Esta Morenikeji: 4 ways to overcome food temptations (Y! Superblogger)

Esta Morenikeji Superblogger

Your challenge with overeating will be half way solved, if you know the difference between a serving and a portion

Everyone faces food temptations. Once in a while a healthy, conscious eater will find his or herself faced with bad food choices. It happens to the best of us.

Some people believe that, we fitness instructors have superhuman power that keeps us immune to food temptations. They assume we eat perfectly right 100% of the time. That assumption is far from the truth. Like everyone else, I also have times when I crave and eat foods I wouldn’t eat on a good day. Yes, there are times when I find myself in an environment, where it would take mind over matter to curb my craving, and to escape the food temptations. Living a healthy lifestyle is a journey and not a destination, we will face obstacles along the path, but we must always tell ourselves “I’m on this journey to succeed”.

In this article I share with you four ways to overcome food temptations.  I used these strategies, to overcome food temptations when I lost 23kg in 9 months (and I still use these strategies).

Be your own nutrition “expert”

As the popular saying goes “knowledge is power”. By being your own “expert” I don’t mean you should start dishing out nutrition advice to people, I mean you should get the knowledge you need to make right food choices. Your eating habit will improve dramatically if you can distinguish between which food is healthy and which food is not. Your challenge with overeating will be half way solved, if you know the difference between a serving and a portion, and what a serving of food really looks like. Seeking knowledge about food and nutrition really helped me a lot while I was losing the extra 23kg I was carrying around. But you have to be careful where you’re getting your nutrition information from, the internet has made it easy for anyone who has anything to say, to be able share what they have with the rest of the world. It is your responsibility to search for the right information in the right places. You have to cut through the junk, to get the real information from the real experts.

Have a Daily Meal Plan

If you don’t have a meal plan you will end up eating anything that is available- whether good or bad.  Having a daily meal plan is like having a compass, and a constraint. Your plan guides and constraints you. You cannot eat what everyone is eating because you have a plan; you cannot eat how everyone is eating because you are constrained. Don’t wait till you are hungry before you start thinking about what to eat, plan ahead.

Keep Your Environment free of Tempting foods

Here is one of the self-imposed rules I live by: “Don’t put in your house what you don’t want in your mouth”. People who are close to me know that, there are certain foods you can never find in my house. A friend once made a joke about how he would lose weight if he lived in my house for 1 month, because he wouldn’t be able to eat his normal, everyday foods.  I don’t keep in my house what I don’t want to eat, or what I don’t want to eat in excess. Protect your environment, don’t buy what you know you shouldn’t be eating. Don’t keep in your house what you don’t want to eat, if they give you, give it away. At work, keep your environment healthy by planning your food ahead. Stay away from environments that expose you to bad foods. If it’s not totally possible to stay away from such environments, carry healthy substitutes with you at all times.

Engage your mind

Craving is an emotional thing. When the desire to eat a particular food hits, it comes like a flood of emotion that can cloud your judgments. To overcome craving, you need to develop the habit of imposing your mind over your craving, because it takes few seconds to give in to food craving. The strategy I normal use is to immediately walk  few meters away from the scene and then I start to have a conversation with myself, in my head, and give myself strong reasons why I can’t have that food. There are times when I literally have to walk away as fast as I can, and drown my craving with the repeated shouts of “you can’t have that”-the shouts happen in my head.

Living and eating healthy is a way of life, not what we do once in a while. You are not going to wake up slim tomorrow because, you eat only vegetables and fish today, just like I’m not going to wake up fat tomorrow because, I eat a buffet today. It’s not what we do once in a while that makes the difference; it is what we do consistently on a daily basis that makes the difference.

These are just my own strategies; the ways I keep my self under control so that I don’t stray from my healthy lifestyle. What strategies have you used or are you using to overcome food temptations? I’ll like to hear from you in the comment section below.

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Esta Morenikeji is a fitness instructor and fitness blogger. Once upon a time she weighed 92kg, now weighing in at 67kg, she teaches people how to lose weight and keep fit in a fun way. She blogs about fitness and weight loss at www.zonefitness.com.ng and tweets from @estamorenikeji

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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