Life can be stressful and overwhelming. During these moments, we may lose sight of how to nourish ourselves. Yet, when we’re in tough times, we need a balanced, nutritious diet to sustain us. I recommend focusing on these five tips for maintaining a safe and healthy relationship with food despite life’s challenges.
Assess Your Readiness
You may have BIG diet and nutrition goals, but what are you truly ready to focus on? This is an essential question to ask yourself when life feels overwhelming. Maybe you can focus on drinking enough water throughout the day, adding a vegetable or fruit to every meal, or possibly having only one snack between meals instead of grazing. I strongly recommend setting specific, attainable goals that match who you are today. These steps may not represent your larger, long-term objectives. But they help you focus on your intake and build your confidence for meeting larger goals.
Keep a Food Log
Improving our relationship with food begins with being truly aware of what we’re eating. Keeping a daily food log is the best way to reflect on our day-to-day intake and assess whether we’re eating well for our bodies. Record what you ate and the timing. It’s also helpful to log how hungry you were before eating and how full you felt after. Using a scale of 1-10 (1= completely starving, 10= way to full), you can measure if you’re waiting too long to eat, as well as if you’re overeating by going beyond just “satisfied”. Done with focus and attention, logging helps you learn a lot about your eating habits and helps you stay on track with balanced eating.
Stick to a Routine
When life is very busy or challenging, it’s easy to overlook the importance of a regular eating pattern. However, if we skip meals or go for long periods of time without food or hydration we will not have enough energy to get through a long day or manage stress. It may also negatively impact other aspects of our health and wellness. Eating throughout the day doesn’t have to be hard, aim for nourishing snacks like apple and peanut butter, cheese and crackers, or sliced veggies and salad dressing. If you tend to forget to drink water, set reminders in your phone. For easy meal planning advice, check out the videos and recipes at Hannaford.com/dietitians.
Label Your Barriers
A safer relationship with food begins with identifying and honestly labeling your barriers to success. Do you need more access to food or support? Education? Shopping or cooking skills? When you’re honest about the factors that prevent you from maintaining a healthier relationship with food, you will be able to overcome these challenges and meet your health and wellness goals. (And if it’s education you need, the Hannaford Dietitian team has you covered! Check out our FREE classes. Visit Hannaford.com/dietitians.)
Identify Emotional Eating
Any time we eat “from the neck up” it’s considered emotional eating. This means that the “hunger” cue starts with a thought about food or a desire for a certain flavor or food. Unlike physical hunger, which begins in our stomach and slowly grows until we eat, emotional hunger comes on very fast. Sometimes emotional hunger is paired with a negative emotion, but it may happen if we’re tired, tense, stressed, bored or simply feeling “off”. When we pause to identify where our hunger cue is coming from, we can reduce the potential for emotional eating. (Note: this is another helpful observation to note in your food log).
Your Hannaford Dietitians are here to help! Our in-store dietitians offer store tours and helpful demonstrations in many of our locations throughout ME, NH, MA, VT and NY. Visit Hannaford.com/dietitians for individual schedules.