The hardest thing about dieting to lose weight, lower body fat or whatever isn’t knowing what you should eat, it’s finding the will power to eat what you should and more to the point avoid eating what you know you shouldn’t. It is a sad fact of life but tasty things are generally not good for us.
Here are 5 ways to keep on top of your urges and stay on track:
1: Stay Full
We are evolved to want food because we need it, and our bodies have a clever way of regulating caloric intake – the hungrier you get the more your brain will seek out high calorie foods, like bread, cakes and the like. This is why crash diets rarely work long term; starving yourself just makes you want food. Instead, aim to stay nicely full constantly and you will find you don’t crave naughty food as much.
2: Treat Yourself A Little
Life is no fun if you don’t enjoy your food, personally I look cookies, biscuits etc, and I’m not sure it would be worth it if I could never eat them. So I will treat myself once or twice a week – the golden rule is to treat yourself a little, but not too much.
3: Eat Healthy Food First
This kind of fits in with tip number one – on those occasions that you really want to eat something you shouldn’t, don’t try to resist, but make yourself have a bowl of vegetables first. If you tell yourself that you just need some healthy food first, you will find it easier to be constrained when you eat the tasty food afterwards.
4: Binge Sometimes
This is the best bit of all – perhaps not applicable to everyone though. I like to train with weights, for the sakes of bodybuilding. After a heavy workout I do actually need calories, my body needs them to repair itself. In this situation, if I feed myself lots of carbs most of them will be used up, rather than being stored as fat.
With this in mind, once a week I will do a heavy workout and then treat myself to a large pizza or whatever else I fancy – it’s not ideal, but I look forward to this all week and that knowledge makes it easy to maintain the will power the rest of the week.
5: One Thing At A Time
Finally, when you decide you are going to start living a healthier lifestyle – resist the temptation to go all out in the hopes that you will lose weight quickly, because this sort of drastic change is unlikely to stick anyway. The best sort of diet is one that is a lifestyle, so rather than dramatically changing how you eat, just make a small change every few weeks and work on it slowly until it becomes habit.
