4 Ways To Increase Your Motivation For Healthy Eating
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Healthy eating is often associated with weight loss and diets, but eating a healthy diet doesn’t have to be restrictive or consist of depriving yourself. A healthy diet and lifestyle, for example, are vital to preventing and managing cardiovascular disease. Instead of focusing on numbers or losing weight as fast as you can, what matters is changing your overall eating pattern to make way for long-term benefits to your health and your heart.
In fact, when looking for motivation for weight loss, it’s essential to consider it part of a broader wellness journey instead of a single goal. This is because reaching your weight loss target may make you feel less incentivized to keep up your new healthy lifestyle habits, a key reason why some people may find it challenging to maintain their body weight, even after managing to shed the pounds.
1. Determine Why You Want To Eat Healthy
One of the first tips for sticking to a healthy diet is about figuring out why you want to pursue healthy eating. Some people want to eat healthier so that they can live healthier, while others vary from wanting to fit desired clothing styles, pursuing a particular sport, or even learning how to cook. Whatever your reasons, make a list of those specific reasons and keep it handy for when you feel you need a reminder.
2. Set Realistic Expectations
It’s also important to set realistic expectations and goals, instead of pressuring yourself to lose weight too quickly, which may backfire. To better motivate yourself, consider using the SMART goal-setting method by setting Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Time-framed goals related to healthy eating.
3. Track Your Progress
Staying motivated while trying to eat more healthily can be challenging, but tracking your progress can help you stay focused on your goals. Nutrition tracking is often referred to as part of meeting your fitness goals, but this doesn’t mean you should be hyper-focused on numbers and calories. Instead, look at tracking to get an overview of your progress so you know if or when anything needs to be changed.
However, nutrition tracking can be a slippery slope. People who hyper-fixate on recording each meal risk developing eating disorders and an unhealthy relationship with food, which is the opposite of everything you want from healthy eating. A healthy way of tracking your progress is by noting what foods make you feel good and what don’t. Instead of relying on numbers, this is a more holistic approach to eating healthy that prioritizes your mental and physical health.
4. Prioritize Self-Love
Finally, holistic and healthy eating is really a way of eating that benefits your body and mind. Your state of mind, mood, and emotions have more to do with how and what you eat than you think. People tend to associate emotional eating with unhealthy eating, but it’s merely a way to recognize that sometimes, eating is an emotional response — whether negative or positive. For example, we eat to celebrate, and we eat to say goodbye to people.
As humans, we eat not only to satisfy hunger but also to calm certain emotions or intensify them. Practicing self-love and self-care and working on feeling healthier mentally can subsequently help you eat healthier as well. If you feel you are currently struggling mentally or emotionally, it can be helpful to seek help for those concerns before you make any drastic changes to your diet and eating habits. Ultimately, the best motivation for eating healthily can be as simple as wanting to be healthier — physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Ali Scofield is a freelance writer and blogger interested in topics such as health, fitness, and nutrition. Ali is especially fascinated by how technology and the Internet can impact our holistic well-being.
