Excersize? Noo problem, I have that part down. I can talk myself into working out most days, but eating right? I know I need to stop eating like i do and make some better choices but it just doesnt seem satisfying. I either dont eat healthy at all, or i do and ed up binging. and I can work out til my legs fall of but without the diet I dont get very far. I know there have to be others in the same boat i am! how do you convince yourself to put down the cheeseburgers?
I used to be that way in my early 20s (I'm 43 now). For the past 15 or more years, though, I've eaten healthy. The only reason that I had a weight problem is that I ate too much, and I ate some unhealthy stuff along with the healthy stuff.
I think it's a matter of training your palate. Do you know how some people say certain foods are an "acquired taste"? Well, actually, that applies to many foods that we're not used to eating. For example, I grew up with a mother who cooked spaghetti using Ragu (jarred pasta sauce). When I married my Italian husband, I remember going to dinner at his mother's house and being served homemade pasta sauce and not liking it initially. It's because I was used to the junk. Now, though, I would never even consider eating jarred pasta sauce.
The same goes for many fruits and veggies. In my early 20's, I only regularly ate lots of fruits and veggies if I was dieting. However, over the years (maybe because I dieted so much---LOL!), I acquired a taste for those foods. Now, I can't imagine not eating them as a regular part of my diet.
This summer, my sister decided that she would try one new veggie every couple of weeks or so. She introduced herself to fennell, butternut squash, brussell sprouts, etc. Also, she experimented with how to cook those veggies, not giving up if she cooked them in a less than palatable way the first time.
So, try training your palate to enjoy healthier foods. I'll bet you'll surprise yourself.
My bridge strategy is to eat higher-fat vegetables, and higher-fat/sugar fruits.
For fruit I started out with full-fat, plain yogurt that I'd put dried or fresh fruit on, along with a small palmful (about a half ounce) of nuts and a drizzle of honey. Then the honey faded out, and then I started eating it just as fruit, or fruit and nuts, or fruit and yogurt... now it's mostly just whole, natural fruit - but I did it one step at a time.
For vegetables, I did kind of the same thing. First, I declared potatoes and corn to not be vegetables, because adding more fat to them wasn't going to get me anywhere. But other vegetables got cooked with heavy lashings of olive oil. I cooked a lot of vegetables from "The Italian Country Table" by Lynn Rosetto Kasper and Madhur Jaffrey's "World Vegetarian" - neither one skimps on the fat, but it's pretty much all healthy olive oil. Rick Bayless' "Mexican Everyday" has a lot of easy, fairly low-fat and veggie-heavy options.
The eggplant and chickpea soup I made involved frying the eggplant in olive oil, and was topped with little bits of crispy crostini and a crumble of cheese (along with mint and hot peppers). It wasn't really low-cal, but it was better for me than a cheeseburger, and it bridged the way to minestrone or tonight's tortilla soup for dinner.
I also started subbing avocado for a lot of dairy fat. Chips with melted cheese and taco meat became corn tortillas smeared with some freshly mashed avocado, some ground black pepper, hot sauce and poached chicken breast. Scrambled eggs don't get butter and cheese anymore. They get whatever veggies I have lying around (thursday it was onion, kale and mushroom), and slices or cubes of avocado.
For some people, changing their diet overnight works. For others, it's just about incremental improvement.
You are not the only one. Given the choice between a greasy slice of pizza or veggies of some sort, the pizza always calls my name till I give in. I don't have a big problem with fruit( except mellon). My veggies are prettly limmited(corn, potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, onion, and pickles[they are veggies, right?]). I wish I could force my self to eat other veggies, but they just turn me off. Any tips on how to get past this, or do I just need to put my big girl panties on and deal with it?
veggies?! *footstomp.frownieface*
