Pick A Place To Start

My number one tip to anyone that cares to listen is don't try to change your entire diet at once.

Our eating habits are not something that we develop overnight. For many of us our unhealthy tendencies started in childhood, while others didn't start gaining weight until they put on the dreaded "freshman fifteen" in college. Maybe for you things started going downhill when you got that desk job with doughnuts every morning in the conference room and the Starbucks down the block. Maybe you had a couple kids and found it was easier to snarf a Big Mac on your way to the carpool lane than to carve out time for a healthy meal between oboe lessons and soccer lessons. However it happened, it is not going to "un-happen" in a day, or even a week, and it's probably going to take quite a long time to correct these behaviors.

So let's say there are several aspects of your diet that you want to change: you want to cut back on your sugar and salt, cut out the trans fats, eat only good carbs, no fried foods, cut back on your portion sizes, and oh hell, let's say you want to eliminate processed flour too.

To this I pose a simple query: are you high?

It is simply too hard to change everything at once. You are absolutely setting yourself up for failure by trying to do that and losing weight is hard enough as it is. Your best bet is to pick one aspect at a time and focus just on that. After all, it takes one completing an action 21 times for that action to become a habit. So, 21 x 3 meals a day x 4 different kinds of muffins at Starbucks x 39 ways to get your hamburger x oh yeah, is this whole grain? = you lost me on the snack cake aisle. Or something like that... I never was very good at math, but you get my point.

When I decided I needed to make a change, I started small and switched to Diet soda instead of regular. At first it was nasty as hell, but within a week I didn't mind the taste at all, and after a few months I had already lost about 30 pounds. That one success, however small it may have been, gave me a huge confidence boost and made my goal seem that much more attainable. I have no doubt that had I traded Diet for regular while also cutting out fried foods I would have caved and been in the Whataburger drive thru line faster than you can say, "Would you like fries with that?"

Start small. Baby steps. You'll get there.

-Sarah