Excuse Me? #4: I can’t eat healthy, Part 2
Let’s continue down the road of picking apart excuses.
This is continued from Parts 1-3 of the “Excuse Me?” series.
7. I eat better than other people
Great, because everyone else eats like crap. If you work in an office, you see the junk in the lunch room. You see what other people are eating. You see what passes for a lunch. Eating better than the majority of the people around you is not an end point, it is merely the beginning. If everyone is eating horribly and you are only eating slightly better than horrible, does that mean you are on the road to good health? Hardly.
8. I don’t have the time to eat healthy
We addressed this in Excuses #1 regarding finding time to work out. Admittedly, eating healthy may require more time than working out. But with some planning, it doesn’t have to. You can bake large quantities of food at once and have a slow cooker going at the same time. With a well planned Sunday afternoon, you can have a week’s worth of food cooked.
Also, let’s deal with wasted time on TV and surfing the internet, if you are willing to give up some us this time and devote it to some food prep then you are ahead of the game.
9. I don’t have the money to eat well
Do you ever eat out? If you do, then you are spending far more on food than you need to. Eating out is going to be 5 to 10 times more expense than an equivalent amount of groceries.
And there exists a fallacy that choosing healthy food at the grocery store is more expensive than unhealthy options. This is simply not true. Protein can be an expensive part of your diet, but so are the nutritionally devoid snacks that many people routinely buy. Brown rice or potatoes will give you more nutrition and calories per dollar than white bread. Chicken breasts or eggs will give you more protein per dollar than lunch meat. I could go on, but you get the point, eating health does not mean breaking the bank.
10. Every time I buy healthy food, it spoils
Cook it. Then eat it. Problem solved. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.
11. My family doesn’t like healthy food
Could it be because you haven’t tried? It is normal for your body to crave/enjoy foods high in fats, carbs and sodium. That is, until you train your body to appreciate food that is better for you. Talk with anyone who has started eating healthy. They begin to really enjoy healthy foods and their body starts to tell them how bad they feel when they switch back to putting garbage into their bodies.
It will not be easy at first. Often things that are worthwhile take some effort.
12. Healthy food doesn’t taste good
There are countless ways to prepare food for all tastes and preferences. Take a few minutes and write down some of the flavors you like, spices you enjoy and items you like to add to meals. Now perform a Google search with one or two of those things you just wrote down. Chances are, you just got 10s if not 100s of recipes. Thus giving you suggestions on how to cook healthy and make it taste good!
13. Bonus Excuse! I can’t get in shape because of my genetics.
Feel free to blame your parents if that makes you feel better. But that seems rather passive to me. I’d rather focus on things that are within my control. You cannot change your genetics. However, there are many behaviors that you can make a choice to change today.
Step one, make a choice to stop using excuses.
Right Bart?
