Getting yourself to a place where you consistently stick to your healthy lifestyle plan over time can be challenging. It becomes even more challenging when your husband, kids, friends and family aren’t on board with your plan and resist your efforts every step of the way.
There are many reasons this may be happening:
- Being a witness to you making healthier choices can be very confronting to people who know they should make a change, but aren’t ready.
- They have observed you go on and off diets for years and they think it’s just one of those phases.
- They don’t have the pain associated with unhealthy eating that you have, meaning they’re not sick, overweight, or food doesn’t affect them the way it does you, so they’re not motivated to change.
- Change involving one of the most intimate relationship we have, the one with food is threatening to most people. Specially if they aren’t the initiator.
- They fear that if you change, your relationship will change and they may lose you (very few if any will ever recognize this or admit it, but it plays behind the scenes aka their subconscious mind).
How to start eating healthy when your family doesn’t support you
Here some powerful tips that can help you make the change towards healthy lifestyle when involved with difficult family or friends.
It’s about you NOT them
Make this journey about you and you only. Although you might wish that everyone around you decide to join you in your transformation reality is it’s not going to happen. You had your Ah Ah moment, you have decide that you have suffered enough so you are ready to make different choices that where YOU are. Don’t impose your choices on others.
The best way to influence and lead someone in the desired direction is to lead by example and embody the lifestyle you want other to lead. By walking your talk, you become a leader. Leader do not impose their ways… they influence. Making the right choices when you partner isn’t will lead to you improve your self confidence and grow your confeidence towards achieving your goals. More importantly, it will trigger your close one to realise you mean business. Over time they will begin to admire your tenacity and maybe more open to join you.
Don’t think as to what you are doing as a diet
Diet don’t work. Point. Science is right there with me.
If you ever been on a diet and looking for a new diet… likely the first one didn’t work right? My first diet was at 14 years and since then been on and off diet. I always looked losing weight as a temporary process that allowed me to lose the weight and somehow I would never gain the weight back. Weighing nearly 300lbs by the age of 34 my thought process didn’t work.
When you say you’re going on a diet, it suggests that it’s something you’re ‘on’ for the moment – and will probably be ‘off’ later on. It send a message to your close one that it’s not permanent that everything will go back to “normal” at some point. Why would they go thru the effort of making changes.
Communicate, Communicate and Communicate some more
First thing you should be doing is before staring you journey in healthy living is finding your why. If not clear why you want to do this likely your are not going to stick to your new habits. For me at first I wanted to do to changes my lifestyle so I can continue to be successful in my career. With time I moved from a why that was fear base to a why that was love base which is more powerful.
Next is to sit down with your partner, husband and or kids and share your plan for your health. Share what YOU are going to commit to and how you will require their support. Educate them on what you are doing and why it’s going to help YOU be healthier.
Talk it over ahead of time. Don’t surprise them with “Things are gonna change around here.” Learn to negotiate with them. Maybe eating out is problematic for you – but the solution isn’t to tell your close one that restaurants are off limits. You might determine which restaurants offer the best choices for you, or ask if your partner would be willing to share an entrée with you.
Learn to ask for support
Asking for your partner’s support isn’t the same thing as asking them to ‘go on a diet’ with you. You want your partner to respect your efforts and to be willing to do what they can to help. Often times, your partner wants to be helpful but just doesn’t know what to do, so be specific.
Planning to go to the gym a few nights a week? Then ask for help with meal preparation or child care. If your partner is going to still keep goodies in the house, ask if they can stash them away – and not offer you ‘just a bite.’
Don’t ask your close one to police you or to berate you if you cheat. For one thing, what you eat is your responsibility, and it’s unfair to place the burden on someone else. And if you do cheat, you’re likely to shift the blame to your partner. It’s a bad dynamic, so do your best to avoid it.
Find your tribe
Find you peeps. People that are on the same journey as you and desiring to acheive similar goals as you. This might be your partner this might not be.
Being supported with people going through the same transition as you, facing similar challenges as you is an critical part of long term success. Having a community being part of a group is innate desire to the human being. In the context of your health and lifestyle choice you may need to go look outside your inner circle.
This is why I created my private online community as a mean to provide people like you and I a support structure. You can join right us right here. You can also look for Meet up group or other Facebook group where people with similar goals and approach are hanging out.
It does work!
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