Get back on track with healthy eating

What does "healthy food" mean to you? 

To me, healthy food is included in a varied, nutrient dense diet which keeps my body functioning well. 

But in a world where unhealthy food is so available, it can be difficult to define and follow through with healthy eating. 

Busy schedules, misinformation, poor planning and low motivation can make healthy eating extremely challenging. 

Here are a few tips on how you can get back on track with healthy eating. 

-Stop the dieting and food rules. Restriction and deprivation doesn't work as it's not a sustainable style of eating. 

-Plan and prep ahead. When you are prepared, you make better food choices. Plus, by learning how to be a great meal/snack planner, you will create long-lasting "go-to" strategies for maintaining healthy eating habits even during your most busy, stressful and exhausting times in life. 

-Don't make your meals too complicated. Keep healthy eating simple and eat to feel satisfied and energized. 

-Eat with a purpose beyond weight/body composition. Learn to eat mindfully. You deserve to eat enough food to honor your biological hunger but you also deserve to eat food that you enjoy. Eating should be pleasurable experience. You should love your diet. Healthy eating is so much more than just eating to look a certain way but instead, eating to do amazing things with your body. Define your eating purpose behind every meal and snack in your diet. 

-Create one new "healthy eating" goal each week and don't set a new goal until your previous goal becomes a habit. For example, your goal can be to eat breakfast every morning, to bring an afternoon snack to work everyday, to have a recovery snack after every workout, to drink more water, to cook dinner at home two nights per week or to more vegetables at lunch. The idea behind a healthy eating goal is to create new strategies for change. If you have a goal of making dinner, you must figure out how you will make this happen. Stop the saying and start the doing. The only way you can sustain healthy eating is by creating a new lifestyle. 

-Leave space in your busy day for meal planning, prep and cooking. If you tell yourself that you do not have time to eat healthy, you need to adjust your priorities. Healthy eating may feel overwhelming if it is not yet a priority in your life. You can use a food delivery meal prep service or search through cookbooks for inspiration, but in order to eat healthy, healthy food needs to be available. By prepping and planning ahead, you will find yourself eating food that you love and feeling great about the foods that you put inside your body. 

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Feeling off track?

Whether it's traveling, life stressors or multiple events occurring in a short time period, it's easy to feel off track with your diet and workout routine. 

A common tendency for athletes is to see the next "normal" day of life as an opportunity to get back on track. 

With an intense desire to "be really good" until life feels normal again, there's nothing wrong with this, right? 

Well, it's a problem if your "normal" lifestyle habits are so extreme that you can not function well in life when you feel a loss of control over every situation relating to your diet and workout regime. 

For athletes who don't feel safe with their thoughts, choices or feelings when they can not control normal life situations, getting back on track may require an extremely disciplined and restrictive style of eating and going a bit longer and harder with training for the next 48-72 hours, all in an effort to regain control over what didn't go as planned.

This is not only risky for your health but it can cause a roller coaster of emotions too.

The important thing to remember is that we don't have to control every situation to feel and to be "on track".
You can't make up for what happened in the past and you can't control the future, so why not focus on the present?

Give yourself 4-5 days to slowly get yourself back to lifestyle habits that are healthy and productive to your goals.
No need to go to the extreme as being too fixated on "healthy" habits can actually be unhealthy.

As athletes, we already live a very extreme lifestyle and with so many daily decisions and responsibilities, it can be exhausting to feel the need to control everything.

You know that life is going to happen and you will need to travel to work, you will be invited to a party with a smorgasbord of food that you normally don't eat and you are going to miss workouts because life is stressful and busy. 

Rather than letting yourself feel insecure when life is out of your control, perhaps it is time to focus on how you can feel more calm, at ease or at peace with your choices when you find yourself deviating from your "normal" routine.

Remember that anytime you feel off, getting back on track should be focused on you functioning well in life rather than trying to fix what you couldn't control, because it wasn't exactly like you wanted it to be.