ML Coaching
You've decided you can't keep living your lifestyle the way you have so far? You want to change your diet and do more exercise? Great! Lots of people feel the same way you do. At the start, they're highly motivated to eat healthier and lead a better lifestyle.
But problems often crop up when changing your diet. If you don't take them into account, your diet change won't be as successful as you might imagine. That's exactly what this blog post is about. In the next few paragraphs, I'll show you what the biggest problems can be when changing your diet and how to solve them. That way you'll start your new lifestyle not just motivated, but also informed.
1. Lack of time
Especially for working people, lack of time is one of the biggest difficulties in changing your diet. Wanting to eat healthier usually means cooking more yourself. But healthy meals usually take more time than ready meals you can quickly heat up in the microwave or oven.
If you have to cook healthy food fresh alongside a full-time job, that takes up a lot of your day. Many people underestimate the actual effort involved and switch back to their old habits because it's simply less complicated and easier for them.
Solution:
If you don't have enough time during the week, you can use the weekend to meal-prep. If you cook in large batches, you can put the rest in the fridge or freezer. That way you need less time during the week and can still eat healthily. There are also plenty of other creative solutions nowadays. You could, for example, have healthy food delivered that's tailored to your nutritional needs. There are also already some healthy ready-made options, like meal shakes. These give you a complete meal in drinkable form that supplies you with important nutrients.
At this point I'd like to introduce you to PERFECTMEAL, a company I'm personally involved with. PERFECTYOU offers high-quality meal shakes. You not only save the time of cooking, but also give your body all the healthy nutrients it needs. Most importantly, though, it keeps you full long-term. That way you save yourself the extra calories of a midnight snack. I use PERFECTMEAL myself every day, since I also have a stressful daily life, and I'm very happy with how the product turned out.
2. Lack of knowledge
Let's say you have enough time to cook your healthy meals fresh. That's perfect, not everyone can or wants to spend that time on it. Another problem, though, is that many people don't know where to start. What exactly do I need to eat to reach my goal? What's actually healthy?
Many people strictly follow a nutrition plan or diet they heard about from acquaintances or read about online. But that plan won't get you to your goal. For a healthy diet, you should get to grips with the basics of nutrition. What are macro- and micronutrients? Which of these do I need daily and which foods contain them?
Ultimately, you also shouldn't eat the same meals every day just because they're healthy. Many people simply start eating strictly salads, because "salad = healthy". But it's exactly these people who abandon their diet again after a few weeks, because it simply becomes too monotonous and boring.
Solution:
More knowledge about tasty, healthy meals can help make your diet change more successful. But to get there you need to research thoroughly and invest time. You could, for example, take a few minutes each day to learn about different healthy foods.
3. Too radical a change
Humans are creatures of habit. We don't always respond well to fast, radical changes, ideally we want everything to stay the same. That way we don't have to leave our comfort zone. You should be aware of this when changing your diet too.
Many people start out overmotivated and cut out all unhealthy meals from their life on principle. No sweets, no fast food. Everything you used to enjoy eating gets crossed off the menu overnight. While you might be able to keep this up for a few weeks, you'll quickly overwhelm yourself with it. The result? You want to go back to your old habits.
Solution:
It would be far more advisable to shape the change for the long term. After all, changing your diet isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. You can start step by step, cutting out unhealthy meals and using healthier alternatives instead. Even if that just means switching from sugary drinks to sugar-free drinks for one week. Even that step alone can already bring about a lot of change, without you having to do too much at once.
4. Forbidden foods
The next step is also a big mistake I keep seeing with my clients. Cutting out foods really doesn't get you anywhere, and I can give you several reasons why.
For one, you're only restricting yourself if you cut out foods like sugar or fast food completely. Of course, these foods aren't healthy, but you can still enjoy them now and then, as long as you do so in moderation. On top of that, you'd only be increasing your cravings for exactly these foods. The result would be that the diet becomes even harder for you.
Solution:
What you could do instead: cut out those foods during the week and allow yourself one or two unhealthy meals on the weekend. That way you can motivate yourself to eat healthily during the week, since you know a reward awaits you on the weekend. You also don't need to worry too much about gaining weight because of it. If you're below your calorie needs on a weekly average, you'll lose weight. It doesn't matter if you're above your calorie needs on a single day.
5. No long-term goals
What do you actually want to achieve with your diet change? Do you want to maintain your weight, do you want to lose weight, or do you want to build muscle?
Everyone approaches the topic of nutrition with different wishes and expectations. You should be aware of that too. A goal lets you go into the day more motivated. If you have no goal, you won't stick with your diet change long-term either.
Solution:
Create concrete goals. I always like to use the SMART rule for this. Your goals should be:
- Specific,
- Measurable,
- Attractive,
- Relevant, and
- Time-bound.
It's much smarter to say: "I want to lose 15 kilograms in 6 months" than "I want a six-pack for the beach". The more concrete you make your goals, the more likely you are to stick to your diet change. Make sure your goals are realistic too, and don't forget to track your progress. If you want to lose weight, you should weigh yourself more often to see how good your progress is.
Conclusion
Changing your own diet isn't easy. Problems often crop up and you can make plenty of mistakes, especially at the start. But you should always try not to blame yourself. Everyone makes mistakes, what matters is that you learn from them. Not everyone can eat perfectly from one day to the next, otherwise we'd all be lean and fit. It takes courage and perseverance to reach your dream body. And you can be all the more proud once you've reached your goal.
PERFECTYOU
You can of course take the first step by using healthy alternatives, like the meal shakes from PERFECTYOU. As a personal trainer and Corporate Health Coach, I've seen with both my clients and numerous employees at large companies that, buried in work, they either don't eat at all, or if they do, only very unhealthy, sugar- and fat-heavy meals like a packaged sandwich.
With PERFECTMEAL we've now created the perfect solution to this problem - the healthy meal shake.
Here you can order Switzerland's first complete meal shake and see for yourself: