Changing your eating habits may help improve your overall health, fitness/performance, improve your body composition and reduce risk for disease. Despite these benefits, many people struggle to maintain dietary changes in the long-term. To ensure that your dietary changes are practical, beneficial and health promoting, consider the following tips before you make an extreme lifestyle change with a new style of eating.
1. What's your motivation/reason for change? - If you are wanting to eliminate or add certain foods to the diet, give yourself a really good reason to do so. "Because it's trendy" or "because I need to lose weight" can be motivating but remind yourself that for any diet to be successful, long term nutrition compliance is key.
2. Don't go all in - I caution you not to wake up one morning and start living with a dietary title (unless it's for medical/health reasons). Like anything in life, dietary changes take time. Make small tweaks and adjustments and for anything you eliminate, find a nutritious alternative so you don't end up with a nutrient deficiency. Making gradual changes and continually assessing how you feel is key.
3. Create a positive relationship with food - To start, there are no bad foods. Unless for medical/health/ethical reasons, your diet does not need an off-limit food list. Consider the "food talk" that you think to yourself in your own head or what you hear around you. When changing the diet, it's important to keep a healthy relationship with food. This means there are no cheat foods, bad foods, and unhealthy foods. Avoid categorizing food in a black and white way.
4. Learn to indulge responsibly - When a diet is overly restrictive, energy and nutrient deficient and rigid, you may be worried about how you will eat at parties, events, eating out or traveling. Removing certain foods from the diet because you feel you have a lack of self-control, fear or guilt when eating those foods, is not the answer. Because one of the side effects of a restrictive diet is food preoccupation/obsession, the more you restrict in your diet, the more you will think about food. Within every diet is room for indulging. Learn to indulge mindfully and responsibly.
5. Cook - At the backbone of every diet plan is an emphasis of real food. And with good reason! If you find yourself gravitating toward processed food as a convenient option in your new diet plan, you have not changed the most important thing in your diet - eating more real food. No matter what diet plan you follow, you must make time and learn to appreciate grocery shopping, meal prepping and cooking.