Look at yourself. Take a good, hard look. Do you like what you see?
Maybe you do. Congratulations!
But maybe you’re disappointed you’re not in better shape. Maybe you’ve been trying to break the fast-food habit, but aren’t sure how to start. If so, this post is for you!
Our body composition is primarily — 80% — determined by what we eat. Sure, we need to exercise to build muscle and get fully fit, but we can’t get away from the fact that we can do the most good for our bodies by eating properly.
Now, I know, we’ve all been on diets that failed. We just can’t seem to stick with them. Even if the results are good, our lives make dieting challenging, especially if those diets are particular restrictive, like the ones that allow only 1000 calories a day or that totally disallow anything with sugar in it.
Because of those kinds of eating plans, people often get wrapped around the diet axle. It’s too much of a commitment. It’s too hard to avoid all those “bad” foods.
Think of all the workplace dietary health hazards, like birthday cakes, donuts and breakfast tacos someone brings in, cookies someone baked. Heck, it’s downright impolite to refuse to eat those things!
Yeah, it’s tough to stay on a healthy eating plan.
But if you really are disappointed with your choices, it’s time to make better ones.
So here’s an idea. Instead of stopping all your current dining habits completely, and jumping into some diet that you know you’ll never stay on, how about you eat healthy, say, 50% of the time.
Half the time. Half your meals — healthy. Just half.
So, then, 4 days a week — healthy eating. The other 3 days, you eat whatever you like.
(Yeah, I already moved your half up to 57% with the 4 out of 7 days thing, but you can live with that, right? It’s just so much cleaner and easier to keep track of that way, instead of having to factor in a half-day there somewhere….)
Your first inclination might be to make your days Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — the weekend — but you may want to rethink that. Do you really need to let go on Sunday? Heck, that’s the start of a new week and a good day to get back into the swing of things.
Thursday through Saturday? That might work for you. Or Monday and Thursday and Saturday. Or change them up every week depending on what’s going on. Up to you.
The whole point of this post is to remind you that you don’t have to be 100% health-conscious 100% of the time. I threw 50% out there, but, seriously, any number you can use to help yourself get more fit — 10%, 25%, 50% — that’s all good. Anything’s better than 0%, right?
Hopefully, once you get into it and start seeing positive results, start looking and feeling better, you’ll decide to add another day of healthy eating, and another day. Six out of seven days of healthy eating would be 86%. That’s pretty good.
But, um, I wouldn’t go beyond that — you have to leave room for the occasional pizza binge, ya know?