TRY IT: Create a Psychological Profile Before Beginning Your Diet

Image: Thomas Hawk

If you read this blog long enough, you will definitely get sick of references to LifeHacker. I can’t help it. It’s the best site on the internet (yes, I’ve seen all of them).

This post is right up my hyper-individualized alley.

Basically, the author advocates figuring out the basics of your food preferences and triggers BEFORE starting on your new eating program.

Some of his suggestions (and I quote):

• Before starting your diet, try restricting certain foods for a few days and see how you react once you can have them again. Do you rush out to eat them the moment you’re able? If you find yourself in a moment of weakness, try to step back and figure out why you’re craving a certain food. Did something bad happen? Are you stressed? Are you simple just hungry and could avoid eating it by eating something else?
• When you start your diet, take a practice week (or at least a few days if you have a lot of self-control). Use this time to allow yourself to slip up so you can figure out why you’re doing it. You can use this information later to help you succeed in your dieting goals.
• When following the diet, if you find yourself having a strong reaction to a meal—good or bad—make note of it and assess why that might be. If you’re simply enjoying the food, it’s a good meal to remember and repeat. If you’ve had an especially good or bad day, however, it’s worth noting that your mood may be coloring your experience. You don’t want to assign too much praise or criticism to a meal when you’re in a heightened emotional state.

This is a similar tactic to keeping an eating journal – your feelings during the day and how that affected your food choices, instead of just a food journal of what you jammed in your pie hole.

What are some other ways to trial run a new eating program? How can you implement your findings to make changes in your eating habits more successful? What are some food and situational triggers that you have discovered?

TRY IT: Focus on Immediate Benefits

This one is inspired by the blog “Blond and Balanced.”

START A SNOWBALL

Have you ever heard of a debt snowball? My cousin introduced this concept to me as she and her husband were trying to pay off a lot of debt from college and starting a family.

Traditional logic has you pay off the highest interest loans first.  So, if you have a 15% card, a 10% card, a 6% mortgage and a 4% student loan, then that’s the order you pay them off in.

The “Debt Snowball” ignores the logic of saving money and instead focuses on something that Americans are very fond of – immediate gratification.

If you like something, you keep doing it, right?

So, the debt snowball has you pay off the lowest BALANCE first. Then you get the warm fuzzies from that success and want to keep on attacking your debt.

A little off-topic, but this TRY IT works the same way.

FOCUS ON TODAY

One of the top motivators for getting healthy is to prevent disease and increase longevity.

Right, we all want to live a long time and not as decrepit old people.

Unfortunately, our human brains are really geared toward pleasure now instead of reward later.

So, while you’re still working towards a long, healthy life, focusing on benefits today might keep you climbing on to the treadmill and putting back that second donut.

WARM FUZZIES?

If there is anything you like about exercising and eating right – anything at all – focusing on that might help you keep making good choices.

Here’s Amber’s list of immediate workout benefits, maybe some of these apply to you:

1. The satisfaction you feel after a workout. The “aftertaste” as she calls it.

2. Unwinding and stress relief after a long day.

3. Not feeling like crap for skipping a workout.

4. Considering that you’re just going to waste that hour anyway (be honest, you were going to watch Survivor or some crap like that).

5. Creative inspiration. Having time to yourself is pretty rare. You might actually *think* of something.

6. Or you can use working out as an excuse to get out and see people – with a buddy, in a class, stalking that guy at your gym…

So what got you off the couch today? What reward do you get from making the right lifestyle choices? Better sleep? Workout afterglow? Not having to run to the bathroom after chowing down on a fist-full of deep-fried “food”?

TRY IT: Eat Better, Not Less

Image: Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton

As part of a series on the common New Year’s resolution of losing weight, LifeHacker covered some tips on changing what you eat instead of how much you eat.

This is advice I often give to people who are new to making lifestyle changes.

Sometimes I even suggest eating MORE – adding healthy fruits/veg/whole wheat/yogurt on top of normal meals  – to start the transition to a better diet.

The LifeHacker post covers:

• Using basic recipes to incorporate new, healthier foods into your diet.
• Simplifying your “diet” – in other words, try to eat less meat or more veggies instead of following a complex regime set out in many diet books.
• Use rice cookers, crockpots and microwaves to simplify cooking.
• Follow the USDA Food Pyramid for easy food guidelines.

I loved this article because it really focuses on reducing the barriers that most people face to healthy eating.

Changing habits can be overwhelming, so making simple first steps can make the difference between giving up or changing your life. Of course, everyone is different so if any of this advice sounds hard/stupid/boring, don’t do it!

Find changes that are comfortable for you and when those are easy-peasey, move on to the next step.

On a personal note, my husband would be dead of starvation if we didn’t have a slow cooker (crockpot, same thing). You can find them for literally $20. You cut up veggies, throw them on top of meat/beans/rice/lentils/spices, hit a button, come back in 6-10 hours and eat it. It can be a big help if the food preparation part of healthy eating seems like torture.

So, what are ways that you’ve simplified your eating plan? Do you focus on eating well or eating less? What kitchen tools and tricks have made healthy eating a breeze for your household?