Why don’t we change our eating habits?
You may have noticed, like I have, lots of information about healthy eating cropping up all over the place.
There are government guidelines, health campaigns , TV shows, herbal shops on the high street, and more than one or two blogs in the Internet on the subject 🙂
It’s all great! Learning more about what kind of food is good for us and why, is surely a good thing. Also, more importantly, its good to know what is bad for us and why.
Sometimes, people make changes in their lives when they learn new information. Very often though, they don’t. They know the theory, but don’t make the change. Changing habits and behaviour sometimes takes a huge amount of effort.
How to change our eating habits
When it comes to eating habits, I can’t help wondering if we might be better first, getting people to try new foods, new tastes, and new flavours. Then working on knowing the health facts.
We could try creating opportunities for ourselves (or others), to try new healthy foods and to have fun with it. Stress doesn’t usually help people learn or change their behaviour. Having fun with new food, might induce more ‘trying out’ and experimenting. It is more likely to create positive feelings that can help us make changes.
I think we are more likely to start eating a new food if we like it, rather than just being told it is good for us, and we should be eating it.
That lovely word, ‘should’, (we think ‘yes, you’re right, I know I should – but of course I also know I won’t…’) loaded with guilt and negative feelings.
Setting ourselves up for success in adopting a healthy diet might then start with new tastes and flavours, rather than ‘you should eat more veg because you need the vitamins and minerals’. How we feel about food is so important, maybe it needs to be put first.
This is what I am starting to – to experiment and have fun, to get inspired and try something new!
What do you think?