How to Avoid Unhealthy Eating

Maintaining healthy eating habits and sticking to your goals can be tricky when cues from our environment encourage otherwise. There are a few strategies to combat these cues. Creating a time delay between your meal choice and the actual meal can be advantageous. Being aware that “meal” options at restaurants can cause you to make more indulgent choices. “Tasty” and “unhealthy” have become strongly linked in our culture, and it is hard not to be influenced by this. The link can be weakened by working on being more health conscious. Here are three tips on how you can avoid unhealthy eating.

1. Plan Ahead

We all hear that meal prepping is a good idea, but does it work? A study by VanEpps et al. (2016) showed that creating a time-delay of meal choice and consumption has been linked to both healthy choices and calorie consciousness. This also supports the suggestion to not grocery shop when you are hungry. Because we think about the distant future in more abstractly, our choices are more likely to reflect our health-related goals – rather than lower level terms, such as indulgence and enjoyment. Making choices in advance are more likely to support your goals of health and what you truly want for yourself, rather than just what sounds good in the moment. It is easier to utilize self-control over your “future self”. When you are hungry, the unhealthy option is more enticing, and you are likely to eat more of it. Your environment provides external cues, such as the availability of food, which might influence you to eat unhealthy foods you normally would not eat (Elliston et al. 2017). Yet, VanEpps et al. (2016) found that there was no difference in meal satisfaction between those who ordered in advance and those who ordered at lunchtime. Having the indulgent meal might not even be more satisfying, so you stick to what you’ve already prepped!

2. Skip the "Meal” Options

Think about the last time you went out to eat. Did you get an entrée, and did the waiter ask – “do you want salad or fries?” Did you decide “I am already having a special meal, I might as well have the fries”? This is common, and it has been found by Lee et al. (2016) that these double indulgent choices caused unhealthy choices rather than selecting items “a la carte fashion”. It is easier to keep goals in mind when items are separate, as you select exactly what you want and can resist ordering a side on its own. But once you pick a meal or combination that comes with a side, you are getting extra food you did not necessarily want.

This environmental cue provides the option of eating more, and people in the study were more likely to make a double indulgent choice, especially if they did have food related goals. Remember this effect next time you go out to eat, and pick the salad. If you really want the fries, ask for a box and take half of your meal home, or simply do not finish it.

3. Unhealthy is Not the Same as Tasty

An issue that obstructs following healthy goals is that our culture has strongly correlated “tasty” with unhealthy foods. We all want to enjoy our food; but because of this association, it can be hard not to feel deprived. Luckily, this association can be weakened by increasing health consciousness (Mai and Hoffman 2015). Our environment largely impacts our choices and ability to use self-control. Health consciousness can give us motivation to stick to our goals, even when our environment encourages us to do otherwise. Being health conscious helps create new criteria for good food – it serves a purpose for your body. Believing that unhealthy and tasty are not the same has positive health benefits, as shown in this study. Increasing health consciousness can have an explicit effect on this link, but the implicit link still will exist. The explicit link can still help us exercise self-control. The findings of this study suggests that a holistic and positive approach in food marketing is needed to foster healthy food choices. From the prospective of the consumers, consider being more open-minded to trying healthier options as it may surprise you as to how tasty healthier options have become over the years. Consider some of the plant-based recipes developed by Nature’s Trusts which focuses on making everyday indulgent foods both tasty and healthy at the same time.

Your turn!

Let us know what you’re doing on a daily basis to avoid unhealthy eating in the comment section below. We’d love to hear about what works well for you in cultivating your own healthy eating habits.

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REFERENCES

VanEpps, Eric M. et al. “Advance Ordering for Heathier Eating? Field Experiments on the

Relationship Between the Meal Order – Consumption Time Delay and Meal Content.” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 53, no. 3, June 2016, pp. 369-380. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1509/jmr.14.0234.

Lee, Yong Kyu, et al. “I’ll Have Fries with That: Increasing Choice Complexity Promotes

Indulgent Food Choices.” Psychology & Marketing, vol. 33, no. 7, July 2016, pp. 505-515. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/mar.20893.

Elliston, Katherine G., et al. “Situational Cues and Momentary Food Environment Predict

Everyday Eating Behavior in Adults wit Overweight and Obesity.” Health Psychology, vo. 36, no. 4, Apr. 2017. Pp. 337-345. EBSCOhost doi:10.1037/hea0000439.

Mai, Robert and Stefan Hoffmann. "How to Combat the Unhealthy = Tasty Intuition: The

Influencing Role of Health Consciousness." Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, vol. 34, no. 1, Spring2015, pp. 63-83.

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