Thanksgiving is over. I really hope you enjoyed some time with friends and family and chose not to stress for at least that one day about calories.
Now, the holiday is over. The long weekend is over. You’re likely back at home and ready to get back to the grind one last time in 2015. With that said, let’s talk about a few ways you can use your environment to your advantage to create healthy habits that will help you send out this year with a bang. Who knows, maybe you’ll even send a few pounds out before the new year. 🙂
One thing that is completely under-rated when it comes to weight loss is just how important your environment is to your success. Your environment is more than just your physical environment (also includes things like who you hang out with, etc.), but today we’ll focus specifically on making your kitchen and workplace safe zones since that’s where you spend the majority of your time.
Let’s face it. Establishing new behavior patterns is tough and habits don’t become habits overnight. Many people practice destructive eating and exercise behaviors for years. Something you may not have thought about is that when you continue making the same old crappy choices, you’re building and PRACTICING poor habits, whether you want to be or not.
Habits are easy. Change is hard.
The fact that you have so much practice going through the motions of your habits is one of the reasons you can usually follow a very specific meal plan for a few weeks, but there’s no way in hell can you do it forever! Once your excitement and willpower wear thin, you’ll go back to your old ways. You don’t want to hear it, but you’ve probably become really good at things like restricting and binging or just generally eating crap.
Developing new {healthy} habits like prepping food and planning healthy meals ahead of time feels so much harder than what you’ve always done. That is, until you practice healthy habits over and over until they become your new normal. Sure, you’ll have to muster up some willpower to start creating changes, but eventually if you practice making healthy habits easier, by doing things like cleaning out your kitchen and prepping your food ahead of time you’ll keep going…because these healthy habits will be your new well-practiced habits.
Willpower generally gets things started, habits keep things going.
If you rely on willpower for your every move, failure is inevitable. The best decision makers are the ones who know when not to trust themselves. The best decision makers adjust their lifestyles and environments to help them be successful. They make good habits easy. They find a few meals they love and use them often.
Below is one of my favorite go-to meals when I need something my whole family will eat.
Hummus Crusted Chicken {Adapted from this recipe.}
It’s a busy time of year and you likely have extra social events planned over this next month. You’ll be presented with plenty of opportunities to indulge at the office, at parties, with friends, etc. so save your willpower for when you actually need it instead of constantly testing it. One easy way to do this today…give your kitchen a quick makeover.
First thing’s first. Get rid of the Thanksgiving leftovers!
Then, instead of keeping your favorite junk food and booze on hand at all times, make it more difficult to get your hands on things like cupcakes, cookies, beer and candy. It doesn’t mean any food (or drink!) has to be off-limits to you, but just make it a little more challenging to eat foods that are not conducive to your goals. This will help make it much easier to develop, and practice, healthy habits at home.
If a food is in your possession or located in your home, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually eat it.
Once you’ve gotten rid of the Thanksgiving leftovers, toss most of your processed food. It’s much easier to make healthy decisions at home simply by clearing out foods that tempt you most, but don’t make you feel your best.
This list includes, but is not limited to:
- Cereal
- Bread
- Bagels
- Crackers
- Cookies
- All calorie-containing beverages like soda and juice
- Sugar (anything ending in “-ose” is sugar including sucrose, glucose, fructose and high fructose corn syrup)
- Alcohol
Yes, I realize many of you have families or roomates and can’t just trash all the food you don’t want to eat. Two strategies can work if your family members and/or roommates are just not willing to get on board with your new healthy lifestyle.
- Give your kids/spouse/other family members their own cabinet. It’s off limits to you! Stay out of there. For realz.
- Only buy junk food they like and you DO NOT like. At least until you’ve created plenty of new healthy habits at home.
Better yet, try to get everyone (yes, including kids!) on board with eating healthier at home. I have seen it a million times…a client struggles for months or years, but magically she starts to succeed once her husband or family is ready to hop on the healthy eating wagon too!
Fill your kitchen cabinets and refrigerator with yummy, healthy things like fruits, veggies, various meats, eggs, healthy fats (nuts, avocado, etc.) and grains close to their natural form (things like oats, rice, etc. work great for most people). Spend some time building and practicing great habits like chopping up fruits and veggies when you get home from the grocery store, making dinner and preparing your lunches and/or breakfasts ahead of time.
Homework for today…
Makeover your kitchen. Make the good habits easier. Make the bad habits harder. Watch what happens!
That’s it for today…get cleaning and let me know how it goes!
Throwing out food might seem drastic, but it works!
And the good news is once you do it enough, you actually start to learn, so when you’re at the store considering buying some junk food, you’ll think “wait… I’ll just end up throwing this in the trash like I always do” and then you won’t buy it at all!
That’s what happened to me anyway.