subject: Healthy Eating Is A Journey [print this page] Healthy Eating Is A Journey Healthy Eating Is A Journey
It's a beautiful Saturday morning so you decide to take the family on a 35 minute trip to a nearby amusement park. You are 36 minutes into the road trip and everyone is anxious, wondering why you're not there yet. By the time you get 45 minutes into the trip everyone is outright irritated by delayed arrival. What happened?
There are two typical reasons for this unpleasant reaction. First of all, the desired destination became the main object of focus. Secondly, there was a concrete expectation that the destination would be reached in a very short time frame. These are the same reasons millions of people fail in their attempts to adopt healthy eating habits every new year. Like the passengers in the story many people set out each new year with ambitions diet and fitness goals only to face frustration and discouragement when success does not occur within the few first weeks or months.
How we eat, including the food choices, locations, and times, is a core component of our lifestyle. Because our food intake controls our blood chemistry it largely determines our level of health, our level of energy, and to some degree our mental concentration. In addition, how we eat is often influenced by our social lives, our culture, our economics, our emotions, and our biology. Thus, with so many things connected to our food choices it should be no wonder that changing how we eats takes time and commitment.
Realizing that healthy eating is a lifelong journey is the first step to success. In other words, you must begin with a state of mind that says 1) This is one of the most important lifestyle changes I will ever start. 2) It may take months or even years to reach a powerful level of change. 3) I will continue to move forward even when confronted with regular setbacks; because, I can see and measure success each year. Such conviction is needed in order to have any chance of changing something as engrained as our eating habits.
In part 2 of this article we explore the step-by-step process of adopting "Healthful Eating-style. This will include addressing the challenge of "Inertia" and the powerful healthy eating concept known as the "Substitution Principle".
