If you are considering losing weight and feeling more healthy – and are at the beginning of your plan – a simple way to ensure you are going to be successful is to modify your eating behavior.

This lies outside the concern of what kind of foods you are going to eat, how you are going to exercise and what your other health concerns may be.

Because no matter where you are in your journey chances are very good you are eating too much food, too quickly, in the wrong environments and so on.

Getting a handle on how you eat is the kind of baseline behavior that will carry you on through life – long past your current weight loss goals.

1. Plan your meals ahead of time – Before you go to bed at night, you should have a good idea of what the next day’s meals are going to be, in the same way you know what clothes you are going to wear or what your to-do list looks like.
2. Shop for your food with meal planning in mind – When you make your shopping list, physically or mentally, you should do so after taking a good look at the contents of your refrigerator and pantry. What do you need for the next couple days in order to prepare12-15 meals?
3. Prepare your food ahead of time – We currently favor making large batches of soup and vegetables and storing them in the fridge. This gives us the ingredients to ladle out per-prepared food into containers to either eat at work or quickly heat them up at home.
4. Portion control – Have you ever seen an 8-ounce coffee cup? Compared to what we are chugging today, it looks like a shot glass. Same goes for bowls – an old-fashioned soup bowl is half the size of the chunky ones being sold today. We eat too much, and part of the reason is we have grown accustomed to being served food and beverages in over sized containers. If you don’t want to purchase new items just yet, put your food on salad dishes instead of something as big as the lid to a garbage can. You can comfortably cut your consumption by one-third simply by taking care of portion control.
5. Eat sitting down at a table – Everyone has a dining room or kitchen table that is supposed to be for eating, but is often used to store the mail, folded laundry and so on – and is often walked past with a steaming plate of food on the way to sit down at the computer chair or in front of the television. Clear the table off of everything not related to eating and sit down to eat your meal – re-create this table as the oasis where you nourish your body.
6. Do not bring your phone, tablet, laptop or any other electronic device with you to your table – This includes the television, radio or other electronic stimuli which might be blaring from a few feet away or another room.
7. Before you eat, say grace or an equivalent – Clear your mind of anything else that is going on and concentrate on what you are about to do – nourish your body. You can enter this time by either saying a religious note of thanks for your meal or something of your own design, such as “This delicious food nourishes my body and I am thankful.” [Read more…]