3 Critical Strategies to Keep You On Track with Healthy Eating Habits

Are you at (or moving toward) your health goals, or do you find it challenging to “stay on track?”

We hear from so many women that they are “good for a while,” but then fall off track and have a hard time regaining momentum.

Here’s the most important question to ask yourself:
If you are following some sort of eating plan, is it something that is really sustainable, or do you feel like you can’t wait to be done with it already?

If you don’t have specific foundational strategies in place, it’s not going to sustain you for the long haul. Chances are, you may have encountered a similar experience if not once, but over and over again. And we know how frustrating that can be. 

So although meal plans can serve as a guide, they can only take you so far. Our three foundational strategies can help you not only lose weight, but keep you healthy and happy not only while you’re doing it, but for the rest of your life.

Read or watch below and take stock of where you are on all three. See which of the areas needs the most work and start there!

Strategy 1: Find Healthy Foods you Love
If plain grilled chicken and steamed broccoli don’t float your boat – that’s okay! We are right there with you. We are forever researching new foods and developing new recipes because tasty foods are more fun to eat and more likely to help you stay on a healthy eating path.

Let’s take grilled chicken and broccoli for example. Turn it from boring to delicious by simply brushing a mixture of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and dried basil onto the chicken, and a drizzle of grass-fed butter or ghee with a pinch of sea salt onto your broccoli. These one minute tasks takes that meal to a whole new level with very little fuss. Now we’re talking flavor without sacrificing nutrition.

The key is having simple but DELICIOUS recipes at your fingertips so you can create an easy healthy meal without stress. It’s impossible (and NO fun), if you feel like the only way to stick with a healthy eating plan is by eating bland food or food that takes forever to cook. Also keep in mind that variety is essential for your digestion, immune health, and pretty much every other system in the body.

The good news is, there are so many healthy options out there, you just need to find new favorites and learn new ways to make healthier foods taste so good that you look forward to eating them. Otherwise, you’ll be counting the days until your “diet” ends and you can go back to your tastier way of eating.

Our PM Meal Mastery™ program provides a great framework for quick simple recipes. Check it out HERE. 

Strategy 2.: Plan Ahead
So let’s talk about planning. Do you PLAN to eat healthy?

There’s that saying by our old friend Ben Franklin – “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”

Think for a minute how life would be if you didn’t plan for anything. Would you be able to have a secure retirement if you didn’t have a clear financial plan? How would your vacation go if you made no plans to rent a car, book a hotel or make a plane reservation? Planning is so essential in so many areas of our lives, but somehow we leave our health and nutrition plan in the dust.

You may be saying to yourself, ugh, planning sounds like a pain and I already have much to do.

So we know this isn’t something you want to hear, but it IS something you want to get a handle on because it will save you much stress and aggravation.

Plus, after you do it for a bit it becomes a habit AND much easier.

So we suggest setting aside a particular time of the week to plan out the meals that give you the most trouble. For instance, if you’re constantly plagued by the “what’s for dinner” question, one tip that works well for us and many of our clients is to set aside a few minutes on a Friday or Saturday and choose three dinner recipes to have for the following week.

Then you have something specific to shop for and the exact recipe to follow, which takes a lot of stress off the evening. Just knowing what you are going to have in advance, and the ingredients on hand, is huge.

Also, when you make a recipe, plan to have extra that you can have some the next day for lunch or dinner the next night. This is a wonderful routine to get into and a huge time saver and relieves a lot of stress.

And remember those quick tasty healthy foods we talked about in strategy number 1? Well if you plan ahead and have those foods on hand in your kitchen at all times, you will always be able to pull a simple meal or snack together in a snap.

Strategy 3: Give Up the ‘All or Nothing’ Mentality 
This happens so often when someone goes on a diet. They feel the need to follow it perfectly. So they are either IN diet mode, or OFF diet mode. Making one mistake off the diet causes them to crumble, feel like a failure, and abandon the diet. Sadly, we hear this all the time.

We like to compare this to a dropped cell phone. What if you dropped your cell phone and instead of picking it up, you smashed it? If you had just picked it up, it might have had a scratch or two, no major harm done.

Let’s just say that that black and white thinking is NOT the way to maintain a long term healthy relationship with food (or your cell phone)!

Success comes much more readily if you allow some wiggle room and learn how to get right back on track.

How about thinking of it this way: If you aren’t on a diet, you can never go off of it.

So instead of thinking of being on a diet, you are on a healthy eating path.

Sometimes the path gets a little bumpy or has a pothole. That doesn’t ruin the path. Just walk around it and continue on. The bottom line is that your healthy eating path does not have to be 100% perfect for you to succeed.

Looking for more info on how to make simple, savvy changes to your diet? A great place to start is by following the guidelines in our PM Meal Mastery™ program. For less than the cost of a bag of groceries, you can have access to this amazing resource that provides a scientifically-backed nutrition plan for optimal health, energy, and confidence after menopause.