Your Biggest Struggles With Eating Healthier – Part 3: Finding it boring!
This week we are looking at the biggest struggles we come across whilst trying to make healthier eating changes. It’s these very things that can make us slide back to our old habits, within weeks, or even days!
Yesterday we looked at cravings for sweet foods, why we shouldn’t cut all sugar from our diets, and the most important thing we need to do if we eat sugar, other than the natural sugars found in fruit.
Today we are tackling another toughie, finding healthy food boring…
Don’t you just hate the feeling of missing out, like everyone else is eating succulent things draped in tasty sauces and desserts galore and you are stuck with things like lettuce and cabbage? It doesn’t have to be this way!
Here is our next healthy eating dilemma:
“Trying to find ways to spice up or change up the ‘boring’ healthy foods. Figuring out how to incorporate them so they merged with our tastes and didn’t feel like an extra ‘healthy add-on’ that we had to endure.”
Yes it can feel challenging to eat lots of vegetables and healthy foods because lets face it some of it doesn’t taste great by itself. Wheatgrass for instance, sheesh that stuff is fowl on its own!
It’s pretty normal to want to smother the cauliflower in a creamy cheese sauce, and the pasta and whatever else cheese sauce can go on. It’s also normal to think that good food like lasagna or burger and chips are the things that you should be cutting out to replace with these boring healthy foods, or adding on side salad just because you ‘have’ to.
Can I just say that it doesn’t have to be this way?
When you do have the rich, heavy meals, just have them earlier on in the day rather than later, and eat healthy portion sizes. Remember we can have pretty much whatever we want if we don’t have too much of it, or eat it too regularly.
Before going for a second portion, give your body time to digest for around 20 minutes, drink water, then decide if you really need it.
Make Your Snacks Healthier
Another important point if you really want to make healthier changes, is to be mindful of what you eat outside of your main meals. That way you won’t feel forced to make every meal a super healthy one.
It’s very often what goes on outside of breakfast, lunch and dinner that contributes most to our waistlines and health problems (sugar laiden soft drinks seriously don’t help either). If you have three large meals per day with sides or seconds, plus snacks as well, you will definitely feel and see the effects after a while, if you are not doing lots of exercise to burn off the extra food. It will get stored away for energy consumption later on.
If you are only eating three meals per day then your mealtimes are there to really be enjoyed. You don’t work all day and take care of family to then expect to feel satisfied from a diet meal.
Try writing a food diary for one week and see how often you eat and drink outside of your three meals, it may be that is the thing that could be made healthier to start with, by making snack swaps for healthier options and drinking more water.
Make Your Meals Healthier
If you want to make your favourite dishes healthier without feeling like it’s an add on, this will come with time as you get used to trying different things and having them more regularly, but you can also spruce up your current dishes without hassle. Here is a blog we wrote earlier on How To make Your Favourite Meals Healthier. Then we wrote Part 2 which includes our top tips on preparing, cooking, serving and eating in healthier ways.
As you can see from the previous blogs, you can make even the blandest, boring foods into something divine, with the help of good old seasonings. Herbs, spices,
roots, vinegars, it’s all good! You can make the same piece of chicken taste like a hundred different things. You can make the same carrot taste like a hundred different things. You can even make a salad so good you want to start munching from the bowl before it has hit the table.
How about trying some naughty-tasting, but healthy desserts? I discovered a delicious chocolate donut flavour seasoning by Flavor God which I love adding to plain natural, or Greek yogurt. It tastes like a yummy chocolate donut flavored dessert that really hits the spot, but without all the guilt! There are loads of healthier dessert recipes out there, so I will do another post on this to share my favourites!
I hope this and the two previous blogs gives you some inspiration to make your food and body healthier and in turn, happier. We love to hear from you, tell us your thoughts and struggles with eating healthier in the comments below 🙂