WHY WE ARE ONLY 80% CONSISTENT IN OUR DIET

Some readers ask how we manage to be consistent in our diet. Well, the answer is: we are not. We don't eat 100 percent the healthiest way.

We eat our casseroles with pasta, cream, and lots of cheese. In the mornings we like to have breakfast rolls and don't always go to the organic bakery. We add honey to the salad dressing. Some days we eat cake. We drink beer and shandy. We eat pizza. This series goes on, but you can see what I mean. We eat a lot of things that we know are not ideal. These foods make up to 20 percent of our diet.

But is it allowed? Are these still healthy habits?

No, they are not healthy. But yes, you can, because they are not habits. They are partly compromised that we make due to the demands of everyday life. Some of them are exceptions that we consciously allow ourselves, and they are also an expression of the wish not to be driven crazy.

It is not this 20 percent that makes us fat and sick, but the other 80 percent. These are the habits that we need to be in control of. Sure, a 100 percent healthy diet would be (even) better, but there are also some arguments against such consistency.

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WHICH SPEAKS AGAINST CONSISTENCY IN NUTRITION

I see two reasons why a consistent diet is unrealistic for most people.

1. PEOPLE DON'T LIKE BIG CHANGES

Whenever you change your diet, you have to consider the status quo. Anyone who has previously been eating frozen pizza, potato chips, and lemonade would have to turn their lives upside down in order to live consistently healthily. The head does not play along with such a 180-degree turn. Even if you realize that the previous diet is harmful to your health, you will perceive it as a loss. The sweets and ready meals have their reason. They not only satisfy hunger but also promise quick satisfaction whenever you need them.

If a chocolate bar makes me happy today, should a carrot do it tomorrow? This may work in a crash diet, because it is not about satisfaction, but about temporary renunciation. The end of the barren time is sure to come. But a permanent change seems unbearable at this moment. Even 80 percent consistency is already too much here.

Changes are sustainable if we tackle them one after the other. I lost a lot of weight on a crash diet six years ago. But after that, it took me years to adopt a healthy diet that would keep my weight down. It was a gradual process that is still ongoing. After all, I still don't eat consistently healthy, although I (theoretically) know how to do it.

I am convinced that vegetables are the healthiest choice - preferably unprocessed. I can eat as much of it as I want. I can't possibly get fat that way and probably stay healthy. This diet would be a 100 percent consistent implementation of our philosophy of "real food". But I am far from only eating vegetables. Maybe I'll get there someday, but right now this change is too big for my head.

Instead, I improve my diet in small steps. At the moment I'm trying to stop snacking after dinner. And if I do, then only vegetables. I also extended the anti-sugar challenge for myself. I also have the topics of milk and wheat flour on my screen and would like to focus on them in the future. But all in good time, otherwise I'll lose interest before I've even started.

2. DIET MUST BE SUITABLE FOR EVERYDAY USE

Even if it is possible to consistently eat healthily for a while, this change does not last long for most people. Because it is often not suitable for everyday use.

I am torn about this argument. On the one hand, everyone should adapt their everyday life in such a way that one has a chance to eat healthily. Anyone who thinks that never has time to cook, the need to change something in his day. No discussion. After all, this is about your own health.

On the other hand, you can't change everything at will. At a time when every roommate in a household works, it is not possible to prepare two or three fresh meals a day. If you eat mainly vegetables, even more meals are necessary. Outside of your own household, it becomes even more difficult: Most restaurants do not have consistently healthy dishes on the menu and friends or family do not always have what you would describe as healthy. All of this may be manageable with initial motivation, but at some point, it gets too tough. A diet that is not suitable for everyday use is only a phase.

So both things have to happen: everyday life has to adapt to a healthy diet, but also the diet has to adapt to everyday life. That makes compromises necessary.

For Jasmin and me, suitability for everyday use is a high priority. We would like to express that at Healthy Habits. Our recipes are therefore not particularly ingenious, they are simple, relatively quick to prepare, and use ingredients that are available in every supermarket.

For these two reasons, I think a 100 percent healthy diet is almost impossible. But this insight does not depress us. We can live with that because we find that we feel good even at 80 percent. And with small changes, we might get a few percentages points out in the future.

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WHICH SPEAKS FOR CONSISTENCY

However, consistency doesn't have to be bad. I don't want to talk it out of anyone who finds it easy. Consistency also has at least two advantages:

1. THERE ARE CLEAR RULES

It is easier for me to be consistent than to “pay attention to it a little”. That's why I'm consistent in at least some things: I don't have any sweets at home, I don't drink sweet drinks, I don't eat ready-made meals (at home) - regardless of whether it's complete meals or snacks. It just doesn't exist anymore. Such rules help me not to have to make decisions every time. My brain is lazy to make decisions. It wants clarity and I create this with clear rules.

That's why I like actions like our anti-sugar challenge. During this time I know what I can't eat. It's easy for me (but also because I know that the end is in sight). After the challenge, however, the rules are not that clear. I would like to allow myself a little now and then. But what is "now and then" and what exactly do I allow myself? That remains (still) unexplained, which is why unhealthy habits creep in after exceptions.

2. YOU LIVE (EVEN) HEALTHIER

I don't want to make a secret of it: the more consistently you eat healthily, the healthier and slimmer you will be. If vegetables are the best food, the higher their proportion in your diet, the better off. That is why I would always prefer the green salad over pasta from a health point of view.

But when I'm hungry and short on time and maybe a few other worries, long-term health isn't high on my priority list - although it should be. This is where the compromises come into play.

THE QUESTION IS: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?

In our experience, the best way to control your weight is through the quality of your diet. If the diet changes for the better, the weight drops. The more consistent you are, the more you lose weight. The weight levels off by itself.  How much you eat only matters if the quality of your diet is poor. 

How consistent you should be in your diet therefore depends on what you want to achieve. We want to feel good in our skin, be fit and healthy, not have to pull in our stomachs, and like to look at each other in photos. At the same time, we don't want to be constantly disciplined and want to enjoy something. That works with a consistency of 80 percent.

However, if your goal is a beach body with a six-pack, then you have to do more. Our boot camp trainer once admitted that he wasn't entirely consistent either. He'd have a slice of whole wheat bread in the afternoon. We had to smile at that. That’s an exception for him. But he is a fitness trainer through and through. He would like to keep improving in terms of sport and getting that one extra push-up out of it. That doesn't work with an 80 percent diet.

You now need to balance your goals with your diet. What do you want to achieve - and what are you willing to invest for it? There is no fitness trainer body with pasta in creamy cheese sauce. But that's not necessary either. If your goals are less demanding, you can be a little less strict with yourself and allow yourself a few exceptions in addition to healthy habits.

The most important thing for me is to be able to maintain my (healthy) diet permanently. Then I would prefer 80 percent to strive for 100 percent but fail and fall back into old habits in frustration. 

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7 Alibis That Keep You Away From Eating Healthy

 

Wanting to be slim and healthy is one thing. But to live like this in everyday life is completely different. It's hard to eat healthily. Much harder than eating the next bag of fries with ketchup and mayonnaise. We would like to have both: the healthy body - but also the fast food, the lemonade, and the cake. That is why many people are looking for healthy solutions that do not require them to change their diet.

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Some of these are long outdated beliefs to which they still cling. Sometimes they trust the latest trend, which is supposed to fix it now after everything else has not worked. Then again they replace one unhealthy food with another that supposedly is better. And quite often they simply buy the products that resourceful companies put on the supermarket shelf. It's like simply replacing the vegetables on your plate with a diet powder.

All of these solutions have one thing in common: They are alibis. They drive away from the guilty conscience but have nothing to do with healthy eating. They trick you into thinking that you can continue to live as you have before and still stay slim. I would now like to introduce you to seven such alibis:

1. YOU BUY PRODUCTS WITH A HEALTH PROMISE

The healthier people want to live, the more “healthier” products companies bring to the market. They are developing so-called functional food, i.e. foods enriched with additives such as probiotic yogurts, cholesterol-lowering margarine, or protein bars. If that's not enough, you can use numerous dietary supplements. There are canned vitamins, protein from plastic buckets, protein flakes, turbo diet packages, and Almased powder, with which you can “lose weight quickly and healthily”. If you don't want to know exactly, it all looks really healthy.

With other products it is clear from the start that they count in the unhealthy corner, but clever marketing should make them appear healthier, such as Stevia Cola, diet cookies, milk bars with “fresh milk” or Knoppers, “the breakfast”. I find the Weight Watchers product range particularly worrying. In their online shop as well as in some supermarkets there are whole milk biscuits, chocolate spreads, potato chips and peanut flips. You can eat all of this for just a few Smart Points . But is it really that smart? You can find out here how we are misled by the industry when it comes to food .

None of this has anything to do with healthy eating. These products are just alibis for people who want to stick to their bad habits with a clear conscience.

2. YOU ARE HIDING BEHIND A PHILOSOPHY

Paleo, low carb, high carb, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free. There are many nutritional philosophies. I understand their appeal because they bring structure to (nutritional) chaos. It can help to hold on to them. Therefore, at least at times, it almost doesn't matter which philosophy you believe in. If you follow it with vigor and common sense, it will work.

But it's not the nutritional philosophies that are healthy, it's what you make of them. Unfortunately, people tend to switch off their (human) minds as soon as motivation wanes and is replaced by comfort. Then he goes in search of solutions that correspond to the philosophy but are no longer healthy. What's the use of Paleo when you eat the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Protein Bar? What is the meaning of the Weight Watchers imprint when you smear the chocolate spread on your bun? How healthy is a gluten-free pizza really?

At the latest when companies bring their pseudo-healthy products onto the market and consumers jump on them, every nutritional philosophy is reduced to absurdity. Then it is nothing more than an alibi.

3. YOU TRUST IN SUPERFOODS

Exotic foods with a particularly high proportion of healthy nutrients are booming: chia seeds, acai and goji berries, hemp seeds, maca, quinoa, cocoa, coconut oil, avocado. Some of them have already made it into every supermarket and have become mass products. Other superfoods are expensive to buy in specialty stores and on the Internet. I have nothing against this real food. Some of them are also in my pantry.

However, you shouldn't fool yourself that you are eating healthy because of the superfoods. They probably only make up a small proportion of your daily energy intake. I add these foods to my diet because I like their taste or consistency, and because they add a little variety. But how many goji berries can you eat?

You cannot compensate for an otherwise unhealthy diet with superfoods. Just because there's avocado on the pizza doesn't mean it's healthy. Neither do a few chia seeds make the sugary ready-made muesli any better. From a health perspective, superfoods are only marginal optimization. They do not make a significant contribution to a healthy diet, but they can be used as a good alibi.

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4. YOU REPLACE SUGAR WITH SUBSTITUTES

Word has long got around that sugar is unhealthy and that it contributes a lot to the fact that mankind is getting fatter. People just don't want to move around. At least not in such a way that it hurts. You would like to keep eating cakes, desserts, ice cream, and chocolate. Just without sugar. As a result, they are really hot for substitutes. The industry has responded and offers a whole range of sweet alternatives.

They have long been contained in finished products, and they are also increasingly available in supermarkets for home use: natural alternatives (honey, syrup, coconut blossom sugar), sugar substitutes (xylitol, erythritol) and synthetic sweeteners (aspartame, saccharin, stevia). Many of them are insanely expensive, others are cheap, but insanely artificial. Some are high in calories and some are not.

But the basic problem remains: they all increase our craving for something sweet. Sometimes the body reacts to them in the same way as to sugar and sometimes the substitute makes you even hungrier. By replacing sugar in this way, you bring exactly the problems into your home that you actually wanted to avoid, but with a better conscience. Ultimately, agave syrup, erythritol & Co. have nothing to do with a healthy diet. They are alibis. You can find out more about sugar substitutes here.

5. YOU FIXATE ON CALORIES

Until a few years ago, I counted the calories at every meal. I also assigned a number of calories to each forest run. It just didn't help me because instead of maintaining my weight, I gained weight again.

Measuring something makes us feel good at first. The feeling of being in control of our diet. However, I now believe that calories are leading us on the wrong track. After all, what use is it to measure something if the value has hardly any meaning? The amount of calories says nothing about whether we eat healthily, whether we are full after a meal, and how our body uses the energy it has absorbed.

Much more important than the quantity is the quality of the calories, because not all calories are created equal. Energy from a croissant with jam is used differently than energy from eggs with avocado. You can find out how big the difference between good and bad calories are and what makes them different in our article: Quality instead of quantity - why this also applies to calories.

Those who count calories but eat unhealthy foods do not automatically stay slim. The counting is just an alibi to keep eating everything. Instead, we would need a qualitative measurement, but that is not practically possible. Therefore, many people stick to the bare numbers, even if they make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves.

6. YOU ARE STARVING YOURSELF SLIM

Skip breakfast, skip dinner or the FdH diet: Many people try to lose weight by starving or at least not gaining weight. But starvation is not a healthy diet either. Starving is starving.

Starving is uncomfortable, but comparatively comfortable. You don't have to worry, you don't cook, you can continue to eat your favorite dishes and it doesn't cost any money either. If you eat less, you even save some. In some ways, starving yourself is therefore easier than changing your diet.

However, something so uncomfortable can never be a permanent solution, because starvation is based on willpower, and it is finite. You can only hold out for a limited time. A week, a month, a year. At some point, it's over, and then the yo-yo effect waves. Only after starving do you realize that not only was everything in vain but that you also harmed yourself. Because with diets, the body reduces its energy consumption. After a while, the body adjusts to the reduced energy and gets along with less. But if you eat more again - sooner or later everyone does that - you gain weight.

In the end, the disadvantages of any diet catch up with you. Diets are not a healthy diet. They are just an alibi to keep eating unhealthy foods. 

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7. YOU JUSTIFY YOUR SINS WITH EXERCISE

“I am allowed to sin, because I was jogging today.” - Everyone has probably uttered such justifications. I as well. A few years ago, I ran up to 20 kilometers on weekends. After that, I would often treat myself to a large sundae. Pretty much everything is wrong with this logic. (Why you can't lose weight while jogging)

Exercise is important for a healthy body, but it doesn't make up for poor nutrition. Diet is mainly responsible for the slimline - it accounts for up to 80 percent. The rest is movement. So if we do sports and eat the sundae afterward, we not only tear down all successes with our buttocks but also pull our health account deep into the red.

Even if you could add up calories from food and exercise, it would never work out because we burn very little extra energy during exercise. We're talking about 250 calories for 30 minutes of jogging. That's a couple of slices of wholemeal bread.

Sport is still important because it has a long-term effect. If we build muscles during exercise, they will continue to burn energy long afterward. In order for them to be able to do this, however, the diet has to be right, because chocolate does not nourish muscles, but fat cells. You can read more about this in Jasmin's article: Why burning fat is not so important in exercise and what really counts when losing weight.

So if exercise is an excuse for you for a lack of discipline in your diet, you are on the wrong track. Exercise cannot compensate for an unhealthy diet. The best effects are achieved when exercise and healthy eating go hand in hand.

BOTTOM LINE: DON'T DECEIVE YOURSELF

I used to get some of these alibis myself. I was good at glossing over them, only they didn't help. I worked on the symptoms a little but didn't get to the root of my problems.

Do you also recognize yourself in these alibis? That wouldn't be objectionable. Almost everyone is tricking their diet and hoping to miraculously stay slim and healthy despite their vices. But of course, it is a deception on yourself. As long as you eat mostly finished goods, pasta and pizza remain the first choice, you consume sweets and high-calorie drinks every day, you will run into problems.

There is no solution that lets you eat any junk you want and still stay healthy. No matter what powder you swallow, how many kilometers you jog or whether you add chia seeds to your breakfast: To stay really slim and healthy, you have to eat the way lean and healthy, people do. These have their healthy habits.

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