Improve your surrounding environment

Your surrounding environment has a huge influence on you

What your surrounding environment is is like has a huge effect on you and your behaviour. If your kitchen cupboards are full of crisps, snacks, chocolate etc, then no wonder you are more likely to eat them. So lets make the kitchen as helpful as possible… and this doesn’t have to stop with the kitchen. You can follow the same principles for your living and work spaces too.

• Keep healthy stuff near and convenient – Make it as easy as possible to do the right things. Why make it any harder for yourself than it needs to be?
• Keep unhealthy stuff out of sight and inconvenient – Make sure you have to jump through a few hoops to do the less healthy things.

Traffic lights

Split your foods into red, yellow and green foods…

Red foods

• These are just bad news for you. At the time you may crave these foods, but afterwards you may feel sick, bloated or lethargic. You know these are your triggers, yet you fall for them all the time.
• Red = Nope! Or at the very least, very rarely on very special occasions.

Yellow foods

• These are foods/drinks that can sometimes be ok, sometimes not.  Maybe you can control yourself around them in certain situations or at certain times.  But at other times you need to be careful.
• Yellow = Caution! Be careful. Only ok for an occasional treat.

Green foods

• These are foods that are nutritious and make you feel good physically and emotionally. You can control yourself around these and you are in charge. They don’t exert a hold over you.
• Green = Get stuck in! These should be the backbone of almost all your meals.

Show the good, hide the bad

Once you have linked your foods to their traffic light colours:

• Bring the green foods forward and put them front and centre on your shelves/cupboards. Make them noticeable and prominent.
• Hide the yellow foods at the back and make them inconvenient to see and reach. Make sure you have to jump through a few hoops to have them.
• Get rid of the red foods. If you are a good person and don’t want to throw food in the bin, then give them away. You will instantly become more popular and you will be doing yourself a favour.

Top Tip! Don’t fall into the classic trap of “getting rid of the red food by eating it one last time”. Doing that just means your very first step on this new road is giving in to temptation. Once you set that precedent, it is very hard to change it.

So start as you mean to go on. Get rid of the red food properly.

In conclusion

Changing how you eat and drink can be hard enough as it is. Why make it any harder than it needs to be by surrounding yourself with the foods and drinks you are trying to cut back on. Make choosing the right foods and drinks as easy and convenient as possible. Because lets face it, if it’s not there, you can’t have it! It is as simple as that…