Everyone has finished eating again but I am still sitting at the table with my unfinished dinner. I know I won’t be able to leave the table until I eat it. I am so used to eating sweets that I fill up with them during the day and then I don’t feel like eating healthy and nutritious meals. I also spend a lot of time outdoors, walking around the countryside or forest, cycling, running, or playing football with friends. This combination made me underweight. This is what my childhood and the beginning of my teenage life looked like.
The first time I paid attention to what I was eating was when I wanted to gain weight. From what I remember, I was underweight about 3-4 kilograms below the norm according to the BMI index. I didn’t like being too skinny and thought it looked terrible. So I decided I had to do something about it and gain weight. I didn’t start stuffing myself with fatty and high-calorie food, because even though I wanted to gain weight, I was still picky. In addition to sweets, which were my main source of energy, I started adding rice and chicken for dinner. Just rice with chicken because who needs vegetables or sauce with it… 🙄
My path to a healthy lifestyle began with the desire to eat more calories and start my first cardio training. After some time, I made my first attempts at healthy eating, but unfortunately after a few weeks, I always returned to unhealthy habits and switched to chips and my favorite chocolate in various forms. These ups and downs continued until I was 27. Eventually, I started to get tired of not being able to control my unhealthy habits and switch to a healthy lifestyle. I started wondering what to do to make my brain finally understand that it has to live a healthy life and not just stick to a diet for a while and then like crazy, throw itself at unhealthy products.
After a few weeks of looking for a solution, I decided that I would do the same as with other things I want to implement in my life – I will learn why I need this whole diet at all. Why do I want to use it? How does this make sense to me? This way, I will convince myself that it is worth leading a healthy lifestyle. And you won’t guess what happened? This approach worked! 🙂
I still remember reading the first book about the sugary brain – “The Sugar Brain Fix” by Dr. Mike Dow. I learned one important thing from it – you need to develop healthy habits and replace unhealthy ones with them. Forcing yourself to do something from one day to the next, doing several things at once, and expecting quick results makes no sense (at least in my case it doesn’t work)! You need about 30 days to develop healthy habits. After this period, your body will start to use them automatically and they will no longer cause you such difficulty. I always imagine this process in both directions. If such habit formation works in the case of a healthy lifestyle, I use the same mechanism in the case of an unhealthy lifestyle. My bad habits became automatic because I repeated them over and over again. Of course, without delving into the problem of addiction to unhealthy products that are made in such a way as to give us a quick dopamine kick. However, I do not want to discuss this topic in this entry.
After realizing the power of developing the right habits, I started to approach dieting differently. From that moment on, I felt that I finally knew what the “recipe” for a healthy life was, and not just “from diet to diet” – and that’s what started happening. I would also like to emphasize here that there are still days when I eat something less healthy. I also have a few unhealthy products that I like very much and I try to limit them. However, awareness and the power of developing habits allowed me to maintain a healthy balance in my daily lifestyle. One of my favorite examples is regularly eating the right amount of vegetables and fruit, which have a huge impact on my daily well-being.
📝 In the next entries, I will want to expand on the topics discussed above and delve into various other topics that I have discovered over the last few years and which motivate me to take care of my health every day.
