4 Step Guide to Eating Healthy in a Vulnerable Environment

Last weekend, I made a cake of oats with no processed food. I used organic ingredients as a substitute for the original recipe. To my surprise, it looked appetizing.

I tasted and offered it to my mother to have a bite. The look on my diabetic mother’s face made me realize two things that day: First, no matter what, Diabetics can never like anything without sugar. Secondly, you should never offer your diet food to anyone.

Eating healthy is not a one-time pursuit. It’s a way of life.

If you are on constant healthy eating habits, your subconscious mind will be programmed to reach for those food items. Your brain will do so irrespective of the surroundings and people around you.

However, the actual job is to train your mind to do so. It needs conviction and a few tricks which I’ll share with you today.

1. Food Tastes the Same With Healthy Ingredients

Food made with healthy ingredients tastes the same as their counterpart. If you ask me a thousand times, I will still say the same thing.

I have tried manipulating recipes off the internet to make them work for my diet. It works. And if it works for me, who barely has any cooking skills, it will work for you as well.

Take inspiration from chefs like Jamie Oliver, Rujuta Diwekar, Lee Hersh, Teresa Cutter who make absolutely anything delicious. But, while you do this, stay away from some influencers spamming Instagram and youtube.

Adults are like children when you tell them what’s inside the food they are eating; they start disliking it. Recall your childhood, when you hated vegetables but, your mother somehow made them look delectable.

It would help if you played a similar psychological trick with your brain every time you eat. Reiterate it your mind that the food you are consuming is made of the same ingredients others around you are consuming.

2. Remove the Source of Temptation

You want to go on a diet, but you falter every time. You are unable to live up to your commitment. It is a consequence of you testing your conviction more than it is required.

“When you are tempted remove the source of temptation.”

Remove all kinds of tempting and unhealthy food items from your house. Decluttering is the first step before going on a healthy eating spree. Restock your kitchen with what you need to consume and not with what you want to consume.

Consider it a battle where the enemy is taking shelter in your house, therefore, it is bound to attack.

If you cannot reach for them, you are less likely to binge on them.

However, it might not always be the same when you are living with your parents, roommate, or partner.

I am in love with sweets. But both are unfortunately not what I need to consume. Every time I remove them from my kitchen, they are back at their place, a day later. And by now, you must know who brings them back. Duh, my siblings.

In such cases, I follow a rule what I call ‘Occupying your Territory’. Assign yourself space for keeping stuff in the kitchen that only belongs to you.

Choose a cabinet where you store your stuff. It will make sure when making your breakfast, in the morning, you grab your oats instead of sugar-laden cereals which your brother bought.

Do the same with the refrigerator; choose a section where you keep your stuff. But I have to say sharing a refrigerator is damn difficult.

3. Creating a Void Never Helps

Eating healthy is not synonymous with giving up everything you like. Don’t become an absolute food saint. It’s just about finding the right balance and making it a part of your system.

Therefore, never create a complete void of a specific type of food. Eat little of everything once in a while. Eat your comfort food a burger or a chocolate brownie with vanilla ice-cream, but in small portions.

Select a cheat day in a week when you will let yourself have whatever you like.

Avoiding specific food can make you irritable. Therefore, never do that. I have heard people going on a full protein diet and becoming cranky.

Research on the food-mood connection shows how food affects your anger and mood swings. One we already know of is sugar slump. Study at the University of California showed that a diet high in trans fatty acid could cause increased aggression.

Trans fats interfere with the brain’s ability to produce and use Omega 3 fatty acids — a nutrient shown by research to lower aggression. Moreover, Omega 3 fatty acids are linked to depression and irritability.

Besides, the effects of food on anger study also show a vice-versa relation, i.e., the impact of stress on food choice. The experiment demonstrates that stress causes changes in food choice away from healthy low-fat food to less healthy high-fat foods. Another survey finds more females than males report increasing food consumption when stressed.

So, as much as creating a void can create a problem, so is being stressed.

4. Cleanse Your System of Traps

It is the most crucial point to be noted. We consume food in two ways: one is actual consumption; the other is virtual consumption. The virtual consumption is detrimental for your brain.

Social Media is the pit stop for this — cakes, meats, and what not you name it. The more you watch, you are losing the battle with your brain. You are unnecessarily testing your conviction. Keep your scrolling limited.

The more you watch, you are losing the battle with your brain.

I left and unsubscribed all food pages on social media, it reduced my cravings for food more than I expected. For this reason, I experimented with my self one day and constantly watched food videos on youtube. Thanks to youtube’s algorithm it kept showing me more such videos. I felt an appetite for more. That week I ended up making more than a few unhealthy recipes.

The food business is drawn in a way to trap you. Not only food but all products are strategically placed in shopping malls. Baked items, pastries are purposely kept in displays in shopping malls. Their appealing smell activates your salivary glands, making you more likely to purchase on impulse.

Junk foods are placed before the healthy food to make you buy one or two of them while you cross them. Tempting items are at the eye level.

Thus, you need to be aware of the tricks to hold yourself back.

We live in a jungle of processed and unhealthy items. You need to know the rules of the jungle to thrive and survive in it. Irrespective of the members in the wilderness, you need to build a space for yourself where the temptations cannot allure you.