It’s one thing to know nutrition information, it’s an entirely other thing to translate that information into a meal on your plate 3 times a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year…
…and it needs to taste good, can’t be too complicated to cook, make you spend too much time in the kitchen and cost too much. It also needs to satisfy your fussy kids (or partner) because I’m sure you don’t have time to cook two meals each night. And if you do, I’m sure it gets old quickly! Phew!
It can seem all so exhausting!
Even though making small changes to our eating habits is difficult, the influence and push of wellness culture puts immense pressure on people to continue to strive towards these grand, drastic changes to their eating habits or to try all the crazy, whacky diet advice flung all over the internet.
‘Wellness culture’ presents a huge challenge to our long term health.
Hang on? Isn’t wanting wellness a good thing?
Yes! Wanting wellness is a good thing, but true wellness is not what is promoted by wellness culture. ‘Wellness culture’ is the highly influential, social media pushed lifestyle of green smoothies, special powders, coordinated active wear and alternative/integrative health practices that frequently push people into unhealthy mindsets, behaviours and treatments. Like all things, there are positive aspects of wellness culture, but for the most part it creates a drive for a perfect, organic, sustainable, untouched, pure, toxic free form of health that results in food stress, anxiety, risk of malnutrition and disordered eating. For starters, this way of eating is completely impossible to attain and more importantly, unnecessary.
What’s a human supposed to do to make healthy eating a reality?
Most people that I speak to say that know what to eat, they just don’t do it. This is actually a great acknowledgement. Because now that you know this about yourself, the next question you need to ask is why don’t you do it?
- is your expectation of healthy eating too high?
- does the thought of healthy eating make you feel deprived and you don’t truly want that?
- do you feel that healthy eating is just too much effort?
Healthy eating is much more than just downloading a meal plan or waking up on a Monday promising yourself you’ll be perfect. If you don’t understand the key fundamentals that make up a realistic healthy eating pattern, you’ll struggle as soon as you come across a food you don’t like or a meal that doesn’t fit with your life at that moment.
When you understand the principles, and put them into action day to day, that’s when you find the freedom and flexibility to eat well for the rest of your life, no matter what happens.
That’s when healthy eating becomes ‘who you are and what you do’ rather than something you ‘try’ to do. This cannot happen overnight. It happens slowly, incrementally, harnessing the power of psychology and behaviour change.
Sound good? Are you ready to tackle healthy eating without perfection?
Download the Ayla Health mobile app now! Feel the food confidence you’ve always wanted to have!
