Eating healthy

darnellreddon
darnellreddon Posts: 1 Member
in Introduce Yourself
So i need advice on how to eat healthy i always get so eager to buy fast food

Replies

  • christinacookson13
    christinacookson13 Posts: 9 Member
    I am the same!!! I love buying easy food!!

    when I am there I just ask myself do I really need this?? Am I really hungry?? If the answer is no, then try and walk away. I know it will be hard. x
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,905 Member
    There are good choices at fast food restaurants. Eating sensibly doesn't need to be difficult or complicated, though there may be a little learning at first about how to put it together.

    My advice would be not to fall into the trap of thinking that there are special "diet foods" that you must eat to succeed, or "bad foods" that you can never eat again. That kind of thinking is IMO a tangent to the important thing.

    The important thing is getting good overall nutrition, on average, at appropriate calories. What is "good nutrition"? Enough protein, enough healthy fats, plenty of varied, colorful veggies/fruits for micronutrients and fiber. A fast-food burger has protein and some fats, can contribute some useful things to an overall day's nutrition. One food or meal isn't the big deal, what matters most is the well-rounded totality of what one eats.

    For any of us who may have a tendency toward gaining weight (like me), weight management is going to be a lifelong thing. Turning it into short-term project with an end date, with extreme, difficult, but temporary rules . . . that's an on-ramp to repeated yo-you dieting, if you as me.

    (I've been maintaining a healthy weight for almost 6 years now, after losing almost 1/3 of my body weight back in 2015-16. It can work, I think.)
  • Xellercin
    Xellercin Posts: 924 Member
    Question: are you saying you are eager to buy fast food because it's easy, or because you crave salty, fatty, carby, processed foods?

    Your palate is remarkably adaptable. You will generally crave what you normally eat. If you alter your diet long enough to healthier food, you will start to crave healthier food.

    I've done this with multiple people I've lived with. I took over cooking for them for 6-8 weeks and by the end of it, they were craving quinoa and vegetarian stew, not processed food.

    It's a lot of work to overhaul your diet though if you don't have someone cooking for you, so start small. You could start with trying to master health breakfasts until it's automatic that you reach for healthy breakfast options and it feels weird not to.

    Then tackle other meals from there, steadily getting used to healthier options.

    This is what I did after living on junk food during my student years, and nearly a decade later, the habit has been permanent, and I really enjoy my healthy meals, much more than processed food.
  • rosebarnalice
    rosebarnalice Posts: 3,488 Member
    Xellercin wrote: »
    Question: are you saying you are eager to buy fast food because it's easy, or because you crave salty, fatty, carby, processed foods?

    This is a great question and a great place to start. Are you "eager" because of something specific about the food or are you "eager" for the familiarity and comfort of the habit and perhaps even the ritual of the fast food experience?

    If it's really a food thing, maybe try finding a recipe for a lower fat/ lower calorie version of one of your takeaway mainstays and commit to making it several times over the course of a couple of weeks-- making tweaks and adjustments until your own version gives you all the feels. I used to literally dream about drive-thru french fries. Then I bought a bag of frozen ones and experimented with spicing and baking them until I found my french fry sweet spot (tossed w/ cayenne and rosemary and sea salt and baked in a super hot oven, turning frequently, served with siracha and soy dipping sauce). The smell of drive-thru fries now sickens me.

    If it's a habit/ritual thing, maybe think about what it is that feels so good. Are you rewarding yourself for a hard day? Does it feel like self-comfort or self-care? Or does it feel more like stress-avoidance or self medication to cope with loneliness, anger, weariness, grief, trauma or something else? I found a lot of my "cravings" were the latter-- ritualized stress and anger behaviors of "stuffing down my feelings with food." When I started taking my mental health more seriously and began ritualizing practices like chopping veggies and building a big beautiful salad for lunch while my morning coffee was brewing and making and freezing individual servings of beautiful casseroles on weekends when I knew I had a particularly busy week coming up those behaviors began feeling more and more like self care. I can take a heck of a lot of stress out by whacking on a head of cauliflower with my favorite chef's knife!

Categories