Healthy Living Tips.

Right about now everyone will be on the healthy eating and going to the gym hype after new year resolutions so cue all the healthy eating and recipe posts. I thought I would throw in my 2 cents on the topic as someone who has recently revamped my entire eating habits, lost the weight I wanted to through healthy eating and managed to maintain this for over a year now.

I'm not going to preach that I am the perfect example of health, I still don't eat amazingly healthy 100% of the time and I'm not super fit, but I have changed my eating habits to much healthier and feel much better about it. I mean whilst writing this I am about to order a take away because I can't be bothered to cook but please know that sometimes it's OK. It's OK to have a treat sometimes and yes it takes a long time to learn not to feel guilty about it, but you can't eat perfectly 100% of the time and having a treat from time to time stops the binges. I was a self confessed chocoholic and I still find it really hard to stop myself eating an entire family sized bar to myself.

Buy Smaller Plates.

One of the first things I did when I decided to change my eating habits was to buy smaller plates. The plates we had were huge and when cooking you tend to fill your plate which equals much larger portions. Having smaller plates that look full with less food on it, not only is this just much better for you by not over eating it also does some kind of mind trickery. I found this really helped get my portions under control. Another thing I'll tag on here is to give yourself a smaller portion to begin with, eat it and then wait a little while to see if you are still hungry and if need be have a little more but give yourself time to tell if you are actually still 'hungry'. Same goes with being 'full', eat slowly and listen to your body, if you feel full, then stop eating food, it's pretty simple really.


Go au naturale.

One of the easiest things I found helped me was to live by the rule of natural food. With any type of food I pick up if I have no idea what goes into making it, I tend not to eat it. For example, so much frozen food, oven meals, pre-made meals are full of crap. Lets say for example you pick up a ready meal that has sausage and mash in it, if you made that at home, it would include sausages...and potatoes, it shouldn't include a bunch of other products you have no idea what they are. So strip back your meals to basics, vegetables, meat, some kind of carbs. It's not crazy complicated. Don't eat fried chicken everyday, don't eat deep fried crisps or chocolate bars and eat more fresh food, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, easy peasy.

Now some of you will be saying, but I don't like many vegetables or fruit, so this makes eating harder, that's OK. You need to experiment a little with things and see what you prefer. If you only like peas and sweetcorn, that's OK, you can use these in a variety of ways and it's great if you could get a portion of each everyday. One of the things we eat often is jacket potatoes, don't buy the biggest potato you can find but an average sized one, add some salad, add some meat, heck we even have it with rice, but you made it from scratch, you haven't added a bunch of random ingredients you didn't need. Food can be tasty and easy and simple.


Exercising...ugh.
The dreaded exercise chat, you can totally join the gym or go for a run or you can just do little things like increasing your steps per day. I did find that changing my diet and starting the gym at the same time was too much and I found it hard to stick to everything at once so I, personally, decided that my diet was more important to change first. 

I work in an office and drive to and from work, so I basically do no exercise, so I tend to go out and have a walk about in my lunch hour to just get your body moving around and get out of the office environment. This could be a great time to go for a walk with your partner in the countryside, this could be walking your dog once or twice a day, but get your body moving more than you were before and it doesn't have to be crazy intense..you can increase your exercise as time goes on.

When we slip up.
This really is inevitable and when it happens, accept it and move on. Don't wallow in the pizza you had last night, pick yourself back up again and start over, don't let yourself think 'OK well I had that pizza, so this chocolate bar will be OK and I'll just start again tomorrow'. That might work sometimes, but in most cases that one pizza will turn into a 3 day long binge, a mountain of guilt and feeling like shit. I found allowing myself to make mistakes and moving on from them made it much easier because after all we are all human and lets face it, pizza and chocolate are amazing.

~

I really hope this didn't come across as preachy I just thought I'd give some tips that worked for me over the past year and a half. I've managed to lose 1 stone in total and keep it off but most of all I regained my confidence, I just feel so much better in my own skin and it's been a long time since I've felt like this. So I'd love to think someone could take something from this.

Tell me about your weight loss stories or any tips you might have in the comments, I'd love to read them.