In Slender for Good, one of our guiding principles is to “make it easy.”
Make it easy to eat abundant nutritious foods.
Make it easy to avoid non-nutritious food like substances.
Make it easy to eat meals, not snacks.
Make it easy to achieve your health and weight loss goals. Not like in the past, but 100% this time, to achieve results that are even more awesome than you imagine.
And we find a plethora of strategies and tools for making it easy!
Today, I am sharing a strategy that discriminates between people who succeed 100% with these goals, and people who don’t.
So many of the people who finally succeed with their healthy eating and weight loss journey use this strategy:
Writing down your food in advance.
Like so many effective strategies, this one is deceptively simple.
But, as my client Barb said this week, “it’s a game-changer!”
The idea is that, either in the morning or the night before, you write down exactly what you’re going to eat for the day—breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
You want to plan your meals when you’re calm and thinking, not when you’re hangry! You already know this. And this tool can routinize that habit.
Why does this tool make such a difference?
· Telling yourself “I’m going to have a salad for lunch” isn’t as powerful as writing down “Lunch = 10 ounces salad (lettuce, chopped vegetables) with 4 ounces of grilled chicken and an apple;”
· Writing it down tells your brain “I mean it, I’m serious, this matters to me” in a way saying it to yourself doesn’t;
· It engages the conscious, intentional, future-oriented part of your brain in deciding what you will eat, rather than leaving it all up to the more impulsive “lizard brain;”
· You plan your meals when you’re calm and your brain is functioning well, rather than when you’re hangry;
· Planning it in advance gives you the chance to make sure you have the foods and quantities you need to hit your target amount of nutritious foods. Getting to meal time and discovering you don’t have the foods you need is just going to give you the excuse to eat “off-plan.”
Taking something out of your head and putting it down on paper makes a real difference. There’s quite a bit of research showing that writing down our goals makes it significantly more likely we will achieve our goals.
So, writing down your food each day is the kind of habit that will help make this new way of eating so much easier.
Have you ever tried writing down your food? What was that like for you?
