Family Fitness Inspire

Setting Goals For Healthy Eating

Another guest post ~ I’m one lucky mom to have so many kids willing to jump in and help me with my blog. Thank you, Alyssa, for sharing your knowledge with my readers!

Hey Everyone – My name is Alyssa, the second eldest kid in this bunch. I decided to write a nutrition related guest post. Hope you enjoy!

Ever since I started studying nutrition in college, people have always asked me for my opinions or suggestions about nutrition related topics. My first few years were mostly consumed of various biology and chemistry courses, but once I started taking nutrition courses, I became eager to share my information with family and friends. Senior year I took an amazing course called Nutrition Counseling. This course really helped me and my classmates learn how to take all the nutrition information we had learned and help motivate people to change.

Setting Goals For Healthy Eating 

In this course, I learned that giving people meal plans isn’t really the most effective way to promote change. And meal plans are some of the most requested thing I receive from family and friends. In fact, this post was inspired by my brother’s recent request for a meal plan. I was about to respond yes to him, and then I was like wait a second… Meal plans are temporary and may inspire someone for a short duration to change their habits, but then they’ll quickly get tired of those foods or just fall back to their old habits. Instead of saying, yes, to a meal plan, I eagerly responded with, I don’t really like meal plans, but let’s make some goals!

Setting Goals For Healthy Eating

Meal plans are like quick fix diets – they’re only a temporary change to your life. If you want to really make a change to your eating patterns, you need to start with some goals! And the goals need to be made by YOU. Not a dietitian, not a nutritionist, not a friend…by you. If you create the goal it is more likely that you’ll reach the goal. So, ready to make some goals? Keep these things in mind….

1. Think about what you’ve eaten the past 24hrs. What’s something you can change? Whole grains instead of white grains? More vegetables? More fruit? Less added sugar? Drink more water?

2. Make a realistic goal. (ie, add 1 or 2 servings of veggies to dinner 3x a week, make one of your snacks raw veggies 3x a week, only drink soda 1x a week)

3. Make sure your goal is measurable (saying you’ll eat more/less isn’t measurable!), realistic, and positive.

4. Baby steps! Small goals are the way to go. Don’t get discouraged if you face some obstacles!

Instead of trying out the latest fad diet, try setting a goal! It will be more effective towards any lifestyle change that you’re after. Good luck and happy healthy living!

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