What Can You Do To Improve Your Eating Habits?

No one likes going on a diet. Not only are they restrictive, but science also shows they rarely work. Most dieters regain all their weight within the next year. If diets don’t work, what should you be doing?

If you make small tweaks to improve your eating habits it can help you reduce your weight and live a healthier lifestyle. The great thing about these small adjustments is that you’ll barely notice them. Here are 4 simple hacks that you can do to improve your eating habits.

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4 Simple Hacks To Improve Your Eating Habits

Have a Plan

It’s very easy to get lost in the menu at your favorite restaurant. Many people don’t go into a restaurant with a plan on what they’ll have to eat. Any time you go out to eat, you must have a plan. Prior to going out to eat, check out the restaurant’s menu to see what fits with your healthy eating.

Aside from having a plan when you go into a restaurant, having a plan for your daily meals will help get you through when faced with unhealthy options. Many people who meal plan and meal prep have great success avoiding the temptations of office doughnuts or cake.

The reason for the success is that they have access to food they’ve already prepared. In their mind, they already know they’re going to have their whole-grain oats for breakfast. The doughnuts no longer become a temptation.

Track Your Food and Mood

A food journal consists of more than just writing down what you’ve eaten. A food journal will write down what you eat as well as how you felt when eating. Journaling this way can help you deal with emotional eating. Food journaling can also help you identify triggers that cause you to dive into a half-gallon of chunky monkey ice cream.

Prevention Magazine notes that people who use food journals can lose an average of 13 pounds in six months. This was twice the amount of weight as those who didn’t choose to use a food journal. Doubling your weight loss by keeping a small log of what you eat and how you felt seems like a win–win situation.

Skip the Center Aisles

When grocery shopping, Fitness Magazine encourages you to skip the center aisles of your local grocery store. This is because your grocery store packs all the junk food into the center aisles. The fresh produce, meat, dairy, and grains are all located on the outer ring of the supermarket.

There’s no reason for you to even enter the center. By changing your shopping habits, you can easily increase your intake of healthy, whole foods.

Reflect, Replace, Reinforce

The Center for Disease Control suggests that you reflect, replace, and reinforce your eating habits. This strategy has you create a list of all your eating habits. You highlight the eating habits that may be causing you to overeat. Then you look for cues that are in your food diary that may have caused you to overeat.

Finally, you replace the negative eating habits with healthy ones. This is a small tweak since you will already be food journaling. This step just encourages you to review your food journal with a critical thinking mind. Identify the things that keep you in an unhealthy eating pattern. Then eliminate them.

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Dieting isnt going to get you to your goal. However, these four small tweaks to your behavior can help you achieve your goal of healthy eating habits for life. Understanding how important it is to have a plan along with food journaling and shopping the outer aisles will get you farther than any crash diet could.

You probably already know that the way you choose to live your life has some effect on how long you’ll live. But, believe it or not, we do actually have some degree of control over our life expectancy! If you want to know exactly where you should be focusing your efforts to live a healthier lifestyle check out my free report Top 9 Things You Can Do For Your Health To Help You Live Longer. The choices you make about your lifestyle don’t mean that you and your loved ones have to live shorter lives.