4 Healthy Lifestyle Hacks

I think we can all agree that eating healthy and getting exercise in everyday are not easy tasks to accomplish. Given our hectic lifestyles, we somehow have to fit in healthy ways of taking care of ourselves and our family. There is just no easy way around it other than making health a priority. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. However, a few healthy lifestyle hacks I’ve learned from doing health research over the past decade have helped me in my everyday life at accomplishing healthy eating and exercise goals on a regular basis. Don’t get me wrong, of course there are a few days here and there when I stray from the path. I’m human… And I do believe that misbehavior is natural as it often leads us to make healthier decisions thereafter in order to compensate for being bad. But in the grand scheme of things, a balance is actually healthy (at least for sanity purposes).

When it comes to accomplishing health goals, it initially starts with the activation and motivation toward achieving those goals. While yes…we have to actively work towards accomplishing these challenging goals, I personally (and professionally) love figuring out ways around how we can modify our environment and our mindset to make accomplishing these health goals easier and fun.

Here are my 4 healthy lifestyle hacks I hope can help you as well in your everyday life to make challenging health goals a thing of the past.

1. Use A Bigger Table for Desserts

As published at the Journal of the Advances for Consumer Research (2016), my colleagues and I found that when we place smaller indulgent food portions on larger tables, people ate significantly less food and therefore less calories. When walking into eating situations, people initially have the intention of eating less indulgent foods when foods are sliced into smaller portions. However, they are aware of food sizes deviating from the norm—for example when a pizza is sliced into 1/16th rather than the typical 1/8th. This automatically triggers thoughts of overindulgence since the slice is smaller than what they have generally experienced in the past. As such, the goal of reducing unhealthy indulgences via smaller portions becomes more apparent. To remedy this, simply place smaller portions of indulgent foods on larger tables. Based on tenets of the Delboeuf illusion, people’s attention toward environmental influences are impacted by contextual factors (e.g., table size, plate size, fork size) that compete for our visual attention and awareness. As such, the frame-size effect of the larger table makes the smallness of the indulgent foods less apparent, and therefore less likely to trigger overindulgent eating. So as the holidays and baking season are approaching, make it easier for yourself and others to mindlessly eat less by serving smaller indulgent appetizers, sweets and treats on larger tables.

2. Use Different Plate Colors and Shape Combinations

When trying to eat healthy or introducing new healthy foods to others, dinnerware matters as visual settings influence the taste perception of foods. Based on a study conducted by Stewart and Goss (2013), the combination of plate color and shape interact to impact eaters’ perceptions of the food quality and favorability. Through sweetness, intensity, quality, and liking ratings of food, the researchers demonstrate how taste perceptions were enhanced by the specific combination of using lighter-colored round plates and darker-colored square plates. So to help make healthy foods more appealing, it’s important to know which plate colors and angular shape combinations work best together. Just remember to combine white (or lighter colors) plates in round shapes and/or black plates (or darker colors) in angular square shapes to get the best eating experience the next time you’re looking to mindlessly elevate the taste profile of your healthy meals.

3. Practice Mindfulness Eating and Meditation

I knew that meditation had a positive effect on reducing my stress levels, but I never expected that after practicing meditation for some time, I'd become more mindful when eating. Mindless eating has become a term that’s now commonplace in conversations pertaining to topics of food and obesity. Interestingly, considerable food and health research findings indicate that external cues (e.g., larger portion sizes, fat-free labels, social eating) often override actual hunger cues. So if mindlessness causes us to pay less attention to our internal hunger cues, could mindfulness help guide us back to relying more so on our internal hunger cues instead? According to a health study published at the Journal of Consumer Research by Van De Veer and colleagues (2016), people who practice mindfulness meditation are more considerate of what they ate in prior meals and are more aware of their fullness after eating—rather than the amount actually eaten (even if that means they ate less calories). Furthermore, practicing mindfulness is associated with maintaining constant body weight and even lowering BMI (Dalen et al. 2010). These findings suggest that practicing mindfulness meditation may contribute to weight management since people are more aware of when they become full rather than allowing previous eating episodes or external cues to determine how much they eat in a sitting. So if you have never practiced mindfulness meditation or only have 10 minutes a day to devote to meditation, mindfulness intervention is a skill set that can be learned and strengthened over time. The better you become at connecting your mind to your body, the easier it becomes for you to feel full when eating—and therefore work towards achieving your health goals.

4. Choose Fun over Exercise

Can exercise actually be made fun or can it actually be daunting enough to make you feel the need to undo your exercise by indulging afterwards? From a health study recently published at Appetite, Beer and colleagues (2017) found that when people are given limited options in exercise, they were more likely to engage in unhealthy eating after the exercise session. This is due to a “licensing effect” whereby people justify unhealthy eating behavior after engaging in healthy behaviors (e.g., exercise). This suggests the importance of varying exercise options so that you do not feel as if you are actually exercising. Give yourself options that you actually enjoy doing on a regular basis without designating it as actual exercise time. Because as prior research demonstrates, people engaging in physical activity they perceive as fun are less likely to snack on indulgences afterwards compared to those who perceived the physical activity to be actual exercise (Werle, Wansink, and Payne 2015). So instead of making the time for exercise, how about making the time for basketball with friends, a hike, or even simply (window) shopping? You already know your personal favorite, so why not make getting your exercise in mindlessly easy and fun instead! My personal favorite is definitely window shopping, ha!

Your turn!

Do you have any healthy lifestyle hacks to accomplishing your everyday health goals? Let us know in the comment section below. We’d love to hear about what works well for you in cultivating your own healthy eating and exercise habits.

To learn more about healthy eating and holistic living, don't forget to follow @naturestrusts via Instagram and like NT via FB by using the links provided below. Tag us with pictures of your healthy lifestyle hacks because we'd love to see your healthy inspirations and perhaps even share via NT social media as well!

References

Beer, Natalya J., James A. Dimmock, Ben Jackson, and Kym J. Guelfi (2017), "Providing Choice in Exercise Influences Food Intake at the Subsequent Meal," Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise, Vol. 49 (10), p. 21 10-2118.

Dalen, Jeanne, Bruce W. Smith, Brian M. Shelley, Anita L. Sloan, Lisa Leahigh, and Debbie Begay (2010), “Pilot Study: Mindful Eating and Living (MEAL): Weight, Eating Behavior, and Psychological Outcomes Associated with a Mindfulness-Based Intervention for People with Obesity,” Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 18 (6), 260–64.

Davis, Brennan, Collin Payne, and My (Myla) Bui (2016), “Making Small Food Units Seem Regular: How Larger Table Size Reduces Calories to be Consumed,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Vol. 1 (1), p. 115-124.

Stewart, Peter, and Erica Goss (2013), "Plate shape and colour interact to influence taste and quality judgments," Flavour, Vol. 2 (1), p. 1-9.

Van De Veer, Evelien, Erica Van Herpen, and Hans C. M. Van Trijp (2016),"Body and Mind: Mindfulness Helps Consumers to Compensate for Prior Food Intake by Enhancing the Responsiveness to Physiological Cues," Journal Of Consumer Research, Vol. 42 (5), p. 783-803.

Werle, Carolina O. C., Brian Wansink, and Collin R. Payne (2015) "Is it fun or exercise? The framing of physical activity biases subsequent snacking," Marketing Letters, Vol. 26 (4), p. 691-702.

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