To Change Your Eating Habits, Change This!

What if you could change your eating habits more easily, just by changing your environment? 

I can tell you from a lot of experience that this can make a huge difference. 

Changing your environment can change your life in so many ways, and today I want to share some tips on changing the environment of your kitchen to support you in changing or maintaining healthy eating habits. 

Here are some tips for creating an environment in your kitchen that will support you in having more consistently healthy eating habits: 

1) Keep sugary sweets & junk food out of your kitchen as much as possible. It doesn't work well for most people to deprive themselves of having these things totally, but when you always have them around, you are setting yourself up to easily grab them more often than is a good idea to eat them. (I struggle with this too!) Get yourself a treat when you go out, but don't bring a whole container home with you.  If you bake, and you are someone who wants to eat the pan of brownies, share them with people so that you limit the amount you have around. It's an easy way to maintain balance and not overeat the things that you don't want to.  

2) Replace the sugary sweets & junk food with healthier options. Keep things like nuts & fruit around for when you have sweet or salty cravings, and they will more easily become your go-to. It makes it so much easier to make a healthier choice, to develop a habit of choosing fruit over a cookie, and also to develop a taste for healthier snacks so that you enjoy them more over time. 

3) Develop a habit of keeping your kitchen clean. It's a lot harder to muster up the ambition to cook yourself a healthy meal when the kitchen is already messy. Those are the moments that we order pizza....again, or go for less healthy convenience food. Focus on cleaning up as you go when you are cooking a meal so that there is little clean-up after you have eaten your meal. If this is not something you do currently, baby step your way into doing this - it's a game-changer. It's SO much easier to keep up with a clean kitchen little by little rather than letting it get to the point of disaster - then it feels like a big job. Develop small habits like:

• Unloading the dishwasher in the morning when you make your coffee ( it only takes a few minutes).
• Take 5 minutes to clean out the fridge a bit before you go grocery shopping.
• Take a few minutes to wipe down counters & load the dishwasher before you go to bed.
• Take a few minutes to organize your pantry shelves or spice shelves every now & then so that you can easily know what you have & find what you need.
• There are a lot of habits you can develop that only take a couple of minutes a day that can help you to keep on top of having a clean kitchen. 

4) Stock your kitchen with the right dishes to support how you want to eat. Big salad bowls for lunch & dinner salads. (seriously, a big salad on a plate makes me crazy) Smaller dinner plates if you are wanting to work on your portions. Small bowls for snacks so that you are not eating almonds out of a 1 lb bag mindlessly. Meal prep containers if you are wanting to portion out some meals for the week. Whatever your favorite water glasses or bottles are to help encourage you to drink enough water. The right dishes might seem like a small thing, but they can really be supportive! 

5) Keep the small appliances that make healthy eating easier handy. For example, my Nutribullet lives on my counter, making my morning smoothie habit easy & efficient. My food processor is not tucked away deep in a cabinet - it's easily accessible to use for things that would take me a lot longer without it. I use it for shredding things like cabbage & carrots for salads, or pulsing onions & garlic to make a homemade stew a lot quicker than chopping. Whatever your convenience appliances are, keep them easily accessible, if not out on the counter ready to go.  

6) Remember that less can be more! When your kitchen is overly stuffed with things that you don't use or eat, it creates a chaotic feeling environment where you can't find what you need, or even know what you have. If you have a drawer full of lids that magically ran away from the containers they used to match, get rid of them. Stock your pantry, fridge, & freezer with only the things you actually want to be using in an organized fashion - not overly full. Toss out what you don't need.

7) Out of sight, out of mind - in sight, in mind! We use this trick with kids all the time, but it works on us too.  If you do have sweets or junk food in the house - hide it away! Place fresh fruit in bowls on the counter. Make it so that you see all of the pretty fresh produce when you open your fridge!

8) Organize your kitchen in a way that it's a space that you enjoy being in, however that is for you. Personally, I love listening to music, watching something, or talking on the phone when I am cooking. There's a space where my laptop fits on the shelf above the counter perfectly and away from the danger of getting spilled on if I want to stream something to watch while I'm cooking. My bluetooth speaker often lives in the kitchen for listening to anything I want while cooking. I keep my fresh herbs in jars on the counter near the window, and I have houseplants in my kitchen making it feel like the cheerful place I want to be. Maybe you have an Ipad or tablet stand in the kitchen so that you can watch cooking videos while in the kitchen, or a big speaker so you can listen to music & dance while you cook? Whatever your thing is that helps you want to spend more time there, do that! 

Changing your environment can change your life in so many ways. 

Changing the environment of your kitchen can make changing how you eat or maintaining a healthy diet so much easier. It's all about supporting yourself, and what an easy way to support yourself? 

Was there something that inspired you in what you just read? 

How can you change the environment of your kitchen to support how you want to be eating? 

Put it on your to-do list. Set yourself up to make eating a healthy diet easier for you! 

Wishing you wellness, 

Shelly