Healthy habits virtually all diets have in common

I am frequently asked for nutrition advice and help creating healthy habits, especially since most people (including older adults) who come to see me want to lose weight. I often feel very torn because I want to do everything I can to help someone reach their goals, but I’m very aware that I’m not a Registered Dietician (RD) and it’s out of my scope of practice to prescribe a food plan.

With that said I usually stick to general guidelines of servings of foods one should eat, and tips for getting the macro and micro-nutrients we need in our diet. That said, there’s a more that can do said and done.

The Diet Problem

I’ve seen many diets come and go. I usually tell people that any diet will work…if you stick to it. The big problem is that most diets are impossible to maintain long-term…like your whole life, or they are incredibly unsafe.

For this reason, I’ve always been a proponent of making good food choices that you can sustain in a lifestyle-hence one of our mottoes, “Making fitness and wellness a healthy lifestyle you can live with”.

What all good diets have in common

If you look at all the successful campaigns, companies, philosophies of weight-loss or weight-maintenance they all share one crucial component. They all have you track in some sort of way what you put in your mouth.

Whether it’s keeping a food journal, or tracking your points, or counting calories it seems that the simple act of writing it down raises your awareness and helps change behaviors into positive choices that will eventually become healthy habit-forming.

This tracking also provides some self-accountability as to what you are really doing behind closed doors. A draw-back that I’ve mentioned before is that you can start obsessing about food-which isn’t healthy either. Another issue is that most people can’t track the minutia of their lives for the rest of their lives.

The Healthy Habits Solution

So we’ve established that diets don’t work long-term and many are dangerous. We also know that tracking what goes into the body is a common denominator of all successful weight-loss/weight-maintenance programs but they shouldn’t be a long-term strategy. So how do we combine these ideas/strategies? We break it into 4 steps.

Step 1: Tracking/Accountability

There are a myriad of food tracking apps, like myfitness pal. Any of them will work. Remember that the goal isn’t to obsess over the calories, but focus on healthier choices and habits. The tracking is your accountability.

Just remember that tracking your choices is just the first step in creating a long-term healthy lifestyle and behavior. We recommend tracking your choices for a week or two.

Step 2: Identify habits-make a plan

Using the data you collected from step 1, you can identify some habits that you’d like to focus on and create a game plan for accomplishing them. You may have realized that you crave snacks and sweets after dinner every night. Or you’ve realized that you lack energy by lunchtime and that you don’t eat breakfast. Try to find patterns and relationships between your honest tracking and how you feel and perform, and ultimately if it’s getting you closer to your goals.

Step 3: Holding pattern

Then we recommend tracking an additional 2 weeks with your new fitness goals and see how you are doing at reaching them. Don’t rush into changing too many variables at once. Take this time to evaluate if what you identified in step 2 is working. Most people skip this step in an attempt to see results faster. Don’t do it. This is a process, trust it, and you’ll get the results you want.

Step 4: Break down your healthy habits

After tracking, identifying habits, and seeing if those are the right habits for you to address at this time, you’ll want to break every habit, and food choice down to manageable daily healthy habits. This is where you can put yourself on auto-pilot and create healthy habits for lifelong success.

Tired of conflicting food information? Get our down-to-earth, backed-by-science Healthy Eating Guide.