The Psychology of Healthy Eating Habits
Mindset tips to change your current habits and enhance your health
During my time in graduate school, I began to develop symptoms I believed to be in line with those of heart disease (chest pains, palpitations, shortness of breath, etc). I decided this could not be ignored. After multiple doctor visits, I discovered a menacing organ was not trying to assassinate me from the inside out. I had been suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
At the time I weighed 250 lbs, which was much higher than the recommended weight for someone my height (BMI of 38). It was apparent to me that if I did not make a dramatic shift in my life these mental symptoms of anxiety could become the consequences of physical disease. I decided to use my symptoms as inspiration to get into shape. In the course of the next 8 months, I lost over 70 lbs using a moderate diet and exercise regimen. This was not easy, however, it was not as difficult as expected.
Changing the way you look at dieting and exercise can make it easier to implement new habits and make lasting changes to your health.
Healthy habits and weight loss have become synonymous, but I can not stress enough the difference between these two subjects. The way you look is completely irrelevant in this context, and this is not a post about losing weight. There is a difference between fat-shaming and helping someone understand the power of a healthy lifestyle.
There is a shallow form of self-love out there in the self-help community right now that you should love and celebrate yourself the way you are. I am here to tell you that you can still love yourself the way you are while trying to better yourself. Loving yourself does not mean accepting yourself the way you are. It means being gentle with and respecting yourself during your journey in this life.
If your eating habits are negatively affecting your health then you need to work on better habits and ways to make them easier to implement daily. Poor nutrition and lack of physical activity do not only impact your body physically, in many cases it can cause you to be sluggish mentally as well. Whether we like it or not, what we eat matters. At its essence, food is simply the fuel that keeps our bodies going. The body uses carbohydrates, fats, and proteins to keep itself functioning. From our brains to our hearts, the organs in our bodies can not work properly without food.
The first step in building healthy habits is to know how many calories a day you should be consuming.
Calorie counting is not to be a strict number that you need to give any importance to in your mind other than being a general marker of approximate calorie intake for you and your level of physical activity. A calorie goal can also be a powerful tool in weight loss if that is something you are interested in, but it is important to understand how many calories you should be eating daily for the purposes of maintaining healthy eating habits. (Here is a resource to check out to get an idea of where you need to be.
These calories should be broken down into carbs, fats, and proteins with a split of about 40% of calories coming from carbs, 30% from fats, and 30% from protein. These goals can further be tuned for specific goals, but just as a general idea this is a good place to start. These numbers can be easily calculated by looking at the back of packages you eat or a simple internet search. People can also get into trouble thinking they need to enjoy every meal.
Sometimes you just need to eat without compromising your long term goals for short term pleasure.
If I cannot commit enough time to make a delicious, balanced meal then I am just going to make something as quickly as I can, as nutritious and filling as possible, and move on with my day. My go-to breakfast is either fruit and greek yogurt with some granola or a protein bar and a banana. I choose these for the simple reasons that they are nutritious and, most importantly, they are E-A-S-Y.
Making things easier on yourself is one of the most important things you can do to maintain healthy habits.
Another problem that comes with seeking enjoyment from meals is this mentality could lead to eating for comfort and more dangerously to binging and overeating. It can be especially hard dealing with this since many of the foods we eat are genetically modified to be addictive. With the knowledge, we currently have on the disastrous health effects of foods infused with unnecessary amounts of sugars and fats it would be disingenuous to treat them as lightly as we have in the past. Consistently seeking comfort in these foods and over-indulging in them is, in theory, no different than seeking comfort in drugs of abuse. I have linked a study here that shows some of the similarities between drugs of abuse and GMO food.
Obesity and being overweight contributes to at least 2.8 million deaths per year according to the World Health Organization. In many cases, these deaths could have been preventable with the proper education and a corresponding change in mindset. A change to caring about long-term health as opposed to seeking comfort in the present moment.
Everything in the world has become so polarized that people only see two clear sides to every issue in our society. In one camp, there are the health nuts saying you need to count every calorie and go to the gym every day in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle. On the other side, you have those yelling at you to love yourself the way you are and that you don’t need to change anything about yourself.
Life is about balance. You can love yourself and still work on getting better every day. There is a difference between the true compassion of guiding someone towards a difficult task knowing it is in their best interest and the blind compassion that comes from trying to help while actually increasing their chances of future suffering.
Blind compassion tells you should just accept what you look like and you should always do whatever makes you happy to avoid any pain. True compassion tells you to slow down and think about the choices you make regarding your future and that it is okay to experience some pain and discomfort for your self-growth.
You can not claim to love somebody if you are not putting their best interests into consideration and you can not claim you love yourself if you are consistently damaging your health with poor choices.
It is easy to say you can not do something, it is much more difficult to try hard at it every day. If you care about improving your situation enough then you will do it most days and that is a celebration. It is not a diet that you need to be worried about breaking.
As long as you eat balanced meals one time more often this week than you did last week, or a couple of times more next month than you did this month then you are setting yourself up for long-term success. Do not get discouraged when you stray away from your goals, because realizing you are off track is the first step to getting back on. This is about discipline and doing things that make you uncomfortable because you know they are setting you up to be the person you want to be in the future. That is real self-love, is it not?
