3 Painless Ways to Start Eating Right When Nothing Else Will Work
BY: MATT FRAZIER, CO-FOUNDER
You know what you’re supposed to eat: Whole foods, greens, variety, etc. You don't need another website telling you the basics. It’s not that you don’t want to eat healthily — you know how important it is. Not just for you, but for your family. And that if you don’t start soon, it’ll one day be urgent, or maybe, too late.
You can’t seem to start. It’s just too much, with the time it would take to plan meals and shop for new ingredients before you even get down to cooking.
The most common problem, straight from the mouths of our community.
Over 12+ years of growing the No Meat Athlete and Complement communities, I've spoken to thousands of people about what’s keeping them from being where they want to be with their health and fitness (and that of their family).
Far and away, the problem of “I can’t seem to get started” has been the single most common frustration.
The Hidden Force that Prevents You from Starting
Here’s how it goes, most often: "We’ve tried eating well in my house, and it just doesn’t work. We last for two days, and soon we’re right back where we started. I work a full-time job and so does my spouse, and with the kids and their school and everything else, we just don’t have the time to make a healthy diet work."
To this, I say … of course. Of course it’s hard to change habits, that's why most of us fail at them the majority of the time.
Habits start out as tiny threads, and each time you repeat the habit, you add a new thread. Eventually, you’ve got not a thread but a cable, and it’s very hard to break.
Does this mean you’re stuck? That you’re doomed to a life of junk food and the fat, unhealthy family that goes with it?
No. It just means instead of trying to change everything at once, you might be better served by breaking the cables one thread at a time.
This post is about which thread to start with.
3 Simple Ways to Start Small
If you’re talking about a habit like running, it’s easy to start small.
Just go run for five minutes. Or two minutes. Then do the same thing the next day.
Whatever it takes, set up the rules so you start accumulating wins, and you start to change your perception of what it means and how it feels to run.
Small-Step Approach #1. Instead of trying to overhaul your entire diet, pick just one day a week.
And on that one day a week, do everything in your power to eat exceedingly well.
Once you learn how to prepare and execute for just one day, it’ll be easier to do it for multiple days.
Small-Step Approach #2. Make just one meal healthy each day.
To create more continuity in your healthy habits than just once a week, try eating better every day, but just for one meal.
Over time, you can focus on expanding the number of hours around breakfast that you eat healthily.
Small-Step Approach #3. Go all-in, but give yourself an end date.
Set up a fun challenge for yourself and the family, and decide that — for three days or a week or 10 days — you’re all going to eat healthily. Plan another challenge, modifying based on what you’ve learned, and set it for a longer duration. Rinse and repeat.
To Help You Get Started
1. Make “healthy” more fun.
A big part is that healthy food is perceived as boring and bland.
Make the whole thing about something more exciting than “healthy,” and it’s much more likely to be met with openness.
2. Start where you are.
The idea here is to not radically alter your meals, but make small changes in each of them to move it along the spectrum toward healthy.
The point is not to make the shift all at once, but in small, nearly imperceptible bits at a time.
Your Turn
If you’re serious about eating healthily but just can’t seem to start, then I’m begging you: don’t just read this.
Pick one of the three approaches above. Commit. Plan. And then give it a try.
When you mess up (and trust me, you will), learn and try again.
