Maintaining Healthy Eating Habits

I recently read a question somebody had posted on a forum about maintaining a healthy eating habit. She had made some changes to her diet, and exercise and had the exercise part down, but was struggling with the eating part.

We all have those moments, where we are 'good' for a week, then splurge. I find this even more true on fad diets. Any diet that requires you do eliminate a food, or drastically alter your eating like the no carb fads, as well as the low carb diets result in a binge eating of just those foods your not suppose to eat.

The trick to maintaining a healthy eating habit is to maintain a diet that you can stick with for life.

Practical tips to maintain healthy eating:

• Clean out the pantry! Get rid of the chips, cookies, and high fat unhealthy snack foods. If you allow them in your house it will be too tempting to avoid them completely, especially if other household members are eating them. We never keep chips in the house for that reason, I have no power against them. Same with ice cream. We get it as a treat from time to time but I have no power against it, and if its there I eat it!
• Add variety to your diet. The more healthy food choices you have the better. By adding more choices you will help to prevent the boredom in your diet. There are so many healthy choices out there, expand your liking of them. :-)
• Eat your breakfast! Studies show that eating breakfast will reduce the amount of food you eat the rest of the day. Load up on a high fiber diet to keep you full throughout the morning.
• Avoid the restrictive eating diet. Just like I said before, if you restrict food from your diet completely you will likely fail and end up overeating because of that feeling of lacking all those foods you craved, like carbs!
• Stay away from salt. Most high sodium foods are unhealthy in many other ways as well. Just by avoiding high sodium foods, you will be eating better.
• Plan ahead! Pack a lunch, keep snacks in the car, plan your meals, etc. The more prepared you are the better you will be at avoiding the drive-through.
• Stick with it. One of the most important things to eating healthy is just sticking with it. Sometimes it is hard in the beginning but the longer you stick with it the easier it becomes, and eventually it becomes a way of life.

I hope these are some tips you will find useful.

Do you have any to add? Lets keep the list going.