4 Ways to change bad eating habits for weight loss

Diets do not work, well don’t work well in the long term. Why is that? Because many of them are so restrictive. They dictate you eat X for breakfast, Y for lunch and Z for dinner. You have to change your bad eating habits all at once and because it’s such a change, you have to rely on willpower to succeed and it’s not sustainable. Life is full of changes, ups and downs, changes to routines and what diets don’t take into account are people’s habits and having to change them long term to make a diet work.

So what can you do to change habits so that you evolve to make healthy eating effortless and fun..

Here are four proven ways you can change bad eating habits for good and lose weight at the same time:

 1. What’s your Starting point

List all of your habits on a day to day basis. This could be keeping a log of what you do and when you do it and why you do it.

Habits are built over time and it’s our brains way of taking shortcuts, making our lives easier and our brains saying this feels good. So the more we do it, our brains no longer have to consciously think about doing it, we just do it without thinking about it. This is great when it is a positive habit and serving us well, but when it’s not a good habit we have to unravel it. To do so we have to become aware of what we are doing, the triggers and why.

So noting what our habits are that we want to change and what triggers that habit can help us to find an alternative to make the new habit permanent.

2. Change your bad eating habits by knowing what you want to change? 

 When you have listed out your habits in front of you, you can then see what you want to change and because you can see why, you may decide that you want to keep the habit.

So a habit could be; putting sugar in tea and coffee, grabbing a fast food breakfast because you have not left time in the morning, going for a quick lunch and grabbing a quick sandwhich, eating dessert, picking on sweets, eating biscuits with your tea, eating chocolate… lots more.

Work out what you want to change and in which order. So you might be thinking,, all of them… so put an order, prioritise what you will change first so you can put all of your focus on one habit at a time.

3. Change bad eating habits one at a time

Trying to change everything at once is not sustainable, because we have not set ourselves up with new habits and there is too much for our brain to comprehend all of the change. We might be able to do it for a day, few days, few weeks but when there is a change to our pattern or circumstances we revert back to old because we have not cemented in the new patterns.

So tackling it one at a time allows us to form the new habit, test it out and let it settle so it sticks when our circumstances change.

4. Visualise Changing

 So, pick one habit you want to change. Now to start to change the habit, work out what you do want to do, what you want the new habit to be. To give yourself a possibility of the best outcome, think of three possible new habits.

For instance, you could want to change eating the biscuits with your tea in the evening. So 1 is I will eat a healthy nut and seed bar instead. 2 is I just wont have the tea and have water instead. 3 I will do some exercise instead.

Visualise yourself doing all three activities and work out what you preferred. Go into how you will feel for each possibility and you may just come up with a new habit. When you have decided, start your new habit that day. Keep going for at least a month and notice how you feel and how you can make that new habit even easier.

If you revert back to your old habit. Do the visualisations again and come up with some new possibilities.

So let me know by commenting below which habits you are going to let go and when you are going to do it and what you thought of my tips. 

Ready to get off the weight-loss merry-go-round once and for all? Let me help you be diet free forever. Book a free call to give you the opportunity to ask questions and see if we are a good fit to work together on banishing your weightloss challenges together.