How to make good food choices

Hi SparkPeople Members

I hope you had a great week!

So far in this 10-week series, we have talked about:

• Keeping some form of daily planner to help you stay in control of your days
• Believing in yourself and in SparkPeople -- including using affirmations if you like this technique
• How to use a vision collage to keep your goals in front of you for motivation

This week I'll talk about a core part of the SparkPeople program: making good food choices.

This subject hasn't been easy for me. I grew up in a single-parent household and my mom often had to work long hours to help make ends meet. As a result, we often ate fast food or a high amount of packaged foods.

Today, my wife and I are a good team because I help motivate her on fitness and she helps motivate me on nutrition. I've recently become even more "relentless" about my nutrition especially reducing added sugars and simple carbs significantly. I can already tell that other foods now taste better.

Tracking your food

So many of you already use the SparkPeople nutrition tracker on either the web or your phone that I won't go over too much about this. Thanks again for your support -- the SparkPeople app continues to be ranked one of the top health and fitness apps!

The bottom line is that tracking your food works.

Here are some tips I like to add related to nutrition tracking:

Pay attention to more than just the calories in/calories out. Instead, challenge yourself to add one new healthy food at a time to your normal routine. For example, a recent one I added is raw fermented sauerkraut because this is good for my gut health. Another is eating more avocados because of their healthy fat.

Make this as easy as possible. Do this by getting rid of any of your temptation foods -- if not completely from your house, at least try to keep these foods out of sight so they don't tempt you. This is especially true as you are just starting your healthy lifestyle change. At some point, your taste buds will likely change and some of your old favorites will taste so sweet for example that you'll no longer find it enjoyable to consume those foods on a regular basis (this happened to me with soda and other sugary options).

Keep your goals in mind. If it's tough for you to make healthy food choices, be your own coach by visualizing your goals prior to making food choices. Or look at the vision collage you created that represents your goals. When you visualize what you are working towads in just a few seconds, the energy and motivation can carry you through that feeling of being deprived and help you make a better choice.

Cook at home. One of the toughest things for people to believe about healthy eating is that it really can taste better than unhealthy eating. This is especially the case when you learn to use great spices and learn one healthy recipe at a time that tastes great. Some of the healthy pressure cooker recipes we make at home are extraordinary and taste dramatically better than low-quality food. Plus we're able to make several meals at once.

How are you doing with your food choices? Have you recently added any new healthy foods to your regular diet?

Let me know in today's blog!

I'll also share an extra tip in the blog that I use to make good food choices that combines a couple of the topics we have discussed so far in this series:

SparkCheers!

Chris "SparkGuy" Downie



Chris (SparkGuy)

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