Most all of us desire to eat healthy. We want to live a healthy life; and taking good care of ourselves, and eating healthy and well is a crucial step towards achieving that. However, our eating habits are what often get in the way. The inability to be consistent when it comes to making healthy food choices affects our decisions when it comes to food and could have ripple effects far beyond the plate.
We all have some good and bad eating habits that are ingrained into our system. However, giving up the bad eating habits requires a great amount of discipline. Today, I’m sharing a guide for how to break bad eating habits effectively.
How Do You Break Bad Eating Habits
Bad eating habits can negatively affect our health in many areas overall. Learning how to break bad eating habits like skipping meals, regulating your portion sizes, and mastering healthier eating can help encourage you to get a leg up in life when it comes to leading a healthy lifestyle.
How Can Bad Eating Habits Affect Your Health
Poor eating habits can have negative impacts on your health including weight grain, nutrient deficiencies, chronic diseases, and mental health and illnesses.
We all know that bad eating habits like eating too much or unhealthy eating can lead to weight gain. But studies also show that eating too close to bed time not only affects your sleep cycle, but over time can lead to weight gain and contribute to an increase in blood pressure and heart disease. Poor diets can also increase one’s risk for chronic diseases like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers.
Learn how to break them so you can give your body what it needs to properly function and so you can experience what it’s like to live a healthy life.
How To Break Bad Eating Habits
There are a number of things you can do to help break bad eating habits and take control over your health and well-being. Here are a few to help you get going and step foot in a better direction.
Evaluating your habits
Some examples of bad eating habits include skipping meals, eating too fast, eating too close to bed, portion sizes that are too large, and unhealthy eating habits to name a few. To help turn things around, start paying attention to the bad eating habits you may be falling victim to and are looking to break.
Relearning new habits
Sometimes either out of sheer busyness or in a pure effort for losing weight, sometimes people take on the bad habit of skipping meals or breakfast for example. Don’t do that. Weight loss can still be achieved even without skipping meals. What’s important is improving your eating by ensuring you get adequate protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates into your diet. Essentially, what you want to focus on is getting your proper macronutrients and micronutrients first. You can do this by reaching for healthier alternatives like a healthy smoothie rather than a milkshake, water over sodas, or a healthy snack like a piece of fruit rather than cookies.
I’m not saying you can never enjoy treats, you definitely can. It’s best to do so in moderation, after first making sure you’ve given your body the proper nutrients it needs to function and thrive.
Using technology
Use technology to help you break bad habits and adapt healthy eating habits. For some tasks like counting calories or monitoring how much protein or carbs you’ve consumed for the day, technology is your best friend. Some great tools recommended by registered dietitians that you can try are:
Calorie Counter by Lose It! when you want to keep track of the calories in your meals and learn how to stop overeating.
The VeSync scale, which helps you pull up data regarding your body fat, weight, BMI, and more.
My Fitness Pal app for tracking your macros and physical activity levels and