New Years resolutions help us develop new habits that will help us improve ourselves in the new year. The best to ensure you’re physically healthy is by being mindful of what you eat. Mindfulness is a strategy that will help you achieve many benefits for your physical and mental health.
Healthy New Years resolutions always involve some keeping in mind what you eat or what you stop eating. Foods consumed in most households are fast foods, and it can be helpful if you take steps to ensure you eat healthier throughout the new year. You also need to pay attention to the cues your body is sending you. For example, constant digestive symptoms could be a sign of food sensitivities. You can find out which foods these are by taking a Sensitivity Test.
Most people start the new year with a cleansing to help them lose weight. While that will work, it will only do so for a while. You’ll regain all the lost weight once you’re back on your regular diet. However, eating healthily without cutting off entire food groups will help you quickly manage your diet and health.
Some healthy New Years resolutions you can make include:
Make a veggie version of your favourite meat recipes.
It’s easy to reduce the amount of meat you consume because of the various alternatives for those on vegan and vegetarian diets. If you’ve been trying to eat less meat for cardiovascular and blood pressure health, more vegetable alternatives will help you find something better.
Instead of going all in, you can start by making one day of the week meat-free. On that day, prepare homemade versions of your favourite meaty recipes or find plant-based protein options and see how you like them. If you find ones you love, you can use them to replace some of the meat on your menu.
You consume more dietary fibre, nutrients, and minerals by eating less meat and more vegetables. You can check out vegan and vegetarian recipes for the best protein alternatives.
Practice mindful eating
Mindful eating stems from mindfulness, which is practised in Buddhism. Common New Years resolutions include practicing mindful eating, you need to give the food you’re eating your full attention. This means eliminating any external distractions by concentrating only on what you’re eating.
Doing this even supports the cephalic phase of digestion, where your stomach produces digestive juices in response to the sight, smell, and taste of food. Some tips for mindful eating include;
- Paying attention to the cues given by your body. You can ask yourself whether you’re eating out of hunger, boredom, or habit. Also, before eating, ask yourself how hungry you are on a scale of one to ten.
- Slow down and remove all distractions when eating.
- Engage all your senses when eating, like smelling the food, identifying the taste, and noticing the colours and textures in your food.
- Check-in with yourself after or during your meal to see how you’re feeling. Do you feel full, bloated, energised or tired?
When you start practising mindful eating, it may feel strange at first. However, with time, you start noting that you can understand your body better, and you now know when it’s the right time to eat and what’s the right food for your stomach.
Often, people experience symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and digestive symptoms after eating specific foods, which can be a sign of food sensitivity. Through mindful eating, you can notice such symptoms after eating particular foods, and then you can easily take a Sensitivity Test to confirm which foods are problematic to the body.
Experiment with new ingredients
Often, people cook with the ingredients they’re used to. However, there are many ingredients out there to explore. Finding new elements to add to your food will help you discover new tastes and unexplored flavours.
New ingredients also help you escape your shell and discover combinations that take your normal food to the next level. This can help you be more explorative in the kitchen and even impress your guests when you decide to host dinner. Could this be one of your New Years resolutions?
Grow your food.
You can plant some of your favourite herbs if you have space at home. This can lead you to use more fresh herbs in your food. If you have space, you can grow your favourite spices or herbs on your kitchen windowsill or other greens on your balcony, garage, or garden.
Planting food for yourself is a great self-care practice that allows you to have a hobby. Once you start gardening, there’s no way back because you’ll be hooked. Getting fresh food from your garden is the most fantastic thing ever because you can eat seasonally and discover different things you’d enjoy planting and eating.
Less snacking
When it comes to New Years resolutions, this is right up there as one of the most popular! When you snack a lot, you’ll find that most of your calories will be from unhealthy snacks. However, having three meals a day and fewer snacks in between will help you meet your weight goals and prevent you from consuming more than you need.
At first, it will be hard to stop snacking between meals when you’re used to it. However, you can try it by choosing healthy snacks like vegetables and dried fruits. That way, you can desensitise your body from unhealthy snacks. You can then proceed to reduce the number of snacks you consume in a day.
Eat more whole foods.
The simplest way to enhance your overall health is by ensuring your diet is filled with more whole foods. Some examples of whole foods include nuts, fruits, seeds, vegetables, whole grains, and fish. When you add these to your diet, you will enjoy many excellent nutrients present in these foods.
A whole food-based diet is good for your health as it may significantly keep you from the risk of illnesses like excess body weight, heart disease, and blood pressure. If you don’t consume much of these in your everyday diet, you can add each serving to one of your meals. You’ll then learn to incorporate and enjoy them with your typical dishes.
Cut back on beverages with added sugars.
We must reduce added sugars, which we primarily consume in beverages. Sugary drinks increase your risk of illnesses like fatty liver disease, obesity, cavities, insulin resistance, and heart disease in all ages. If you can go cold turkey when it comes to avoiding sugary drinks, then that’s good.
However, you can also avoid this by slowly reducing the quantity you’re consuming. You can start by drinking smoothies and blended fruit juices without adding sugars when you’re craving a sugary drink, and then you can go from there. Slowly weaning yourself from sugary drinks helps you reduce the behaviour for good.
Cook more meals at home.
When you cook meals at home, you control the quantity of each ingredient, and you can make the meal as healthy as possible. Most people these days depend on convenience food. However, these could be bad in the long run if you want to lose weight and be healthier.
According to studies, those who prepare more meals at home have a better diet quality and less body fat than those who eat meals on the go. If most of your meals are from outside, you can start making one meal at home daily. From there, you can increase the quantity, and soon you’ll eat more meals at home.
You can start by cooking your favourite meals at home, and when you’re used to making your meals, you can move on to healthier versions of those foods, then try out new recipes, and it will all keep flowing from there, and your health will keep improving.
Stock less convenience foods
Chips, cookies, and frozen dinners, among other convenience foods, can easily be found in many households. Even though these are tasty and readily available, they’re not the best healthy foods to eat as they can be bad for your health if eaten too often. When you have these foods in your home, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
However, if you don’t stock up on such foods anymore and go grocery shopping weekly, then you’ll have enough fresh food to make healthy meals. When you have healthy ingredients to prepare at home, you’re more suited to cook healthy meals than when you’ve stocked up on convenience foods.
You can set aside one day a week to go to the farmers’ market or supermarket to get your fresh ingredients. When there, ensure you avoid conventional foods while trying to be healthier.
Educate yourself on dieting.
Chronic dieting can mess up your mental and physical health. Additionally, people who lose weight through restrictive dieting regain about two-thirds of their lost weight within a year. Gaining and losing weight so fast can be very bad for your health.
So, even though dieting can help you lose weight now, you’ll regain that weight within a year and in approximately five years, you might recover all of the lost weight and possibly more. Instead of dieting, find a sustainable way to lose weight slowly over a long period by sticking to a healthy diet and gradually increasing the intensity of workouts. This should be one of your top priorities for New Years resolutions!
Final thoughts
Mindful eating are excellent New Years resolutions that will boost not only your overall health but also your mental health. When you start practising mindful eating, you must also consider other aspects of your diet, like the quality of the foods you eat. Making healthy foods at home is a great way to ensure you eat right, lose weight, and become healthier. When switching to a healthy diet, consider your health by learning about food sensitivities, especially if you often suffer from digestive symptoms. One of your New Years resolutions should involve buying one of our Sensitivity Tests! Our test will help you figure out problematic foods in your diet so you can switch them for something that works better for you.
