How to Avoid Diet Boredom #1 Try new fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables can be delicious healthy food choices – and they’re loaded with nutrients. Learning to love a variety of fruits and vegetables helps to keep things interesting, and you’ll be offering your body a whole host of nutrients, too. If you just can’t face a plate of spinach one more day, try spicy mustard greens, kale or Swiss chard instead. Just because your meal plan calls for strawberries doesn’t mean you can’t swap in something more exotic like kiwifruit for a change. How to Avoid Diet Boredom #2 Move meals and meal items around. In general, meal plans are designed to distribute your foods over several meals and snacks throughout the day – partly to help you control hunger, but also to help you maintain your physical and mental energy. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t move things around a little bit. Maybe your plan calls for a mid-morning protein snack, but you don’t feel the need (or the desire) to eat it – by all means, move that snack to later in the day if it works better for you. If you prefer your larger meal midday – rather than the larger dinner meal that your plan calls for – go ahead and swap. The time of day that you eat your calories makes little difference as long as you don’t exceed your daily totals. And, there’s no reason you can’t eat ‘breakfast food’ for dinner and have leftovers in the morning. How to Avoid Diet Boredom #3 Add more seasonings to your food. It seems to me that some people don’t even try to make their food interesting when they’re dieting. It’s almost as if they’re trying to punish themselves – and that it would be ‘bad’ to actually enjoy a tasty plate of food. Eating should bring pleasure, not punishment – and you can add loads of flavor to foods with seasonings like herbs, spices, citrus juice and zest, garlic, onion or a splash of wine or vinegar. And don’t forget almost-calorie-free condiments like mustard, salsa, steak sauce or soy sauce (but use them wisely as some may contain higher sodium content than you would expect). Fresh steamed spinach tastes just fine – but it’s a whole lot better with a little red onion and a sprinkle of balsamic vinegar. How to Avoid Diet Boredom #4 Give your favorite recipes a makeover. Diet boredom can also set in when you aren’t eating your usual favorite meals because they’re not very diet friendly. But with so many tips and tricks for revamping recipes, you might – with a little experimentation – be able to satisfy your craving for your favorite foods without breaking your diet. Once you’ve mastered a recipe, share and swap with your friends – it’s amazing how quickly you can build a healthy recipe collection that way. How to avoid Diet Boredom #5 Find restaurant meals that work with your meal plan. Dieting can be really boring if you’re convinced you can never enjoy a meal out. But there’s no reason to avoid restaurants altogether when you’re in dieting mode – the trick is finding items that work with your diet, not against it. Certain cuisines – Asian and Mediterranean fare, for example – tend to offer diet-friendly vegetables and lean proteins, so that might be a good place to start. And take advantage of online nutrition information – many restaurants post calorie counts – which can be a big help in pre-planning what you’ll order. How to Avoid Diet Boredom #6 Bank some calories during the week. Sometimes the diet boredom doesn’t set in until the weekend. Most of us have our time pretty well scheduled during the week, so eating the same meals most days doesn’t seem to bother us that much. But when the weekend sets in, we want to mix it up a little bit. Some people work around this by cutting back a little bit each day during the week, and loosening the reins somewhat on the weekend. If you want to try this, be sure you have a good idea of how many calories you’ve saved up – and how many calories that splurge might cost you. The “six days on and one day off” diet plan can be hard to pull off if you don’t plan ahead. Binge eating is never a good idea. Make sure you plan to eat when you’re hungry and make wise choices regarding calories vs nutrients on every day of the week. That said, a small treat now and then shouldn’t derail an eating plan and allowing yourself a minor splurge may be the highlight you need to alleviate what could start to feel like a boring diet!
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 10:11:00 +0000