What's YOUR biggest obstacle to eating healthy?
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Parties!! Too much good food at arms reach is bad news.
I was tested recently @ a paty with a ton of goodies & I did not give in to the temptation. When you can refuse to give in to junk food & control your portions of good food you know you have control of your own destiny...
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#1- My own excuse -Juggling 3 kiddos <one a 8mo old baby > after work and having hot food show up at my door really makes my life easier.
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brightresolve wrote: »However YOU define "eating healthy" - what stops or trips you?
Me, I mess up when I am stressed and tired, and think I need a "treat" to reward me for prior good behavior. And, when I mess up my day, I tend to eat outside my normal limits because "I'm already over."
My diet consists largely of whole foods and meals prepared from scratch, whole ingredients or minimally processed foods like cans of tomatoes and whatnot. This stuff makes up probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of my diet. I'm a pretty solid in the kitchen and so is my wife so all of this good, wholesome nutrition is also pretty delicious...in other words, I never feel or perceive that I'm eating "diet food" or anything...it's all awesomeness and I enjoy eating this way so I can't really say there are any obstacles in my way per sei...I also need around 3,000 calories or so to maintain so I'm certainly not deprived, even when I'm in a cut.
I do eat some "junk" from time to time and I overeat from time to time, but not to the extent that it is particularly relevant to my diet and my goals as a whole. I'm a little loser with things on the weekends in terms of doing things like going out for pizza or grabbing some enchiladas from one of my favorite New Mexican joints or some fish 'n chips at the pub...but I'm also a lot more active on the weekends and everything pretty much evens out.
Probably the biggest impediment for me early on was craft beer...I love a good craft beer and was in the habit of drinking beer most nights of the week which was particularly difficult to fit in when I was initially losing weight a few years ago...I broke the habit of nightly drinking and don't really drink during the week anymore save for the random glass of wine or something on a Thursday evening...but I pretty much keep it to Friday and Saturday and that has worked fine for me.
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Nothing has stopped me from eating healthy. Eating healthy would be eating in a manner that keeps you healthy, and I'm healthy.0
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I do like salty and sweet foods, while at the same time I have never had to worry about excess body fat. I'm very slender (at the far low end of the healthy BMI range) and also am fairly active. Sometimes it's a struggle because I know I can pack away a lot of junk food and still not gain weight, while this is not true for most of the population.1
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My obstacle is insomnia and the sweet cravings that come while I'm awake in the wee hours of the morning.0
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Chocolate. I try to give in occasionally with diet hot cocoa or a piece of sugar free chocolate just so I don't feel completely deprived.0
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For me it's having a severeGI disease which makes me unable to eat most fruits and vegetables (none, other than banana raw, a few pureed and cooked to death), no seeds, nuts, legumes, low fiber, garlic, spices, lactose and a few other things.0
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Money, as in having enough to buy the foods I want rather than relying on relatives to buy for me.0
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For me, its the financial aspect of it. When the power or gas or water gets turned off, you could show me all the 'what $20 really get you' buzzfeed articles in the world, and it wouldnt change the fact that as of that moment, it would be cheaper and easier to go buy a pizza. Having food but not having a way to cook it (or even store it, in some cases) is really detrimental to eating healthy. And i think thats something a lot of people dont think about in the whole, eating healthy isnt expensive debate. No, vegetables generally are not more expensive then fast food. But bills and appliances are. If our oven were to die on us right now, it would literally be a year before we could replace or fix it.0
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Also eating enough calories. I dont like eating in the morning, and we dont have the bugdget for snacks, so i pretty much have to split my calorie goal between lunch and dinner.0
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Treats/Comfort eating. Today I had a crummy appointment at the Optometrist, and I almost stopped by Whole Foods to partake of the evil cookies by the pound (it legit would have been 1 or 2 cookies. Maybe 3....dangit) because 'I deserved it'. I talked myself out of it, but it's a close call. I understand I use foods, especially sweet and cheesey foods, as a eating crutch. Last Friday I was able to say no to the spice cake (put right in my face, literally) with no issue.0
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beer0
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Girl Scout Cookies ( Just yesterday I was so tempted to buy a box, but instead gave the girl the money and told her to add it a donation but keep the cookies, my NSV for the day)....In the summer soft serve ice cream cones...and never knowing what to make!
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All the food floating around at work... donuts, cookies, sometimes whole meals. At home I don't buy things so I won't eat them, but at work it's another story. Today I had a cookie.0
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Meal prep. I work 7 days a week and sometimes I just don't feel like doing it. If I don't meal prep then I wake up with no lunch and then my choices are to: 1) Cook lunch and get to work later than I would like; 2) Not eat anything until I get home (but then I have a hard time eating enough calories); 3) Eat out - which I like to limit because a) I have less control over what is in the food; b) it kills me to spend money because of my laziness when I'd much rather spend it on fun stuff; c) There's only so much at Panera Bread I like to eat.
I really like structuring my meals. I listened to a TED Talk once where this guy talked about automating certain things in life because he found it was less stressful and it really resonated with me. There's so many other things to worry about in life that I'd rather take 'what to eat' off my plate (pun intended). I can eat the same stuff for lunch everyday I just need.... to prep it.
ETA: Punctuation.0 -
Laziness is my obstacle, I have a hard time prompting myself to cut up some veggies and bring those with hummus, or a nice boiled egg instead of grabbing a bag of chips, and I find them even more difficult to log than a bag of chips because weighing and cutting and bleh.
I found putting aside an hour or two one day a week to prep some of my food is very helpful. So I'll cook about 5 chicken breasts for the week, cut up all my veggies and weigh them and boil a couple of eggs and just average those things out for seven days and log them at once, then anything extra I use on top of that I just log the day of, saves a lot of time .1 -
lthames0810 wrote: »My obstacle is insomnia and the sweet cravings that come while I'm awake in the wee hours of the morning.
This for me too - especially when I know that just 200 cal of energy bar type carbos will knock me right out for at least the remaining 4 hours of the night - I sometimes succumb, and it's not a big deal as long as it doesn't put me over. ... it used to be 600-1200 cals in the middle of the night, which made me feel like crap!
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Jillian, Nikki, great inspiration about preparing and planning for success. Thanks for the reminders!0
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I wish I could ride a bike for 5.5 hours...Wow!inglysh731 wrote: »Sometimes I simply don't know what I should even eat... or how much.
Rode the bike for 5.5 hrs today... had a pound of pasta salad, 2 lb pork tenderloin, a hefty sweet potato... still need to eat 1200-1500 calories... but of what, I have no idea.
I have a case of Guinness in the garage, kind've want to drink the calories.
Edit: Sometimes I wish that I was told what to eat instead of having to figure it out myself.
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For me, it's the fact that I hate to cook. I mean just HATE it. I don't like things that take even 30 minutes to make. I want instant gratification. So you see how easy it is to rely on takeout in this situation.
I've been combatting this by buying a lot of frozen stuff. Frozen veggies, frozen fully-cooked chicken breasts, etc., that I can just throw in the microwave and be done with it. Seems to be working okay.0 -
The change in diet is kind of painful on the tummy sometimes.0
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RespectTheKitty wrote: »For me, it's the fact that I hate to cook. I mean just HATE it. I don't like things that take even 30 minutes to make. I want instant gratification. So you see how easy it is to rely on takeout in this situation.
I've been combatting this by buying a lot of frozen stuff. Frozen veggies, frozen fully-cooked chicken breasts, etc., that I can just throw in the microwave and be done with it. Seems to be working okay.
Sounds like you've worked out a great way to deal with it - I try to do work lunches like this to avoid too much prep.0 -
being a woman- this da*n low TDEE kills me.0
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I wish I could ride a bike for 5.5 hours...Wow!inglysh731 wrote: »Sometimes I simply don't know what I should even eat... or how much.
Rode the bike for 5.5 hrs today... had a pound of pasta salad, 2 lb pork tenderloin, a hefty sweet potato... still need to eat 1200-1500 calories... but of what, I have no idea.
I have a case of Guinness in the garage, kind've want to drink the calories.
Edit: Sometimes I wish that I was told what to eat instead of having to figure it out myself.
I wish a 5.5 hour bike ride would earn me enough calories for that food.0 -
Mine is Fiber One soft cookies The fiber doesn't bother me so I can over do it on those, and if I buy them, that's just what I do, over eat with them.
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TIME--- teacher full time and mommy of a toddler. I'm learning how to balance it all... work in progress! 0
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Weekends! I do great all week, but then Friday night comes along and without the structure of my daily work schedule, I lose control. I combat this by allowing myself an extra number of calories on the weekend, so I feel like I have a little freedom without totally blowing it. I'm not there yet, but last weekend was my first "successful" weekend in a year!
Also, Beer.0 -
Taste - all of my meals until I left home were eaten with my mother who is notoriously fussy. I was not exposed to much food, and her negative feelings towards vegetables, ethnic foods, etc. were passed on to me habitually. I grew up eating meat and potatoes or spaghetti, almost exclusively rotating between the two, and then fast food/take out whenever possible. In adulthood I now gag at the taste/texture of many foods, and it has been a struggle to overcome. I have made slow, steady progress, but it is frustrating to feel like a fussy eater who doesn't want to be!0
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