Getting Honest About Your Eating Habits

Have you slipped into bad habits over Christmas and the New Year? It’s easy for bad eating patterns to creep up on us. With me, one of the signals of this is when chocolate goes from being an occasional treat to a two-or-three-times daily indulgence!

It’s all too easy to kid ourselves that we “usually” eat a healthy diet – because surely, birthdays, weekends, meals out with friends, and one-offs don’t count, right? The problem is, if you’re regularly putting away chips, candies, cake or ice-cream, your body doesn’t care where the calories come from. You’ll put on weight all the same.

So how can you get the real picture about your habits – including those little extras which you forget about, and those treats that you think are limited to special occasions?

Keeping a Food Diary

The only way to be 100% sure what you’re eating is to record it all. It’s so easy to let a cookie slip in mid-morning, an creamy drink mid-afternoon, and a bag of chips before dinner … If you tend to graze or eat on the go, you may find that you can’t even remember everything you ate by dinner time.

The solution is to keep a notebook on you (or use a spreadsheet if you work at a computer) and write everything down as you eat it. You might like to keep track of calories or grams of fat, too. Yes, it might seem like a hassle at first, but it can really highlight what your bad habits are.

(You can read more about keeping a food diary here.)

Checking “Occasional” Means It

Your diet doesn’t need to be completely rigid in order to work – and, in fact, taking a day off from your diet, or giving yourself leeway to relax on special occasions, can boost your chances of sticking to it in the long run. But are your “occasional” treats really that infrequent?

Think back over the past couple of weeks of your diet – how often have you eaten something which you would never normally have, because it was a “special occasion” or an “event”?

It can be useful to limit the number of occasions you’ll permit yourself each week: if you’re going out to dinner with the family on Saturday, skip the post-work drinks and chips on a Friday night.

Again, if you’re keeping a food diary, you’ll be able to see when you have more “occasional” days than normal ones!

Asking Family or Friends About Your Habits

This one might require a bit of bravery from you and from the person you choose: ask a close friend, housemate or family member to let you know about any bad eating habits which they think you have.

Don’t get defensive or upset – just hear them out, nod and smile, and then think over what they’ve said to decide whether it’s fair or not. You may feel a bit uncomfortable or even challenged by what they say: is that because there’s a lot of truth in it?

You might ask them about:

• Times when they see you making excuses for eating something that might not be a good choice
• Whether they think you’re more likely to eat snack foods when you’re in a particular mood (e.g. bored, upset, stressed)
• One way in which they think you could change your eating habits

Other people can sometimes see things which we’re blind to – so don’t be afraid to ask.

Looking at Your Grocery Receipts

If you want a truly impartial perspective on what you eat, look at your grocery receipts. Go through the items on it, and circle any which you feel aren’t part of your healthy diet. Ask yourself why you bought them – were they consciously chosen for a special treat? Were they on a good offer?

Often, the less-healthy purchases are the ones which we buy on impulse: they probably didn’t make it onto your shopping list. To try to curb the habit of picking up bags of cookies or bars of candy at the store, write yourself a firm list and stick with it.

Good luck finding out about your habits! Don’t be ashamed, upset or defensive – simply accept that your eating patterns might not be as good as you’d hoped. Once you know where you’re starting from, it’s much easier to make healthy changes.

Written by Ali Hale

Related posts:

1. Getting Into Great Dieting Habits
2. The Key to Lasting Weight-Loss: Changing Your Habits
3. Five Ways to Beat Boredom Eating