intentions to care well for our bodies, the speed of our culture and abundance of tasty but nutritionally-void food options make it all too easy to slip up and lose that healthy-eating motivation.
Staying motivated to eat healthy does not have to be impossible. What needs to change more than any specific eating habits is your mindset around diet motivation and your values, which work together to keep you mentally and emotionally committed.
Whether you want more motivation for weight loss, strength, or general health, your brain is the key to unlocking the door.
We will share some eating healthy tips to help you change your way of thinking inside out; changing your mind will provide you with healthy eating inspiration that results in positive behavioural changes.
Why Should We Eat Healthy?
The motivation for eating healthy is about so much more than weight loss. Here are some of the best reasons for you to start learning to eat healthy.
- Healthy body weight. Eating healthy foods full of fiber and nutrients satisfies our body more with fewer calories, helping us to maintain a healthy weight.
- Better heart health. A healthy, whole-food diet improves the heart health, maintains normal blood pressure and cholesterol level.
- Reduces the risk of cancer. Eating a certain way cannot guarantee that you’ll never get cancer or other diseases. Still, healthy foods are higher in antioxidants, which fight free radicals, strengthen our immune system, and simply reduce the risk of getting some diseases. There are many illnesses that are related to an unhealthy diet.
- Improved mental health. Diets with high glycemic load from added sugar and lack of fiber tend to trigger or worsen the symptoms of some psychological disorders, like depression.
- Better digestion. Unhealthy diets mess with our guts’ microbiome or balance of good and bad bacteria. Healthy diets low in added sugar, higher in fiber, and containing some natural probiotics will improve your digestion and keep these essential bacteria cultures balanced.
- Increased life quality. The high level of vitamins and minerals in a whole-food diet will help you feel better, have more energy, and aid virtually every process within your body.
How to Stay Motivated to Eat Healthy
We know that the motivation to get healthy can quickly become discouraging and upsetting. These tips for eating healthier address your mindset, which is the only path to real change.
However, these tips aren’t going to work overnight. We build neural pathways in our brain and habitual patterns over months, years, and decades – these habits won’t change quickly.
Stay committed to your health motivation, even through failures. Stay committed, even when it feels impossible. Staying committed will work overtime, as your stubborn commitment changes your neural pathways and creates new ones.
#1: Keep a Journal
Writing in a daily food journal is a great practice and one of the best self-motivating tips, regardless of what habit you’re trying to change or create. You can set aside a specific time to be with yourself and get in touch with your thoughts and feelings.
A journal for diet encouragement can be a helpful daily reminder of your health goals and help you better understand your eating habits.
- Write in your food journal every day, at least for the most difficult first few months.
- Write some short-term goals.
- Write down your feelings about food, and keep track of the food you’re eating.
Let’s be honest – sometimes we eat for reasons other than actual physical hunger, and a journal can help you to understand and change your eating behaviours.
#2: Clean Out Your Cupboards
One of the most simple tips to eating healthier is to give yourself no other option. Clean out your cupboards; use up, toss, or donate any unhealthy foods you no longer want to eat.
When we first commit to eating healthy, motivation starts strong, but willpower will fluctuate significantly. If you eat a diet high in added sugars, salt, and fat, your body and brain become addicted, literally.
During the detox period, you retrain your taste buds and reprogram your body to enjoy the new, healthier diet you’re eating.
While you don’t need to cut out treats forever, making them a little harder to access can help you through the weak moments in the beginning. You’re still welcome to head out and grab a treat if you’d like, but that extra step makes it much less likely to happen.
While some of us live with others whose diets we cannot control, we can ask them if they can get on board for a few months to help support us. Or, they can keep their treats somewhere out of sight from you.
#3: Focus on Your Feelings
Journaling can help us to recognize the feelings that are at the root of our eating habits. Staying motivated long-term requires us to find healthy ways to deal with these feelings to stop triggering our poor eating habits so we can learn how to stop snacking unnecessarily.
If you mostly eat out of boredom, take up a new hobby, pick up a book, or grab a glass of water or tea instead to have something to occupy you instead of food.
If you eat to cope with stress or negative feelings, get support within your community through a loved one, counselor, or therapist. Find new activities that help you destress, like a brisk walk in the fresh air or a blood-pumping workout session.
#4: Make Smaller Goals
Some of us have some pretty lofty goals. While weight-loss is the most common motivation for diets, losing 60 pounds is a massive goal that can take a year or more to accomplish, even with a very concentrated effort.
While we think you should keep your big goals, it’s even more important to set small, achievable goals that will keep you motivated along your big journey to ultimate health. Start your journey with goals that are impossible to fail.
Let’s use the 60-pound example again. You can set a mini-goal to lose 5 pounds in 2 months, to log your foods every day for a week, or to try a new exercise routine – something you can achieve in a few months at most will build momentum and keep you motivated and working toward your larger goals.
#5: Face Your Fears and Embrace Failure
Changing your eating habits can be a terrifying experience. Why? Because we often develop our eating habits to deal with our feelings to avoid processing them.
Many of us fantasize that losing weight will solve many of our issues and if only.
If only I could lose weight, I’d get the partner I want.
If only I could lose weight, I’d get the promotion.
If only I could lose weight, I could finally feel good about myself.
Some people who have experienced a significant weight-loss and lifestyle change can tell you that changing your body makes you a thinner person, however – the root issues remain unsolved.
Therefore, if you can begin to address and deal with these issues from where you are now, you’ll be much more capable and committed to adopting a healthier lifestyle because when we value ourselves highly, we treat ourselves accordingly.
Failure is going to happen along this journey. To be successful, see loss as a necessary step on the path to change – if you don’t fail at all, you’re not challenging yourself.
#6: No Restrictions
While we recommend keeping tempting foods out of your cupboards for the first months to prevent easy access, we don’t think you should completely cut any foods out of your diet.
The minute you create food restrictions, something breaks in your brain. Restricting things turns on some instinct we carry around food scarcity, and we end up thinking about and craving these foods all the time simply because we know we can’t have them.
Don’t cut anything out completely – every food has its place in a diet that includes moderation.
Final Notes: Healthy Diet Motivation Tips
Healthy eating helps us better to feed our bodies, but also our minds. Use these tips to change your mindset around eating well and self-motivate to make the dietary changes that feel right for you.
To recap:
- Write in a food journal daily;
- Clean out your pantry to avoid temptation;
- Find healthy non-food related outlets for stress and boredom;
- Make small mini-goals you can achieve in a month or two;
- Become comfortable with your fear and failures;
- Don’t completely cut out any food groups.
We wish you so much health and success on your journey to a healthier lifestyle!
11 Steps That Spark Your Motivation To Eat Healthy – Nutriciously
If making better choices was as easy as knowing what to do and then just doing it… we’d all be at our goals by now. But what keeps us stuck in the same old place over and over again? Why do we lose our motivation to eat healthy, work out, get up, or go out?
We have all heard that positive motivation always works better than threats, so therefore we need to get excited about something instead of scared.
We cannot motivate ourselves for a very long time to do something we really don’t want to do, so knowing what we truly long for is crucial for getting motivated over and over again.
Are you really passionate about the upcoming change or do you just think you should do it? In order to achieve your goals, it’s so important to really, really want it – not just because “it would be cool”. This doesn’t get you through the marathon of changing your diet, behavior, and perception.
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While patience is one of the most important parts of finishing a task, we sometimes cannot bring ourselves to not just expect quick results. When we can think of it as building something that should last us a lifetime ideally, it’s clear why changing our diet may take longer than expected.
There’s some solid and good foundation behind it, we need to learn how to deal with different cravings, eating out, social situations, and old comfort eating habits. If you don’t see the results you want soon, don’t give up – just give it time.
The only thing that ever got me to change a habit was inspiration – really wanting to achieve something. It didn’t come with a “should” but rather a “wow I really want to”.
If you’re not feeling it so far, then research more about health, nutrition, and the great results others have achieved until you feel it tugging at your heartstrings – that’s where you can really begin to make real change. That’s where the magic happens.
Best Motivation to Eat Healthy
But let’s take it step by step. Here’s how to stay motivated to eat a healthier, more whole food plant-based diet. Feel free to skip one or two steps if they don’t apply to you and take what’s most powerful to make change happen.
1. Find Your Reasons
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Okay, this seems like an obvious one. But have you actually written down why you want to eat better and what you want to achieve? Try to really come up with some concrete things that you want to be able to do like climbing the stairs or a mountain without getting out of breath, getting better at your favorite sport, healing your digestive issues or skin problems.
Inspiring Reasons to Go Vegan →
Having this vision in mind will make it a lot easier during tough times to stick to your initial plan. It also enables you to track your progress, rather than just aiming for the abstract goal of “being healthy”.
Get clear on what you want and why you want that – having the wrong reasons might set you up for failure in the long run. Try to think who else besides you would benefit from the changes you’re about to make because that makes it even more powerful.
Since motivation isn’t a constant thing that is always there for you, having your reasons with you wherever you go can be just what you need during these low points that will come eventually. So put the list of your reasons into your bag or take a picture with your phone.
When your motivation comes and goes, like a tide, realize that even though it can be completely gone in one moment, it won’t be away permanently. It will come back if you stick it out. In the meantime, follow some of the steps below to find your focus and energy again!
2. Read About It
Surrounding yourself with the possibility of eating a very healthy diet – and doing so effortlessly – makes it a lot more likely for you to try it out and eventually stick to it. When you don’t even know where to start making changes or what a truly healthy and delicious diet looks like, how are you supposed to make any reasonable changes?
Education is key. Find some credible sources that make sound claims about how successful people are on a particular diet. Stay critical and keep your BS radar on – because cutting out one macronutrient, forcefully restricting calories, eating chemical-laden food that comes from a lab or a diet that consists of a ton of different powders and supplements aren’t good options.
The 40+ Best Vegan Books →
When you go back to whole foods, many things take care of themselves. You won’t need supplementation usually, you won’t need to count calories or fight with your hunger.
There are so many amazing people following slightly different healthy plant-based diets who get great results – so check out some of them and see what they eat, how they move and talk. Anything that speaks to you, try it out as well!
Both education and inspiration work so well together. You can also get a few books on this topic and dedicate yourself to read 10 pages every day!
The Most Inspiring Transformation Stories →
3.
Focus on Positivity
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Start by making a list of things that make you smile. This makes your experience better on a daily basis and your focus on “stuff you have to do” shifts over to “things I love”. Write up a few moments that bring you joy and that excite you. Track what makes you happy and let this carry you over to your goals.
Add anything to your list you can think of and whenever motivation is low, take a peek and pick out anything that gives you back your energy and drive.
But there’s also a point at which you can get too excited and this can steal a lot of your energy in the long run. So hold yourself back deliberately in the beginning to honor the fact that you do have some limitations (mentally and physically) and when you jump right into something, you’re pretty likely to jump right out of it too.
So don’t let yourself do everything you want to do right away – only do 50-75% of what you want to do. Increase your action over time. Start monitoring your thoughts and recognize negative self-talk. Once you’re aware of them, you can replace each one with a corresponding positive thought.
Be your own biggest fan and supporter! Don’t focus on how hard your changes will be but rather on finding a way to make them work anyway.
4. Track Your Progress
It can be as simple as marking an X on your calendar when you hit your goal for the day or creating a simple spreadsheet on your computer. You can track this online or print your sheet and fill it out with a pen – whatever you’re more likely to do, choose your favorite version.
It will be very rewarding to look back on your progress and see how far you’ve come when it feels like on a daily basis, nothing changes. And of course, you don’t want too many days without an X! Instead, try to see how many you can get in a row.
Building on these successes is much easier than not seeing any positive changes or progress after a while. Because honestly, every little step along the way is a success, every milestone deserves a little celebration!
Take that positive, uplifting feeling and build on it, use it to carry you to your next micro-goal.
It doesn’t matter if you miss one day, just make sure not to skip two days in a row – not following through one time is just a sign where you need to work harder to make your change happen, it’s not a complete failure that means you can just stop any effort because you won’t ever make it. View it as a teacher and vow to learn this small lesson.
5. Make Tiny Steps
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Let’s be honest: we all want to have our desires fulfilled right at this very moment – but you can’t just wish for a healthy, lean or strong body and instantly get it. Change on a physical level happens much slower than on a mental level in this case.
By programming what you really want into your mind, you keep looking out for things that will make it actually happen in the physical realm.
In order for you to not get frustrated about the gap between where you are and where you want to be, acknowledge your current situation and understand that manifesting that change, making it second nature, will take a little more time.
So make little goals that will result in achieving your big goal. Change single components of your meals or just one whole meal at a time! Either focus on cutting things out (like processed food) or adding new foods in (like a handful of greens). Once you don’t have to think about this tiny change anymore, and thus not requiring any willpower, take your next step.
14 Easy & Tasty Food Swaps →
I know it’s easy to dismiss little changes as “not enough” or ridiculous, but they can be very powerful once they add up and ensure your success much more than just being overwhelmed.
Increase the amount of change you want to implement slowly so it always seems very doable. Going after that one huge goal alone can be draining after a while, so having different small goals makes things a lot more exciting!
6. Program Your Mind
This cannot be emphasized enough, so it gets its own mentioning here. We make so many decisions on a daily basis that we don’t even think about – no matter if they serve us or not.
Getting clear on that fact can be both frustrating and empowering! Because once you know that you can just rewire your brain by repeating the same behavior (especially when connected to a daily trigger), you can use this to your advantage.
And before you know it, you’ll reach out for some fruit as a snack. Or you feel like something is missing when there aren’t any veggies on your plate.
Make yourself do a certain thing regularly, even if it’s just for a few seconds or a minute each day (like checking all the ingredients of the food you’re about to buy at the store). If you feel like you’re constantly stuck in the old habits, then just step away from the situation and change your surroundings. Take a walk and reconsider things, increase your sense of enthusiasm and energy!
And since it’s a huge thing to transform your patterns, keep it one goal at a time. Most of us try too much and get overwhelmed before the day is done. You cannot maintain energy and focus if you are trying to do several goals at once – rather focus on one right now.
7. Confront Your Barriers
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There can be many emotions connected with the foods you eat. Some remind you of an innocent childhood memory, your grandma’s cooking, or how you got over your toughest breakup.
Food nourishes our mind and soul as well as our body and getting someone to stop eating one type of food can be the most frustrating challenge ever.
This is why it’s time to get real and start questioning your relationship with food. Be aware that some strange or scary things can come up – but you’ve built these walls, and you’re the one who has to get rid of them. Stop limiting yourself or setting yourself up for failure by falling back into your old, unconscious ways of doing things.
Confront your fear of letting go and changing things up by making it a challenge: take one food you think you couldn’t live without and stop eating it for an entire week. For two weeks. It’s okay to fail, just keep on trying – nobody makes a plan and just follows through 100% forever.
Take the power that certain foods may have over you away and find that you can make good decisions for yourself! Don’t allow fear to paralyze or intimidate you. There will come a point at which you feel like you can’t push any further or that it doesn’t seem like the right time and place to implement a positive change – do it anyways.
The hardest part is to move beyond your limiting thinking of how much of a hassle it will be.
8. Make It Enjoyable
Don’t force yourself too much and aim for something you don’t really see the point of or wouldn’t enjoy achieving. It’s not just about the end goal, it’s always about the journey.
In order to become the person who eats super healthy, you need to walk from where you are now to where you want to be – meaning you need to give things up, to add things in you don’t like so much yet. You need to be more aware, you need to connect with your body and make your own meals.
If all of this doesn’t sound very appealing to you, go back and check in with your goals. Are they important enough? Then look at the tiny steps that will take you there.
But don’t reward yourself with a huge piece of cake after trying some kale – joy can exist outside of rich food. Likewise, start eating more foods that you know are good for you and that you actually enjoy! Because switching over to broccoli and beans for every dinner might not be as appealing as a veggie curry over steamed rice.
30+ Vegan Recipes for Beginners →
If you don’t like what you do, it’ll be nearly impossible to work it into your lifestyle long-term. Find beauty in your new ways of being – we’re just naturally resistant towards change and the urges to quit will come up here and there.
Beating yourself up over these moments won’t help, so just focus back on what you enjoy about your new meals and how they make you feel. Let that deliciousness sink in and find deep satisfaction in being able to implement a whole new diet after many years of eating very differently.
9. Use Your Calendar
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Grab your old-school planner and take a look at the little gaps in your day. Maybe you’re very busy in the morning and won’t be able to prepare a proper breakfast – then do it the night before.
Or maybe you don’t have time to cook dinner when you come home from work so you just need to look for another gap that will allow you to look for recipes and chop up some food in advance. Then all you’ll have to do in the evening is pop something in the oven, relax, and take it out again.
You can also block an hour every week to organize your fridge and prep or plan your meals! What’s more, when you feel like nothing is changing on a daily basis, schedule weekly check-ins to help you see the results you’ve been getting over time. Then evaluate what’s helping and what you’re not so excited about (let that go for now) so you can stay tuned into your endgame.
A little anticipation can go a long way too, so let your excitement build up before jumping right into your new diet. I get it, many of us get excited and want to start today – but that could be a mistake. Set a date in the future (a week or two) and make that your “Start Date” in your calendar.
Get excited about it and make it a very important date in your life. In the meantime, you start writing out a plan: what do you want to change, how will you be able to achieve it, and when will be the right time – these are the most important questions.
10. Work With Images
Did you just discover an amazing recipe that you prepared for yourself and that was delicious? Take a photo and a note regarding how you made it. Then keep a list of your favorite healthy meals, preferably with pictures.
If you want to take it a step further, make a scrapbook or vision board filled with pictures (maybe of your younger and fitter self?) and words that really motivate you! The key is to not just be inspired to make this change, but to actually take that excitement and build on it.
See the benefits of your goal in your head, imagine how it would feel, how you would go about your day, how you would treat yourself and others. Then it’s just a matter of carrying that energy forward and keeping it going.
You can also write your goals in a fancy font on your computer and either print it out and hang it up right next to your other images of beautiful healthy food or make it your wallpaper on any electronic device.
Internal images work too of course! By visualizing your successful outcome in great detail, you can already make sure you’ll follow through. It’s highly motivating to see, feel, smell and hear what your goal will be like. Form a clear mental picture and get back to this every single day for a few minutes – right after waking up is a great moment or before you fall asleep.
Make sure to have some kind of inspiration around you each day in the form of positive images, words, success stories, forums, or your support system.
11. Do It Together
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Buddy up with someone and join a cooking class together! Or find recipes and put it in a Google Doc to share, take pictures of your healthy food and send it to each other. Even better if you can meet up and make emphasizing eye contact when choosing what to eat.
We also don’t want to look bad in front of others, so making it a public commitment can be powerful – so tell your friends and co-workers about what you’re going to achieve and tell them several times. This could mean giving them updates on how things go, asking for their advice, maybe even motivating them to join in! Way to hold yourself accountable.
Go to Facebook groups or forums where people come together and talk about healthy plant-based eating. See if you can find anyone who wants to be your buddy and partner with you! Make sure you’re dedicated to pushing and encouraging each other to succeed.
Maybe there’s even a vegan meet-up close to you and you can find people to help you out there! Don’t be shy to ask for support because it’s hard to accomplish something alone. It can just be something like your partner asking you each day how you’ve been doing or preparing you a healthy snack when you’re completely pooped one day.
Find your support network, whether that be in the real world or online. If you feel like you need some more help, take a class or get a coach that provides counseling – even though this is more expensive, it could be the answer for you.
Motivated to Eat Healthy?
In the end, we all have to find it in ourselves and want to change for the better. Don’t let others tell you how things should be done or that you won’t ever reach your goals! These long-term goals are worth the effort and you’ll end up creating the life you truly want, the life that really fulfills you.
This is about more than just healthy eating – it’s about making things possible and being the conscious creator of your life.
🍳How to make yourself eat right? Motivation for proper nutrition
What prevents us from switching to a healthy diet? One of the main reasons is that it’s expensive. Yes, potatoes are 10 times cheaper than avocados, but a grocery basket with proper nutrition can be filled with budget products – there would be a desire. That’s what it’s all about. Where to look for motivation to change lifestyle?
In fact, you can eat right and inexpensively, or you can eat first-class expensive junk food. I consider the priority here not the cost of the menu, but the way of thinking that moves a person during the choice of products and cooking, the culture of food in general, and the habits of the family. It depends entirely on consciousness.
If you watch TV, you constantly see advertisements for biscuits, cereals with the words “Fitness” (which is a marketing ploy – they are not “Fitness” of course, if the cereal contains sugar), all sorts of instant cereals, alcohol, beer, etc. .d. An omnivorous person believes this advertisement, he is omnivorous in any respect: in information, in political, – such a person is easily programmed by manufacturers of products and other goods (in particular, medicines). And this is the ideal consumer: what you tell him to buy, he will buy; What you say is, he will eat. It turns out that it does not depend on the wallet, but on our worldview.
And vice versa: the more consciously a person thinks, the more responsibility he has for his actions, for his past, present and future. Through nutrition and training, we come to a pronounced meaningfulness, and as a result, our key beliefs that guide our life as a whole change. So, what thoughts will help create the right motivation?
If you are not happy with every bite, you need to change something
Let’s say that in any unpleasant situation in life you look for someone to blame, and you find it, and you say: “It happened because of the government, or the weather, or where I live, my boss, wife, friends, classmates, etc., etc.” . In a word, everyone around is to blame except you. Or, for example, you are constantly dissatisfied with yourself, your position, prosperity, living conditions … So, it’s time to change something.
The same is true in terms of nutrition: you yourself have chosen what you will eat now. Enjoy every bite! If you regret it later, don’t eat it. But if you still eat – rejoice. Guilt is not constructive. Therefore, we apply a constructive approach to our lives, namely: we rejoice at every piece that we have on our plate, or we eat something else.
And the same can be applied to the rest of everyday life. If we are not happy with what is happening to us, this is a sure sign that something needs to change, and as soon as possible.
In my case, it was food from a famous fast food chain. I couldn’t live without her. She scolded herself, but continued to eat. This has its roots in childhood. When I was little, this restaurant was something special for us. The first one opened just as I started school. And once a year, at the end of the school year, my parents took me to this cafe as a reward for good studies.
The reward pattern became so entrenched that when I wanted to experience some positive emotions in my adult life, I went and ate that definitely unhealthy food. And I couldn’t realize it for a very long time, and when I realized it, I realized that fast food for a long time was no longer a reward for me, but a punishment, that I feel bad from it, that I don’t want to eat for half a day, everything in my stomach is a stake. And it’s time to stop it.
The absence of a constructive approach can lead to very negative, undesirable consequences, including for the individual. First of all, this is constant self-hatred, which is worse than junk food, because the food will be assimilated, digested and released, but self-hatred will remain.
For me, food has become the epitome of self-love. If you love yourself, then feed yourself the best products that your wallet allows, you do not kill yourself with alcohol, smoking, drugs.
How to motivate yourself to eat right?
Look ahead 20 years: do you like everything? I see a lot of old people – decrepit, sick, overweight, who barely move, who do not live, but drag out existence. It hurts a lot to look at them. Yes, the body is decay, but by maintaining oneself and one’s health in good condition, even in old age, one can be cheerful, mobile, useful to one’s grandchildren, and not a burden for them. For me, this is in the first place: not external beauty, not losing weight for the sake of secondary benefits, but health, longevity and benefits for posterity.
Thinking about being a smoker makes me shudder. Every day I wanted to quit, but every time I went, bought a new pack and lit a cigarette. People are weak, and a cigarette is like a girlfriend. You feel lonely, restless, went out for a smoke – and there was a feeling that you did something significant, that life is not meaningless. But this is self-deception!
Once, 11 years ago, I went on vacation, and my favorite cigarettes were not found in the duty-free shop. I thought it was a good sign that it was time to quit. And I didn’t smoke anymore. Moreover, six months later I became pregnant and the opportunity to smoke disappeared by itself.
The trouble is that few people live for the future, think 20-30 years ahead. Living “in the moment” is much easier: I ate this pie now – I won’t suddenly become 20 kilograms fatter, will I? Or, you think, a cigarette, I’m not going to die of lung cancer right now? Or, think about it, a glass of wine, I’m not going to get cirrhosis of the liver and the puffy face of an alcoholic?
Once I visited an oncology hospital and saw a horrific picture there – smokers who had throat cancer. They had a hole in their throat, but they still stood on the porch and smoked.
In general, it’s like with work: think about your condition in five years, in ten. How will you live, on what? What will be around you? It must be understood that nutrition and bad habits have the same cumulative effect as labor activity.
You don’t need to change anything in your diet and life if…
Some people don’t want to change anything, they are in a comfort zone. I am convinced that they are the majority, they form the basis of society. And that’s not bad: stability is better than nothing at all. But, in my opinion, stability is good only if a person is satisfied with it, if he feels happy, coming to the place of work every day, eating the same food, seeing his spouse in the morning and in the evening. But if the feeling of disappointment, uncertainty, longing does not leave you, then you either need to change something, or learn to love what is.
Those who are dissatisfied with their lives, as a rule, deny their participation in this life. He thinks it “happened” to him. I was born in such and such a family – I was not lucky, they took me to such and such a job – I did not deserve more.
Everything that happens to you is the product of your actions and decisions. And the sooner you realize this, the more constructive and happy your life will be.
You chose it! Realize it. It’s sobering, it’s shocking, because some people sincerely believe that it’s “unlucky” or “it’s fate”, and then it turns out that they did it themselves, with their own hands. Yes, this is a very unpleasant feeling, but it is constructive, later it can lead you to action, to changing your life.
There are two options. You either love what you do and enjoy where you are, who you live with, what you eat. Or if you don’t like it, change.
GBUZ RK “City Polyclinic No. 2”. Motivational quotes about healthy eating
2 June – Day healthy eating and avoiding excess food.
Nutrition is one of the main aspects of the modern lifestyle. We need motivation to achieve our goals in life. Forming a commitment to a healthy lifestyle and cutting out unhealthy foods can be difficult for most of us.
So to get that little spark, the following are nutrition quotes that you can review periodically.
1. “The first wealth is health” , — R. Emerson.
2. “People don’t understand that obesity is a sign of poverty. It’s not a lifestyle choice where people just eat and don’t exercise. The problem of proper nutrition for children is the problem of the school lunch: they get sugar, fat and empty calories but don’t eat” , — Tom Colicchio.
3. “Our food must be our medicine, and our medicine must be our food” , — Hippocrates.
4. “Don’t eat anything that your great-great-grandfather wouldn’t recognize as food. There are a lot of food-like foods in the supermarket that your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food. Stay away from them” , — Michael Pollan.
5. “Man is what he eats” , — Lucretius.
6. “Physicians of the future will no longer treat the human body with drugs, but rather treat and prevent disease with nutrition” , — Thomas Edison.
7. “Life is a tragedy of nutrition” , — Arnold Ehret.
8. “Diet is an important key to successful healing. Without a proper balanced diet, the effectiveness of drug treatment is very limited” , — Michael Tierra.
9. “Water is the most neglected nutrient in your diet, but one of the most important” , – Julia Child.
10. “Eating healthy nutritious food is the simple and right solution for getting rid of excess weight” , — Subodh Gupta.
11. “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are” , — GK Chesterton.
12. “Those who believe that they do not have time for a healthy diet, sooner or later will have to find time to treat the disease” , — Edward Stanley.
13. “Today over 95% of all chronic diseases are caused by unhealthy food choices, toxic food ingredients, nutritional deficiencies and lack of exercise” , – Mike Adams.
14. “Eating is a necessity, but eating wisely is an art” , — Francois VI de La Rochefoucauld
15. “If we could give every person the right amount of food and exercise, neither too little nor too much, we would have the safest path to health” , — Hippocrates.
16. “Processed foods not only increase shelf life, but also increase the waist” , — Karen Sessions.
17. “Do not dig a grave with your own knife and fork” , — English proverb.
18. “These little things – food, place, climate, rest, all the casuistry of egoism – are incredibly important of everything that was considered important until now” , — Friedrich Nietzsche.
19. “Most people don’t have a problem with their diet. They have a problem with dieting” , — Karen Sevasian.
20. “Time and health are two precious assets that we do not recognize or appreciate until they are depleted” , – Denis Whately.
21. “Exercise is king, nutrition is queen, put them together and you have a kingdom.”
22. “Good food ends with good conversation” , — Jules Renard.
These nutrition quotes from nutritionists, doctors, athletes and chefs are sure to keep you motivated.