How to Find More Motivation to Eat Right

To eat right means to eat a well-balanced diet of fruit, vegetables, and protein needed for your body to run at its best. The goal of eating right is, most of the time, to live an overall healthier life.

Eating right and healthy for your needs can seem like an impossible task as all the wrong foods seem to taste the best.

However, following a routine and knowing how to eat right can make the challenge a little easier, so keep educating yourself. The main thing you need to do it is to find the motivation to do it. Motivation comes from education and understanding your reasons for doing it in the first place.

• Know your why – You must first know why you want to eat better. Is your reason to be healthier overall, to lose weight, fix a nutrition deficiency, or something else? Write down your reasons for eating better and put it somewhere that you will see every day. This way, you have a reminder, especially if you are eating certain foods that may not bring you too much joy.

• Try new and fun recipes – Search YouTube and Google for fun and easy healthy recipes. You do not need to eat the same boring food every day to be healthy. There are plenty of easy, nutritional, and fun recipes a try. Plus, it can be fun to try something new and different.

• Establish a routine – Routines are a great way to stay motivated because it provides a clear path for success each day. Write down what you plan on eating each day and follow it. If the food you choose is healthy and you eat the number of calories you need, you’ll succeed.

• Be forgiving – Forgive yourself if you happen to fail. Ultimately you will fail because you are human. Take that failure and learn from it and then move on. The more you focus on your failures, the more you waste time, and ultimately the more you will set yourself back, so don’t fall into the trap.  Just start fresh right after you slip.

• Do it with a friend or loved one – Sometimes a healthy challenge with a loved one or friend can be a great motivator to eat right. Set a goal with a friend or even challenge or spouse to eat more veggies, drink more water, and move more with you for the next 30 days. See who makes it and then reward the winner.

• Put money on it – If all else fails, sometimes money can be a great motivator. There are plenty of websites or apps such as Dietbet.com that make this even easier and fun. You can also win money. On Dietbet.com  you join a weight loss challenge of losing 4% of your body weight, put in a certain amount of money, and if you get to your goal weight, you and the other winners get to split the pot of cash. How fun is that?

If you do the work to eat right, realizing it doesn’t have to taste bad or be boring, you won’t fail. You may have mishaps along the way, but you are only human, and it is bound to happen, so pick yourself back up and keep going.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and while it’s a statement that’s been debated, it’s hard to deny that when you eat a wholesome one, you generally end up feeling bright and energized. Personally, I love digging into a bowl of yogurt and fruit in the morning before I sit down to begin my workday. It’s a habit that always leaves me feeling my best.

So in the spirt of feel-good breakfasts, we rounded up over 50 of our very favorite. Whether it’s eggs, hot oatmeal, a smoothie, or something else entirely that you crave, you’re sure to find something here to inspire your routine...

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Is Entitled Thinking Driving Your Emotional Eating?

One common cause of emotional eating among many people is that they’re thinking in a sort of entitled way that makes sense to them. You can find people using this same kind of logic all the time, and you might even be guilty of it yourself.

Entitled thinking is often seen in thinking that you deserve some kind of reward. For example, if you had a hard day at work with a lot of people getting on your nerves, that would be the cause for your desire to eat emotionally.

However, your reasoning for doing this is that you deserve it after such a hard day at work. This sort of reward system mindset is entitled and far from healthy. Other times, you might think that you’re above all of the hardships that you have to face, so you deserve a little treat.

That little treat tends to be emotional eating, in which you stuff yourself with all kinds of unhealthy food just because you feel like it and you can. Everyone has hardships in life, some more than others, but it’s not an excuse for emotional eating.

While you can think you deserve all these things and have earned some sort of treat for not having them, that’s really not the case. Of course you can’t control everything in your life, but if you’re not actually working towards the things you think you deserve, then you shouldn’t be rewarding yourself.

There are situations in which people can’t help the circumstances that they find themselves in, but you can make positive progress towards the things you want. Unless it’s something essential, then you can’t say you deserve it without working for it in any amount.

That attitude is what fuels you to keep feeding your urges without second thought, and it’s a very unhealthy attitude. By changing your thought process, you might find that you resist the urge to emotionally eat more often, and you’ll also become more proactive in getting the things that you want.

Once you realize that you can’t just expect things to come to you, you’ll go after them with a plan of attack, which often leads to a much better life. One of the earliest results you’ll see is that you’re more capable at resisting emotional eating.

Entitled thinking is a form of victim mindset that seems to comfort you through hard times. But it’s really a saboteur on your ability to strengthen yourself to hardships and succeed in spite of whatever it is life doles out to you in any given moment.

Are You Emotionally Eating to Avoid a Life Change

One of the most emotional times in your life is when you’re faced with an important change that you either do or don’t want to make. Even if it’s for the better, change is a scary thing at times, especially if what lies beyond it is unknown and you’re not sure what to expect.

Naturally, right around these moments, you’re going to be in an elevated emotional state. You’re going to be more stressed or sadder than you normally would be, making it a target time for emotional eating.

For example, you might be in a bad or unhealthy relationship. You know that you want to end it, but part of you dreads having to. Whether it be retaliation from the other party, ridicule among friends, or loneliness, there are a lot of things that you might be worried about.

It’s easy to get caught up in the short term negatives while ignoring the long term positives. Before a time like this, you’ll probably experience many emotional eating urges.

Jobs are another very common source of stress and stressful situations. If you have a job that you just despise, you’re definitely going to be stressed. The prospect of quitting your job is an intimidating one for sure, and even the thought of accepting a new job is nerve racking.

This is another likely case in which you’ll resort to emotional eating. The problem with emotional eating in these situations is that it involves you ignoring a major decision in your life that needs to be made just because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Of course it’s more comfortable to be eating a bunch of junk food, but that’s not going to help you make the decisions that you need to – or even carry out the transition from one thing to another after a decision has been made.

There are certain things in our lives that we have to do, even though we hate doing them. These difficult decisions are prime examples of that. Even if you know you want to leave your significant other, you might still dread doing it just because it’s uncomfortable.

However, that’s just the way things go in life, and eating isn’t going to change that. What it can do is permanently damage your health. Even positive life changes, such as a move or marriage, can drive you to eat emotionally because although it’s rooted in happiness, these times are still a source of stress based on an unknown future.

The sooner you learn to stop hiding behind food, the better. It’s a bandage, a temporary solution to a long term problem. You need to be able to face these problems directly if you hope to have a chance at making a positive change for good and protecting your health for longevity.

How to Feed Your Feelings and Not Fill Your Stomach

One of the main reasons people turn to emotional eating is that they’re stressed out - meaning they have a high amount of cortisol being released in their body due to some unfortunate life circumstances.

Regardless of what’s bothering you, the effect on your physical well-being is the same. When you have too much cortisol, your body acts strangely. You’ll lose hair, gain weight, and turn to emotional eating to try to suppress those feelings.

Instead of eating, you need to address your stress in a different way. What you have to understand is that there is a very clear physical process going in your body when you get stressed out, and then when you relieve stress, you reverse that process.

There are many activities that you can do that have been shown to reduce cortisol production in your body, making you less stressed. However, the effectiveness of the activities varies from person to person.

For example, if you really love animals and you have pets, then you’re going to see a significant decrease in stress from spending time with them, petting them, and playing with them.

Both dog and cat owners have been shown to have lower stress levels when they’re interacting with their pets, so it’s a great activity for both you and your pets. Many people also have stress relieving reactions to certain types of music.

When they get caught up listening to their favorite songs, their bodies stop releasing the stress hormone and instead just focus on the music. It doesn’t have to be traditional calming music - just whatever it is that you really enjoy listening to, because the aim is to make you happier.

For the more athletically inclined, exercise is a proven combatant of stress. It gets your blood pumping and lets your body get distracted from whatever it is that’s making you get stressed out.

It also helps you look better and feel better. Whether it’s going for a 20 minute walk or spending two hours lifting weights, exercise is a great way to blow off steam and release endorphins.

What it really boils down to is doing something that you enjoy that’s productive, because what you’re trying to accomplish is slowing your body’s cortisol production down so that you’re not stressed out.

Whatever it is that helps you do that best is what you should do, as long as it’s healthy, unlike emotional eating. Food is something that should be enjoyable and a nutrition resource – but it should never act as a crutch to prop you up in times of turmoil.

Stop the Emotional Eating Urge

When the urge to eat strikes, even though you’re not hungry, it can be difficult to pass it up. It just seems so tempting, so comforting, and you might not even think twice about it if it’s something that you’re used to doing.

However, you need to learn how to stop the urge and fight it when it hits - otherwise you’re just going to keep on falling into the same habit again and again as you watch your health decline.

The first step you need to take is noting when you feel that urge. You don’t necessarily need to do anything about it at first, just learn to identify the difference between genuine hunger and an emotional eating urge.

It may be easier for some than others, but you’ll get the hang of it with some practice. Once you get to a point where you can easily identify emotional eating urges, wait for the next urge to strike.

When it does, instead of going straight to the kitchen or to get fast food, just set yourself a ten minute timer on your phone. Do whatever else you want during this time to distract yourself, and see if you can make it through that ten minutes.

Try to engage in other habits that help you experience joy. That might be talking to a good friend, watching a stand up comedy routine on YouTube, painting or doing a puzzle, gardening or something else.

If you really, truly can’t wait, then you might just not be ready yet. Otherwise, you’re ready to take the next step. Increase the time between feeling the urge hit and acting on it. If you’ve made it through a total twenty minutes, you can think about whether or not you even want to eat anymore.

If you still feel that urge, then keep working with the timer until the urge goes away. It should, sooner or later, at least until you feel genuinely hungry. While you’re waiting for this urge to go away, try thinking about how you’re feeling emotionally at that time and why.

This can give you some good insight as to why you’re feeling the urge to eat when you’re not even hungry. Facing your emotions directly is a very important thing to learn, and if you don’t have that ability, you won’t be able to make smart decisions in life.

Over time, you’ll get better and better at denying the urge to eat emotionally, and you’ll have an easier time doing so. It’ll lead to you having a happier life, a healthier body, and a clearer mind. You won’t be so bogged down by your emotions and you’ll feel a lot more in control.

Sit With Your Emotions

Many people don’t take the time to engage with their own emotions. They prefer to distract themselves with anything that they can, whether they realize it or not, because just being by themselves with their thoughts is a scary notion.

Some people are secretly less happy than they appear to be and don’t want to face the emotions they have surrounding that, so they’ll supplement it with something like emotional eating instead to take their minds off of it and avoid having to have that inner discussion.

You might very well be avoiding your emotions, whether you know it or not, especially if you engage in emotional eating. When you start to use food as solace, you might have something specific in mind that you’re upset about, like a breakup, or you might just be doing it because you’re avoiding something that you’re not very aware of.

It could be that someone said something rude to you and it stuck with you throughout the day, so you eat a lot more later on so you’re not thinking about it, but rather more focused on your large comfort meal.

You can’t hide from moments like this by eating food, but rather you have to sit and be with your thoughts and emotions and work through them logically. A good way to start practicing this is by getting into meditation.

Being able to clear your mind and just sit calmly is a great way to learn that self-control, which is so important to handling emotions. When you’re able to only focus on how you’re feeling, you gain a lot of clarity in your mind that helps you overcome these obstacles in your life much more than you would find by emotionally eating.

You should also work your way up through your emotions, and start with some lesser ones so that you get a grip on it. If you dive straight into your harshest and most brutal emotions, then you’re going to have a hard time handling them.

You need to start with something like why you were upset when someone cut you off in traffic, before you can move on to your deeper seeded childhood traumas. Being able to handle your emotions as they come to you is such a crucial thing to learn, because without it, you will act irrationally.

Things like eating when you get stressed out or lashing out when you’re angry stem from not being in control. But if you have a good grip on your mindset, you’re going to have a much better time dealing with things and letting them go or creating a plan of action to get past it.

The Mediterranean diet is a way of eating that is inspired by the traditional foods consumed in the countries that border the Mediterranean Sea, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain.

It is characterized by an emphasis on whole, minimally processed foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, as well as healthy fats like olive oil. The Mediterranean diet also includes moderate amounts of poultry, eggs, dairy, and seafood, and a limited amount of red meat.

One of the key features of the Mediterranean diet is the use of olive oil as the primary source of fat, in place of saturated fats like butter or lard. Olive oil is rich in monounsaturated fats, which have been shown to have numerous health benefits, including reducing the risk of heart disease.

• Fruits and vegetables: Fruits and vegetables are a key component of the Mediterranean diet, and they should make up a significant portion of your daily intake. These foods are rich in essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, and they can help protect against a range of chronic diseases.
• Whole grains: Whole grains, such as whole wheat, oats, and quinoa, are an important source of fiber, which can help lower cholesterol and regulate blood sugar levels. They should make up a significant portion of your daily intake on the Mediterranean diet.
• Legumes: Legumes, such as beans, lentils, and chickpeas, are an excellent source of protein, fiber, and a range of important nutrients. They should be included in the diet as a regular source of protein, particularly for vegetarians and vegans.
• Nuts and seeds: Nuts and seeds are a good source of healthy fats, protein, and a range of important nutrients. They can be included in the diet as a snack or added to dishes for flavor and texture.
• Healthy fats: As mentioned, olive oil is the primary source of fat in the Mediterranean diet. It is rich in monounsaturated fats, which have been shown to have numerous health benefits. Other sources of healthy fats include avocados, nuts, and seeds.
• Poultry, eggs, dairy, and seafood: These foods can be included in the diet in moderation. Poultry and seafood are good sources of protein, while dairy products (such as yogurt and cheese) can be included as a source of calcium and other nutrients.
• Red meat: Red meat should be limited in the Mediterranean diet, as it is higher in saturated fat and has been linked to an increased risk of certain health conditions.

In addition to following these dietary guidelines, the Mediterranean diet also emphasizes the importance of physical activity, social connections, and a healthy lifestyle. These factors can all contribute to overall well-being and may help protect against chronic diseases.

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Three Reasons Why Everybody Needs To Go On A Mental Detox Program

Usually, when people think of detoxification, they usually think of some sort of drug program. They think of people hanging out and staying clear of drugs. Whether it's heroine, crystal methamphetamine, cocaine, or any other drug, the common definition of detoxification is that people simply stay away.

While that's definitely one aspect of detoxification, it is just one small part of the puzzle. There is a bigger picture to concern ourselves with, and the big picture really turns on issues and toxins that you cannot measure. It is very easy to restrict detoxification to physical toxins. These are things that have an odor, weight. They react chemically. They have a certain impact on your blood chemistry.

But if you really want to detoxify yourself, you have to look at the mental level. What you choose to think about in a moment by moment basis, plays a bigger role in your life's outcomes than you care to realize. In fact, even if you were subjected to the worst form of physical abuse and physical contaminants, you can still manage to do well, as long as you have your wits about you.

As long as you have the right mindset and the right perspective, things will fall into place. Sooner or later, you will find yourself where you need to go. That's how powerful your mental state is. And unfortunately, so many people turn a blind eye to this. They take it for granted, and that's why their lives are full of mental toxins that hold them back, and drag them down, and keep them from the kind of life that they should otherwise be living. Here are three reasons why you should go on a mental detox program.


Reason #1
Say goodbye to the past

The past is the past. The past is made up of facts that happened a while back. Whether it's yesterday or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago, it doesn't matter. It's not happening right here, right now. No matter how bad you feel, and no matter how pumped up you are, you are never going to change the past. Those facts happened.

Your father walked out on your family. Your mother slapped you around. You did drugs. Your girlfriend cheated on you. Your boyfriend treated you like garbage, and on and on. Those things happened. What can change is how you interpret the past. That's the only thing you can do. Instead of allowing your past to get the better of you, today, you can start changing how you respond to it. You can start changing how you process that information.

It no longer has to make you feel like a prisoner. It no longer has to make you feel small, voiceless, and impotent. You can turn things around, because it's all a choice. Is this easy? Absolutely not. Is it quick? Of course not, but it's also absolutely necessary. And the worst part to all of this, is that only you can do it. Not your parents, not your lover, and definitely not your boss, you have to step up.


Reason #2
You gain perspective

When you're so focused on the things that you think should be important in your life, you end up, sooner or later, going around in circles. You put in all this time, effort, and energy trying to get things to happen in your life, but it seems that somehow, someway, you always end up in the same place. This is not an accident. In fact, it is to be expected. How come? You don't have a plan.

When you try to get from point A to point B, and you don't have a map, much less a compass, how are you going to get there? When you let go of mental toxins, you start developing an appreciation for direction in your life. Sooner or later, you become more efficient in choosing the right path for yourself.

Things that happened in the past no longer have a hold on you because now, your map is in the present moment. All that matters is the moment happening right now. You are able to maximize your personal focus and willpower on the things playing out right now. Accordingly, you are able to direct the present to the future you want for yourself.

Reason #3
Mental detox leads to better self-love

I'm sorry break this to you, but you have to love yourself. You have the ultimate responsibility of loving yourself. No matter how much your partner says he or she loves you, it will never match the love you can give yourself. Please understand that for you to love others, you must first learn to love yourself. By the same token, for you to be able to respect other people, you must first begin with a fundamental understanding of self-respect.

You can only give what you have. If you don't respect yourself, how can you expect to respect others. The same applies to love. When you do mental detox, you reclaim your ability to love yourself. You no longer are a people-pleaser. You no longer try to live based on other people's expectations. You are no longer live in your life based on some sort of schedule set by other people.

Instead, you focus on what's important and you reclaim ownership over your life. That is real power. That leads to your real identity which leads to real self-love, and when that happens, you are able to love others in real terms. Not in stereotypes, not in formulas, not in any kind of artificial way, we're talking about the real thing. Because ultimately, we know what real love is - it's sacrifice.

In other words, you're willing to let go of your needs just to make somebody else happy. Sacrifice is real love, and unfortunately, most of us don't have that. Most of us deal with toxins that eat away at that self-love, and replaces it with a counterfeit of self-gratification and self-absorption. I don't know about you, the last time I checked, the $3 dollar bill still fake. Nobody is going to take a $3 dollar bill. Stop feeding yourself emotional counterfeits. Click here to go on a mental detox program that can unlock your ability to truly love, truly give, and truly share. Your owe it to yourself.