Your Biggest Struggles With Eating Healthier – Make it Easy
“Right that’s it. I have had enough of feeling like this. I want to eat healthier and exercise more to lose this weight and keep it off once and for all”
Sound familiar?
What happens next in your world? Do you keep up the new eating and exercise regime, or do you go back to your old habits quite quickly? If it’s the latter, read on…
We all want to feel awesome, and we all know food has a huge impact on how great we feel, so it seems logical to throw all our focus into that. Our brain says yep, more fruit and veg = healthier, more exercise = fitter. Both true, BUT our brain also has a naughty habit of wanting to keep you safe… As in, safe in your comfort zone. Old habits can die hard and supermarkets are tempting.
It doesn’t help that we are overloaded with conflicting advice about what is healthy. Should we be clean eating, going vegan, avoiding fat, cutting out sugar, what? Then there are the occasional people who read The Secret and attempt to think themselves thin whilst eating nothing but junk.
All these things we are supposed to do and consider to become the most supreme version of ourselves. Excellent, but again, why is it so blinking hard to stick to for more than a few weeks?
We asked you what your biggest struggles are with keeping up new healthier eating habits, so this week we will be posting them here, one by one, with our tips on how to get through them. You will smash them and feel like a total badass that YOU have control over your habits, not the other way around…
So, let’s kick things off with problem 1:
My biggest struggle is variation and prepping. I’m such a lazy cook. I like quick and easy.
Answer: I love quick and easy too! Having to prep, serve and eat several healthy meals, several times per day, every day, for months and years on end, is enough to make anyone go crazy, especially if you have family to cook for too. Unless of course, you have lots of time on your hands and genuinely enjoy it.
To tackle this common struggle, I ‘ve personally had success with two options and have made a solid habit of them both to give me variation.
Bulking up on any normal meals, and freezing them in portion pots for later use (man I thank myself for doing this, especially when hungry people come in and want something, like now) The prep only happens once but the effort stretches for two or 3 meals, what’s not to love? I also do this for morning smoothies. When you 
next make one, add a load more ingredients into freezer bags ready to go, then all you have to do is empty it into the blender and enjoy.
- Making one-pot/tray dishes. The prep is really quick and minimal, you can just throw it all in and season it right up in many different ways, so the variation is huge. If you took 30 mins-one hour, just once per week, to cook up a few different one tray/pot meals and stash them in the freezer, you can enjoy healthy and satisfying meals all week by simply reheating them. Heck you don’t even need a pot if you are feeling extra lazy, just use tin foil on an oven tray and wrap your meat and veg up in that to cook beautifully, while you go off and do what you need to do. Bin the tin foil after and voila! Tray doesn’t even need washing and you have some gourmet looking food waiting for you. There will be a separate blog on this with recipe ideas!
- Ok there is a 3rd, but I personally don’t use it enough, and that is the slow cooker. There are some fabulous women that manage to think far ahead enough to put ingredients into their slow cooker in the morning, so that by dinner time there is the most succulent dish awaiting her. If you want fuller flavour and more tender meat, this will be the way to get it. I guess I have personaly got into the habit of the first two options so unless I am cooking a stew or similar, I rarely think about the slow cooker!
Give them a try and let us know how you get on! Tomorrow we will be tackling a big struggle for many of us. SUGAR and the problem of wanting it often, especially when we are supposed to be eating healthier…
Have you struggled with keeping up with healthier habits? Tell us in the comments below!