Everyone has foods, events, emotions, people and places that trigger unhealthy eating. Devise strategies to overcome these triggers and you are well on your way to winning your weight loss war. Here are my top twenty tips for toppling your triggers. Please note that not every strategy works for every person. Remember that the only expert in your healthy life journey is you. Only you can determine which ones are right for you. However, with so many to choose from you are sure to find a few which will help you tremendously!
- If you crave something, serve yourself a small portion and then put the packet away. A little bit of what you want goes further than you think.
- Keep chocolate in the freezer. It’s a lot harder to binge on chocolate when it’s frozen!
- Try to replace your trigger foods with healthy alternatives. If a particular chocolate bar is your weakness, try dark chocolate instead.
- Buy single-serve packets of foods you love—fun-size bags of chocolate such as M&Ms and Maltesers are great—to avoid the risk of binging
- Avoid having foods in the house that you know you can’t just eat a little bit of.
- If someone gives you a box of chocolates that you love either re-gift them or open them, take a taste and then throw the rest in the rubbish bin immediately. An open packet is an empty packet!
- Avoid your trigger foods. Don’t buy them and don’t order them when you eat out. Ask for no hot potato chips with your meal and you won’t be able to eat any and you’ll soon find that you become used to not eating them as well.
- If you crave something sweet, try something sour instead, like a dill pickle. You might find it’ll stop your sweet tooth in its tracks!
- Work out the approximate calories in your favourite trigger foods (be realistic about how much of them you normally eat!). It’s probably a sobering figure.
- Work out what you could eat (calorie-wise) instead of your trigger food. For example, there are 1345 calories and 75g of fat in an average 250g block of milk chocolate. That's the equivalent of eating two slices of multigrain bread, two large boiled eggs, one carton of low fat yoghurt, one medium banana, four sushi rolls, half a cup of blueberries, 25 almonds, one lean chicken breast, half a cup of mashed sweet potato, half a cup of broccoli, half a cup of carrots, one scoop of regular ice-cream and two olives!
- Work out how much money you’ll save when you stop buying your trigger foods. Think of what you can buy with that money instead. Start saving for that designer outfit!
- Keep a food diary to record what you’re feeling when you crave certain foods.
- Do your grocery shopping after a meal, so you’re not hungry when you browse the aisles and don’t end up filling your trolley with junk.
- Do your grocery shopping after a workout. You’ll be less tempted to undo all your hard work with unhealthy foods!
- Plan your meals and shop accordingly. Being organised is the best way to avoid unhealthy pitfalls and emotional eating.
- Have regular, healthy snacks between meals to avoid getting so hungry that you end up binging.
- When you have a craving, chew gum or have a breath mint—it’ll help distract your brain and your stomach!
- If you’re going out to a restaurant or a party, eat something beforehand so you won’t be as hungry and risk over-indulging.
- Reboot your brain. If you always done something one way or at one time (eg after dinner snacking) it has become hard-wired into your brain. Re-boot your software by doing something different. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that this IS possible. Rather than following the usual path that you take, make yourself a completely new path!
- Work out what works best for you. Some of these may work for others, others may just tempt you further. Work out which is which and don’t lie to yourself that something that hasn’t worked before will suddenly work this time.
