Healthy Eating Habits by Rima Bazzi
Every daily choice you make can become a habit. Your brain then performs it without full consciousness as if it’s set on auto-pilot mode; therefore, it controls you and impacts different areas of your life. Building healthy habits has a positive ripple effect on your routines, so why not consciously replace negative habits with better serving ones? We’ve all heard the phrase “you need 21 days to form a habit”, so why not use these days wisely by making healthy choices that serve you? Personal coach mentor Rima Bazzi will teach you how to replace bad eating habits and how to sustain your new healthy habits for the long term.
How to build a healthy eating habit?
Habits, especially healthy ones, do not appear out of thin air. There is no magic word that turns your life upside down for the better, but there are some actions you can take to change the negatives into positives.
First of all, we tend to think and act in extremes. Either we’re eating healthy and perfectly well all the time, or we’re binging and overindulging in all of our cravings that we had deprived ourselves of eating. This often stems from the wrong belief that in order to reach your ideal body weight, you need to eat healthy, clean food all the time. However, healthy eating can mean different things to different people. For some, healthy eating means cutting out all refined carbs and all refined sugars. For others, healthy eating is about limiting their calorie intake or eating only organic and raw foods.
In general, when we’re seeking perfection in our eating habits, we’re setting very unrealistic standards for ourselves with very rigid rules. Instead of benefitting from this new lifestyle, we end up affecting negatively our emotional and mental wellbeing. This instability and negativity in our emotional and mental state will reflect negatively on our eating habits. Rima’s advice to you is to seek balance in everything that you do.
“There is no such thing as perfect eating, and it’s impossible to sustain that for the long term,” says Rima. So start replacing one bad habit with a good one at a time. Don’t overwhelm your brain with all the changes you want to create overnight. This habit can be as small as eating more fruits on a daily basis or drinking more water instead of drinking juice. If you feel like indulging yourself, it’s okay. Progress is not linear. You need to sit back and realize that this behavior does not work in favor of the person you are trying to become. Later on, when tempted, you will make the better choice.
How to maintain a healthy eating habit?
In a world that seeks instant gratification, do not give up quickly. As was mentioned previously, “you need 21 days to form a habit”. Changes will not happen overnight. If you’re not patient with your body, you add stress from not losing weight quickly, for example. So whatever habit you’re trying to break, visualize yourself succeeding and happy about the changes you made. You’ll be able to resist the tiny voice in your head telling you to break the habit.
Tip number two demands that you celebrate your wins. No matter how small they may be. If you never ate fruits during the day and you manage to eat even one, celebrate that. Write it down in your notes app, a habit tracker app, or an old-fashioned notebook. Make sure that when rewarding yourself, you don’t enforce your bad eating habits.
Maintaining a healthy eating habit tip number three is: out of sight, out of mind! Remove all triggers of the bad habit you are trying to replace in your environment whether at home or work. By doing so, you force your environment to work for you, not against you.
The lesson here is to take this process step by step and not drastically change your eating habits. The more important lesson is to have fun and stay healthy!
If you have any more questions, we are here to help.