Eating healthy is not rocket science. We all know what to do. Cut out the junk food, eat more veggies, reduce your sugar intake, drink more water and tea. However, we aren’t always able to make the necessary changes. Here are the 5 aspects to consider when changing your diet and eating healthy.

1. Willpower & Habit

According to Charles Duhigg, author of “the power of habit” almost half of our daily decisions are based on habit (source). If you have developed bad habits around your diet, it will be very difficult to break them even if you know that they are damaging for you. But set up correctly, you can use them to your advantage. Why do habits matter so much? Because willpower is a finite resource. Making choices throughout the day depletes your willpower resource and it becomes more and more difficult to make the right choice. However, if you get to the point where certain decisions are made automatic thanks to habitualization, you can make healthy choices automatically and save willpower at the same time. If you cannot completely get rid of certain habits like grabbing a beer after work with co-workers, learn to replace it with alcohol free beer, one glass at a time.

2. Your Social Circle

If you are surrounded by people who like to indulge in fast food multiple times a week and like getting wasted every weekend, you’ll have a bad time living healthy and still being friends with them. You can learn more about how your social circle influences you here but long story short, if you really want to get healthy and your friends are holding you back, get new friends. Yes, friends and family do matter but is it worth sacrificing your health? Get a social circle that is in line with your goals and ideally people who are a few steps ahead of you. They will become the new benchmark and encourage you throughout your journey instead of sabotaging it.

3. Flavor

Unfortunately healthy eating has a bad rep. People tend to think it’s bland, not filling and just lame. Reality is there are a lot of recipes out there that are healthy and delicious at the same time. If you don’t want to completely change what you eat, you can still slightly upgrade your standard recipes. Reduce the amount of sugar you use, replace margarine with grass-fed butter, go for dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate etc. This is where it comes full circle with point 1. You don’t need 1000 healthy recipes but just 5-10 solid recipes that you can rotate through just to get started. That can be some healthy breakfast options, snacks, dinners and you are set. For some healthy snacks, you can also check our recipes.

4. Eating Out

Similar to point 3 but even if you have a group of people who want to eat healthy, you’ll realize most restaurants don’t offer many healthy options. Even if it looks healthy, there’s a high chance that they use margarine or other bad fats to fry your food and other additives too. Last but not least the quality of the ingredients might be questionable too. Reality is good ingredients are expensive and in order to survive, restaurants have to cut costs. Therefore, it’s straight up challenging to find restaurants that offer healthy food at a reasonable price. What I can only recommend though is to do some basic research about the restaurants in your area (e.g. check the menu, take a look at the kitchen if possible and ask where they get their vegetables and meats). Again, thanks to our habits we go to the same restaurants over and over again, so use that to your advantage.

5. Temptations at Home

A very good friend of mine has a serious sweet tooth. He just can’t resist when there’s snacks at home or around him at the office. But because he is aware of it, he made it a rule not to have any snacks at home and asked his co-workers to keep them away from the desks next to him. Out of sight, out of mind. You can apply the same at home. If you have a bowl or cabinet full of sweets at home, get rid of it. If one of your family members insists on having it at home, ask them to store it somewhere else where you won’t find it. If you always have beer at home, replace it with alcohol free beer. Let’s face it, we are all just human and our will power is limited. So the best way to approach it is by removing the temptations all together.

Conclusion

There are factors we cannot control easily. Changing our social circle is not that easy, picking a healthy restaurant can be tough too. But what you can do for sure is

1. remove temptations as much as possible
2. replace some of the unhealthy options with healthy options (alcohol free beer vs. regular beer, dark chocolate vs. regular chocolate)
3. learn 5 to 10 healthy recipes (breakfast, lunch and dinner), make sure you have everything you need to cook those recipes
   1. learn about habits and how to use them to your advantage

By the way, my friend Joseph has a great video about habits and how to build them. You can check it out below:

Lastly, if you want to learn more about health and fitness, check out my other website.