If you’re on the precipice of making some major changes to your diet, be it because you’re trying to get healthier or you’re needing to make dietary changes for medical purposes, there are a few things that you’ll want to do to help ensure that these changes are more likely to stick. Because unless you’re living in a senior living community where your food is all prepared for you, getting yourself to stick to a new diet can be a challenge.
To help you with this, here are three ways to prepare for making changes to your diet.
Be Mindful About How Certain Foods Make You Feel
For many people, the reason that they are making changes to their diet is so that they can start to feel better, regardless of whether they’re looking to do things like losing weight or avoiding inflammation or other digestion issues. So to help you recognize that your new dietary guidelines are working for you, it can help to be mindful about how you feel after eating certain foods.
Slow down and take inventory of how your body feels when you stick to your new dietary guidelines. Do you feel satiated and content? Then think about how you feel when you go outside of your dietary guidelines. Do you feel sick or bloated? If you’re able to recognize these feelings and remember them, it can make sticking to your diet much easier because doing so just makes you feel better.
Try To Avoid An All Or Nothing Approach
Unless you’re needing to make dietary changes to avoid things like an allergic reaction, you may want to try to avoid taking an all or nothing approach to your new diet.
In many cases, when people decide not to eat something, this can be the one thing that they fixate on. Then, when they finally do give themselves access to this food, overindulgence is easy to succumb to. But if you can avoid this all or nothing thinking, you may find it easier to balance your new dietary guidelines.
Create Both Short-Term And Long-Term Goals
To stick to any kind of plan that requires making new habits, your success can be easier to reach by setting appropriate short-term and long-term goals.
For a new diet, short-term goals could include things like being consistent over multiple meals or multiple days. Then, as you move into more long-term goals, you can aim for things like seeing positive changes in certain health metrics. This way, you can feel success quickly and well into the future.
If you’re going to be starting a new diet soon, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you prepare for this adjustment.