If you have been struggling with making healthy shifts to your diet, here is a battle plan to help you.
Here is what you need to succeed with making diet shifts:
- Motivation!
You need a good reason to shift that pattern! This is motivation! It is energy which keeps you focused on it until you succeed
- Better alternative!
It’s not enough to simply say “No!”. You need a better alternative! Examples? White bread to whole grain cereals. White sugar in sweets to fruit sugar in dried raisins. Remember that just suppressing a need usually does not work. You want a better choice.
Shift one aspect of your diet at a time over a period of a week! If you try to shift many aspects of your diet at the same time, you usually loose focus and miss your target. 1 week gives you enough space to experiment with new recipes and ideas.
Remember that your environment, family or friends need to readapt to your new choices. It’s not just you, you are educating, it is them as well.
After one week, maintain the new habit and if you need to, ad a second change to your diet.
It will easily take you one to three months to really integrate a new eating pattern, so stay focused.
There is only one reason you will stick to a new pattern: if it is easy and fun to maintain on the long term without major effort.
Makes sense, right?