3 secrets we wish someone told me earlier about

Some random thoughts about how to eat healthy every day and maintain a healthy diet long-term to lose weight, feel great and be healthy. Not just for a period of time following a healthy meal plan or a challenge.

Let’s start with what’s not a secret:

Obsessing over eating healthy, superfoods or dieting is not healthy.

Actually we've been struggling on and off with this over the last, what now, 3-4 years, but we'll talk more about it in a different post.

Today we want to share three little secrets about maintaining a healthy diet that would’ve saved us some headache, bloating and time, if we knew them years, or even weeks ago.

Now, when we say diet, we don’t mean dieting as in starving or counting nutrients as if we're participating in a Nintendo game. (<- alright, we don’t know what people do on Nintendo, the only game we ever played was Farmville in 2009 and it sucked, but we were OBSESSED.) With healthy diet we mean – healthy way of eating.

Okay, so let’s see.

3 Secrets About Maintaining A Healthy Diet we Wish we Knew Years Ago

Don’t forget, but forgive and look at the big picture.

We told you about the mindset that we've developed to make the healthier choice most of the time. In short it’s about making your food and lifestyle choices based on how they’ll make you feel right now, during that particular day, not in the future. Not because you’ll look pretty in a bathing suit during summer or because you’ll have a healthy glow a month from now. You can read the post here.

Still, even when you’re clear about your decisions and actually keep your eye on the why, there comes a time when you want a chocolate filled croissant and can’t resist that craving. More than that, you don’t want to resist that craving.

And the chocolate filled croissant is there. And it’s warm. So you get it. It’s not every day you get to eat a warm croissant after all.

You eat it, it feels good.

Then your friend suggests you go for pizza. Well, today, let’s let it go and eat whatever you want. As much as you want? Fit people have cheat days, don’t they? Let’s go for it.

And then the WHOLE day you eat like it’s your last one.

Why?

We don’t know why this is the case for everyone. But for us – we do this, when we feel even the slightest amount of guilt about eating something “bad”. We feel like we're breaking rules and push the limits to see if we can break them some more without “punishment”.

The times we don’t feel ANY guilt, we can stop at the croissant. We're fully aware – we're getting that croissant and we're good with that decision. No need to make excuses or to feel guilt.

But we keep our promise to do well at the next meal. We forgive, but we don’t forget we ate that croissant. A full day is too precious to waste.

When we look at people who seem fit and healthy, they have cheat meals or cheat days. But we don’t see the big picture. We don’t see that the person with abs who just ate a batch of chocolate chip pancakes hasn’t eaten anything sweet for a whole week. Or a month. We don’t watch them throughout the day – how much they walk, stand, run or sit on their asses. Probably not for 10 hours a day. We don’t see how much they sleep either. Aaaand we don’t see how they actually feel.

See the big picture in your own life. If you want the croissant, take the croissant, but then make sure to get your veggies.

Control What You Can!

So the problem with maintaining a healthy diet and lifestyle isn’t the fact that you would eat a batch of chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. It’s what you do next, throughout the day.

If you eat like there’s no tomorrow the whole day, everyday, there’s probably a bigger reason for that.

From our experience when we're going through something and am stressed, we tend to say: “Screw it, we need to deal with this stressful thing ASAP, can’t eat healthy right now. Hasta luego, salad.”

And then we eat chips and pizza and drink coffee…and then more of it.

Whether it’s work, family, relationships, take a step back and know you’re responsible for many things, but not for everything. You’re only responsible for the things you can take some action about. Get it together, take that action, let go of trying to control everything and everyone. Let everything else go its natural way. Because let’s be real: it will anyway.

Salad’s always better.

via giphy

We know some people hate salads, we see articles about this everywhere.

“Here are 700 healthy recipes that aren’t salad. How to eat healthy when you hate salad, How to make a salad actually edible…”

We were lucky enough to grow up in a family where we actually ate salads. True it was always the same salad: cucumbers, tomatoes and onions and always as a side dish, but at least there was always a salad. We’d have this salad always with grilled chicken and BREAD or some other meat and bread. And when we say bread, we don’t mean a little bit of bread here and there, we mean mostly bread.

So to us…salads are awesome. We don’t need to cook, we basically cut things in pieces and put them in a bowl with olive oil, salt and sometimes vinegar. Simple to adjust taste and flavor and don’t need any meal prep.

But, see, when we're eating out, we don’t want to eat a salad. We're eating out after all. It needs to be something big and special. Something that will make us feel GOOD.

So two weeks ago at 10pm we got a huge fat burger thinking we really WANT it and that we'd be missing out and regret if we don’t get it.

That burger came, we had one bite and it was enough.

It wasn’t satisfying, but we felt like we needed to force it down our throat (Our parents married young and didn’t have much money, so we've been taught our whole life to not leave anything on the plate).

Walking after that burger was a big achievement and we couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning we woke up swollen, we couldn’t exercise, we couldn’t work, we couldn’t do anything. It felt like a waste. We only wanted coffee and to go hide somewhere until that torture was over.

We should’ve gotten the salad. We say it every time and we do it 60% of the time. Here’s to 80%.

via giphy

We know, it sounds sad to go out for dinner and only order a salad. We felt sorry every time we saw a girl on a date with some guy who’s eating a steak and she’s eating a sad looking salad. Like get some self-respect, you can eat too.

But, well, she’s right.

A salad is much better than a steak or burger if you want to feel good and not just give into cravings. It might not always seem like the thing you want at first, but it’s always the better choice and it tastes much better, honestly.

Well these are the 3 things we wish someone told us a while ago about eating healthy. But then again, would we have listened? Probably not, we're a stubborn human being.

If you’re one of those lucky ones, who actually listens when they get good advice – we hope you find this little post helpful!