With Christmas, New Year and Valentine festivities out of the way, it is time to take control of your health and the best place to start is by checking eating habits. It takes a while to build habits, so do not expect to get it right away. Just take it one day at a time and you’re on your way to a healthier 2019.
Mindful Eating
Many of us cannot remember what we have eaten in the course of a week because most of the time we are multi-tasking-eating while probably texting, watching a show or scrolling through your social media feed. Mindful eating is paying attention to your food right from what you purchase, where you buy from, how you cook it, how you eat it and more. Mindful eating requires a lot more thought than eating according to cravings or just not paying attention at all to what you consume. The benefits of mindful eating are immense; it will help you lose weight, help you watch what you spend on food, reduce your binge eating and generally make you feel better.
Make Your Own Meals
There are so many benefits of making your own food; eating homemade food saves you money because it is always cheaper than eating out. It will save you time especially if you batch cook. It is way healthier because you know what ingredients you cook with and you can make healthier decisions to omit some not-so-healthy food while including more of what your body truly needs, you basically control the nutritional intake of your meals. This is especially useful if you are allergic to certain foods like nuts, seafood, gluten and more.
If you are someone that tends to drink a lot of energy drinks, fizzy drinks, alcohol, consider reducing your intake of these fluids and drink more water instead. Drinking more water is a habit that will help you all your life if you can adopt it early enough. Water is the best detoxifier and helps get rid of toxins through urine and sweat. Drinking water helps boost your metabolism and aids in digesting your food properly. Drinking water can even aid weight loss by suppressing your need to eat more. Water keeps your skin flourishing which reduces the signs of ageing. If you get frequent headaches, it is advisable to drink more water because some headaches are cause by dehydration. Also, dehydration can cause bad breath, drink more water to get rid of food particles. Water basically keeps you alive!
Try To Meal Prep
There are many benefits for meal prepping; it saves time and money. When you meal prep, you can plan in advance what you should be eating and you are less likely to make poor food choices. Meal prepping is worth your time and a healthy eating habit to adopt for 2019.
Watch Your Portions
Portion control is very important when it comes to adopting healthy eating habits. If you struggle with eating way more than you should it is advisable that you gradually reduce the amount of food you consume and over time your stomach will get used to the smaller portions which in turn will be great for your overall health. A starting point is to get out your measuring cups so that you can measure your food, you can use scales also. Once you are accustomed to measuring your food intake at home, you can easily eyeball your food portions when you eat out. Another tip to help with portion control is using smaller plates to serve your meals; it gives the illusion of a fully packed plate. We tend to fill our plates no matter what size it is, so it is better to use a smaller plate than a standard sized plate.
Don’t Starve Yourself
Starving oneself is probably intentional or unintentional. If it is intentional, you will need to find a way to stop because it is not a healthy way to live and cannot be sustained long term, get some help. Perhaps you are one of those that get caught up in your daily activities that you forget you have not had breakfast and lunch, yet it is almost dinner time, you need a reminder. Either ways, starving oneself is not beneficial to your health-starvation can lead to bone loss, constipation, malnutrition, dehydration, fatigue, high blood pressure electrolyte imbalance and more. When you starve yourself, you tend to succumb to binge eating, or just eating whatever you can find which may not necessarily be the healthy option. The most productive way to stop starving yourself is to plan your mealtimes, including snack times, make time for food.
[TheGuardian]
