How to improve your eating habits

Eating healthy can sometimes seem challenging especially if you’re trying to change your whole diet. It’s better to start by reducing the amount of sugar that you consume as opposed to cutting it out completely. Sugar is addictive and believe me I have tried to cut sugar out from my husband’s diet completely and after a week he literally went crazy. I quickly gave in and let him have as much sugar as he wanted. In hindsight I should have encouraged him to reduce his intake of sugar as opposed to completely removing it.

When it comes to eating in general, we have been told that eating too much fat is bad, on the contrary, eating good fat is very healthy and it can help those who want to lose weight. I was vegan for 9 years, and in that time (after the initial 3 years of being vegan) I weighed more than I do now after going back to being an omnivore, so what changed? Well being on a vegan diet you consume a lot of carbs in the form of rice, potatoes, bread, vegan meat (which has a lot of wheat), pasta etc. Therefore, as vegans we relied more on the carbs to keep us full in comparison to after switching back to eating animal products we eat more meat, fish, eggs etc, which makes us stay fuller for longer (I know understand why my Mum would say”you get hungry often because you don’t eat animal products” at the time I thought what a bizarre thing to say but now I completely understand what she meant! Eating more good fats means that we rarely snack on sugar laden treats, or carbs for snacks in between meals.

Thus, reducing carbohydrates and sugar should be on top of the list, but it has to be done slowly. For example, if you’re having porridge for breakfast, instead of having two tablespoons of sugar or honey, add 1 tablespoon instead. Then add almond butter and a bit of cream which has low naturally occurring sugars that way, you don’t miss the extra tablespoon of sugar that much. Then after a week or so try having the porridge with no sugar at all, you will find that oats have a natural sweetness to them and don’t need sugar at all.

The key here is to be open to changing your previously learned eating habits and focusing on learning new ways of looking at food, look at it as fuel for the body. At first new meals can be hard to to keep up with so give yourself a treat once a week where you can make yourself a cake which will have less sugar and carbs than your shop bought one, add more eggs and less flour, use honey instead of sugar but don’t use too much, use half of what the recipe calls for. Eventually switch to homemade stevia instead of honey (I will write a blog post about this soon).

These steps will help you improve your overall eating habits, eat more good fats; avocados, beef, salmon, nitrite free bacon, chicken, lamb, eggs etc. Include lots more low sugar vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts as well as some salads.

If you eat two bars of chocolate a day, try to cut down to 1 bar and eventually have it as a treat once a week, better yet cut it out completely and keep it for special occasions but do this over a period of time, depending on what your health goals are!

Quick Takeaways:

• Reducing sugar is important, the ultimate goal is to stop consuming sugar altogether but this has to be implemented gradually.
• Don’t stress over it, take baby steps, if on some days you don’t do as well as you would have liked to; don’t give up, continue trying and improving, it will work eventually!
• Think of food as fuel for your body, what you put in, will be what gives you good health or bad health.
• Focus on switching out carbs and sugar for healthier choices, by reducing the quantity and slowly replacing it with healthier options
• Plan ahead, search for recipes a few days before so that you have the good ingredients ready.