Happy New Year! Welcome to 2023! We hope that you have had an amazing Christmas, eating, drinking and making merry!
Well, New Year is soon upon us and it’s the time when we start thinking about making resolutions. We suddenly want to deprive ourselves and eliminate things from our diet in a desperate attempt to lose weight quickly. Let us tell you now, that cutting your calories to an extreme low, missing out on ‘bad’ foods such as chocolate, cake, biscuits and crisps or, even worse, removing a whole food group, eg carbs, from your diet, is NOT the way to a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.
Once you cut something out of your diet, you will feel that you are missing out, and if you ‘give in’ and have some, then you feel like you might as well give up because you have failed. This is not a healthy way to live, either physically or mentally.
Let’s make 2023 different, let’s make it the year that we get healthy patterns in place and learn to live without the guilt of what we’ve eaten at a certain meal or throughout the day.
I like to look at food in two ways. There is food for fuel. We need to function and to be able to have the energy to do the things that we need to do, but there is also food for the soul and this is the food that makes us feel good and enables us to enjoy social gatherings etc. I believe that a combination of both of them leads to a happy relationship with food. Christmas is one of the social occasions where we eat ‘soul food’, so don’t beat yourself up about what you have eaten over the festive period.
Making lots of changes or being too restrictive is setting yourself up to fail because you are trying to live up to something that is just too damn hard to continue long term.
Have a read of the following blog which will tell you why fad diets DON’T work long term:
Small changes you can make
With that in mind, let’s look at making small changes that are easy to sustain long term.
- Check your portion sizes. One of the first things to do is to check your portion sizes. We have consistently eaten more over the years and now eat significantly more than we did in the 1950s. This is an easy thing to do without depriving yourself at all.
- If you have no clue as to the amount of food that you should be eating, then as a rough guide (although this will vary from person to person), aim for 1800 to 2000 calories a day (for women). Any less than this and you could be putting your health at risk. If you don’t eat enough, you put yourself at risk of low energy levels, irritability, sleep problems and constant hunger to name but a few.
- Add in some exercise. Make sure that this is something that you enjoy, whether this is walking, joining in a class, swimming or going to the gym. Not only is exercise good for weight loss, it’s great for toning, better sleep, relieves anxiety and stress, confidence and mental wellbeing, so make sure that you are eating enough to have the strength and energy to do this. Take a look at www.wfitness.co.uk to see how we can help you to fit exercise into your busy lifestyle easily, whilst making friends along the way.
Recipe Ideas
If you’re looking for some healthy recipes to get you started take a look at the following blogs which include ideas for healthy evening meals, healthy food swaps for snacks, winter warming soups and healthy brunches.
Let’s make an achievable resolution for 2023 that we have a healthier lifestyle that we can build on. Look after YOU this year, like you would any precious thing. We only get one life, let’s make it as long and healthy as we can.
Have a great New Years Eve and a very Happy New Year!
Much Love
Caroline & Hannah xx