GET THE HEALTHY EATING HABIT

How can you start eating healthily, until you’re clear about what you’re eating at the moment?

Lots of people say they eat healthily. They ‘forget’ about the hot chocolate with whipped cream they had on the way to work, the fries they served with dinner, the chocolate bar they ate when they were bored, the fact that they have no fresh fruit or vegetables in the house…

Now I am not some skinny freak who wags her finger and says that from now on you will never have a treat, or eat something that you enjoy. No food is ‘unhealthy’ in its own right, and there’s no food that will harm you – as long as you eat the less healthy foods only occasionally, in among many other foods which are actively good for your health.

But before you can even start to make changes in your diet, you need to get a handle on what exactly you are eating, day in, day out, to see what the real picture looks like.

Get yourself a note book, and over the next five days, write down everything you eat. Everything. I mean it! Every little handful of pretzels, two bites of a cream cake – write it down. No one else needs to see it, but you need to know where you stand.

Now, do the reckoning. Take a larger piece of paper and make two columns. Head one ‘healthy foods’ and one ‘unhealthy foods’. Go through your daily lists and put each item into one or other of these lists. If an item falls into both categories – like a wholemeal sandwich, filled with thickly-mayonnaised chicken salad – put wholemeal bread in the healthy column, and mayonnaised-chicken in the other. Don’t agonise over it – this is just to give you an idea.

How do your columns look? Which one is longer?

If the list of junk, processed, fatty, sweet or salty foods far outweighs the column of fresh fruit and veg, lean meat, fish and poultry, whole grains, pulses, nuts and seeds – then you need to take action.

Go back to your daily diary, and ask yourself: When are you most likely to eat unhealthily?

• is it when you snack?
• when you watch tv?
• when you’re in a hurry?
• at your main meal?
• when you’re at home, or when you’re out?

Identify your danger points, and resolve to make some changes, one simple step at a time, so that you’ll make a real shift in the balance.

Now you know where you are starting from, and where you’re headed. Excellent!

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what is the greatest threat to your bid to get the healthy eating habit – and how you can overcome it.

Day 3 of Get the Healthy Eating Habit, free ecourse.