There are thousand of articles, programs, books and classes all devoted to this topic. The reason this blog might be helpful to you is because I have taken a few of the simplest and easiest to implement ideas for you to began practicing right now! No time like the present! No need to wait until January 1st. If you begin your small changes now you are creating momentum for the future. One small step at a time.
Keep the ice cream, cookies, and chocolates out of the house.
Make “laziness” work for you by making it harder and more inconvenient to reach for high-calorie, low-nutrition, easy-to-overeat foods.If you want sweets, you have to go get them. At 10 PM, when you’re snuggled into your sofa binge-watching your favorite TV show, it’s going to be a lot harder to motivate yourself to get up and go to the grocery store.
Pro tip: Keep a colorful assortment of dried and fresh fruits around for snacking.
Use a meal plan. Don’t make fresh decisions every day or keep meal choices totally open-ended all the time.
Instead, make decisions in advance and work from a template.
Pro tip: Every few days, sketch out the meals you’ll eat for the next few days. Check the list daily so you know:
what to buy at the grocery store;
what to pre-prep;
what meal you’ll eat at what time (or when you’re really hungry).
Keep chopped, ready-to-eat vegetables in the fridge.
Put them front-and-center so you see them and can get to them easily.
Pro tip: To make your favorite salad veggies even easier, store them “restaurant style”. Clean and sterilize one of your refrigerator’s crispers, dump chopped veggies (loose) into it, and cover them with a damp paper towel and a couple of ice cubes.
Don’t be hungry and in the grocery store at the same time.
Treat grocery shopping like a surgical operation: Have a plan (like your meal list from Tip 3). Get in and get out efficiently. (See if you can make a game of it.)
Pro tip: Focus on the perimeter — the produce, meat, and dairy sections. Don’t even go down the processed food aisles, so you won’t be tempted.
Shop with a basket instead of a cart to limit what you can buy (it sneaks in an arm workout, too).
These tips are courtesy of Pro-Nutrition and are also part of the training I received through ACE while getting my Health Coach certification. While you may have heard them before if your not practicing them now would be an excellent time to start. Obviously this is just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to a healthy eating plan, weight loss and staying the course but it is much easier to make a few small changes and to add to those over a period of time then to take on to much and have a hard time sticking with all the newness of lifestyle change.
As always my goal is to support your forward momentum in a way that is doable and produces results that are on going and sustainable. In support of you and your health, fitness and wellness goals!
Laurie