Lot many behaviors can affect your eating pattern. Some behaviors are emotional, habitual, cultural, or traditional. It is each one of us duty to identify those behaviors, in order to live better and healthy life.
Emotional behaviors may include:
- Being happy or sad
- Feeling stressed, bored, or lonely
- Getting over a fight or mood swings
Habitual behaviors may include:
- Eating same food type or same portions every time.
- Urge to eat while watching TV.
- Working over-time in the office and not paying attention to food type and portion
- Neglecting exercise or any form of physical activity.
- Eating out often or on special occasions. (Please see article “Starting on weight loss” for few tips on eating out.)
Cultural behaviors may include:
- Making high fat foods and sweets.
- Eating a typical food after the fasts, which is hight in fat and sugar.
- Preparation of food especially deep frying.
Traditional behaviors may include:
- Family traditions
- Eating or using a particular type of food all the time.
- Limiting variety of foods
- Cooking with high fat, high calorie, or high carb products
- Preparation of the food, especially deep frying or often use of clarified butter or butter.
- Cultural traditions as mentioned above.
Tracking down your eating behaviors is not easy but is also not difficult. Tracking is important, as lot of people eat without noticing their triggered eating vs. hunger eating. Following are some tips to identify these behaviors, most important is to check yourself.
- Check yourself - When you eat in between your meals, stop and question yourself—Am i really hungry? If your answer is no, then go back and track down which behavior is triggering you to eat.
- Track - Track your behavior pattern in between your meals or at any meals, to make sure you are not eating out of emotional or habitual behaviors. Once you know it, mark a page for behaviors in your journal and track your emotional eating there per day basis.
- Plan alternatives - Plan ahead alternatives for triggered eating like healthy eats not more than 1 pt both in salty and sweet categories. Always, keep low-point, low-calorie, or low-fat snack around. Following are some ideas:
- Fat-Free popcorn (1 pt for whole bag)
- Cucumber slices topped with chunky avocado salsa (1 pt)
- Mix Vegetable Soup (0 pt)
1 pt sweet snacks:
- Squash Muffins (1 pt)
- Vita top muffins (1 pt)
- Fat-free popcorn sprinkled with Splenda or any other sweetener (1pt for whole bag)
- Quakers Apple Cinnamon Rice cakes (1 pt/1 cake)
Please let me know how you feel about this recipe, by leaving me your valuable comments.
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