What's YOUR biggest obstacle to eating healthy?

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...

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.

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.

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.

Money, as in having enough to buy the foods I want rather than relying on relatives to buy for me.

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.

beer

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.

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 .

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.

Hope228 wrote: »

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 I could ride a bike for 5.5 hours...Wow!

I wish a 5.5 hour bike ride would earn me enough calories for that food.

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.