If you have a hard time eating healthy, your problem may simply come down to poor habits. Fortunately, habits can change. Oftentimes we can’t find a fix for the most common eating problem, which is why we end up eating, God knows what. With a huge variety of foods out there, it’s hard to control your eating habits and recognize your eating problems. Here is my list of 10 quick fixes for 10 most common eating problems. Check it out and see what you can do for your health today.
1. If you can’t stop snacking
If you have a weakness for snacks between meals, you easily risk eating too much. To bring your snacking under control, it’s a good idea to change the kind of snack you go for. Rather than grab typical snack foods like cookies, you could resolve to switch to the kind of foods you would have at mealtime. The less simple the foods are that you snack on, the less easy it will be for you to think of reaching for them when it isn’t mealtime.
2. If you love munchies when you watch TV
Studies show that people who eat while engaged in another activity such as television watching, end up eating 50% to 60% more than they do when they don’t have the distraction. If you engage in distracted snacking while doing something else, you need to unlink the two activities. Eating should always be done by itself.
3. If you have to eat each time you’re in a bad mood
Even if you’re responsible for the foods that you choose to eat most of the time, you may have the habit of easily making an exception when you’re in a bad mood, as a special concession for what you’re going through. Once you know how the cycle of poor moods and comfort foods works, you can try to find ways of comforting yourself in other ways.
4. If you give yourself a day off your diet each week
If you work hard to be responsible for your diet all week long, you may feel you deserve to cut yourself some slack over the weekend. A survey by the National Weight Control Registry, though, finds that those who lighten up over the weekends have a 50% greater chance of losing control over their weight than those who always stay vigilant. It’s a much better idea to maintain a practical level of self-control and never let it up.
5. If you often skip your breakfast
While skipping breakfast may be necessary sometimes when an emergency situation turns up, ignoring it as a matter of routine can cost you your health. You may end up being less efficient at work, and less healthy. Breakfast doesn’t have to be an elaborate meal – you only need servings of protein, fruit and whole grains. Even a sandwich and a smoothie will do, as long as it’s healthy.
More: 10 Signs Your Diet is Out of Balance
6. If you don’t have time to cook
In general, ready-to-eat foods are far less healthy than home cooking. If you do have some time to cook, it’s important to give up takeaway foods and start making your own. If cooking for yourself seems too hard at first, easing yourself in is an option. You can start by using partially prepared ingredients from the store like frozen vegetables, rice mix, pre-cooked chicken etc. Over time, you can move to fully making your meals from scratch.
7. You eat on the go
If you do even some eating as you drive, take public transportation, or shop, you’ll usually be distracted enough to not truly notice how much you are eating away. You can also end up with an upset stomach by not chewing and swallowing correctly. It’s important to realize that you pay a serious price with your health if you don’t make enough time to sit down to eat.
8. You eat very quickly
Eating in haste is an ill-advised practice, any way you look at it. Not only do you get no time to chew your food properly, you end up gulping a lot of air down and feel bloated later on. The other problem is that the brain isn’t able to process information from the stomach very quickly. As your stomach begins to signal to the brain that it’s beginning to fill up, it takes the brain 20 minutes to read the signals. If you eat quickly, you will end up eating a lot before your brain has a chance to catch the signal from the stomach. Slow eating, then, can give you a far better chance at keeping the food you eat under control.
9. You don’t practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is all the rage today. To simply focus on what they do when they do it can easily help anyone change unhealthy habits. When you force yourself to be aware of the foods you eat, you should begin to find it easier to keep to a diet.
10. You depend on sweets for energy
If you find yourself constantly running out of energy through the day, you could be tempted to turn to a candy bar or another source of empty nutrients to give yourself a boost. You need to completely give up on sweet foods as a way to boost your energy levels, though. Instead, you can simply switch to foods that have nutrition, in addition to sweetness. Raisins, chocolate-covered peanuts and other sweets that offer some nutritional content, can help.
More: 15 Healthy Snacks to Tame Your Sweet Tooth
All these eating problems sound pretty obvious. don’t they? Yet, many of us overlook them. One way or another, you will develop healthy eating habits, but it’s best to do it as soon as possible in order to avoid the horrible consequences. So, how are you dealing with your eating problems? Let me know. I’ll try to help you fix them.