3 Tips to Make Time for Healthier Eating Habits

As a career woman, or any busy woman, you may be intending to have healthier eating habits, but when it comes down to it, a lack of time can feel like the limiting factor.

You might start out making the time for it, but then start losing the motivation when unscheduled things come up or stress levels rise.

That’s why I’d like to give you 3 tips to make time for healthier eating habits, so you can follow through with your intentions and stop feeling like time constraints are getting in the way.

Tip #1 – Make Small Changes

The first thing you can do for yourself to make time for healthier eating habits is to just commit to making small changes first. A mistake I see commonly see being made is to make too drastic of a change, which will most definitely require more time and effort.

For example, if you never cook dinner and you want to start cooking healthy dinners every night, that’s going to require a fair amount of time to start doing.

You’ll need to look for recipes, buy the ingredients, potentially buy some utensils or kitchen tools you might need that you didn’t have, plus get used to chopping, cooking, etc. The more you do it, the quicker you’ll get of course, but at first, it probably will be a larger time commitment.

Instead, make a smaller change. For example, if you want to start eating healthier dinners instead of takeout, start by just adding a simple salad that you prepare at home to go along with your takeout. Making a small salad to go along with your takeout (and eating it first, before you dig into the takeout) takes maybe 1-2 minutes.

Then maybe one night a week, cook up a protein to put on top of a salad for a full meal instead of doing takeout that night.

Start small and slowly build up. It will seem less overwhelming and it starts out with much less of a time commitment, making it more likely you’ll be able to stick with it.

• RELATED: 9 Tips to Save Time in the Kitchen (Blog Post)
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Tip #2 – Get Realistic

The second thing you can do for yourself to make time for healthier eating habits is to get realistic about how much time it will really take to make some changes.

Often, we see our busy schedule as something that just doesn’t have space to cram yet another thing into.

The thought of making your own lunch instead of ordering lunch with your work colleagues seems like it would just take so much time the night before or the morning of.

When you think about how much time it really takes though, it’s quite minimal. Once you get realistic about the amount of time, it all of a sudden seems so much less time-consuming.

Making a quick sandwich, wrap, or salad takes less than 5 minutes. Even for the inexperienced.

You could even save a little more time by making two lunches and saving one for later in the week.

• RELATED: Being Too Busy and Your Eating Habits (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: 9 Healthy Meals on the Go (Blog Post)

Tip #3 – Understand the Importance

The third tip is to understand the importance of having healthier eating habits and how it will benefit you for a long time.

It’s easy to start out strong and find the time to make a change, but without the understanding of just how important it is to your future to make time for healthier eating habits, it’ll probably fizzle out.

That’s because our brains were created to prioritize immediate reward over long-term reward, for survival purposes when we had to worry about just surviving until the next day.

Because much of the reward from healthier eating habits is more long-term, rather than immediate, it’s very easy to start becoming unmotivated to make time for healthier eating habits.

Especially when we have so many other things going on, our schedule gets disrupted, our stress levels rise, etc.

So keeping in mind those future rewards and reminding yourself every day of them, will help you to stay on track and stay motivated to make time for healthier eating habits.

I even recommend writing down a few reasons why this is important to you and keeping it in a visible place to remind you every day.

• RELATED: 7 Ridiculously Easy Hacks for Healthier Eating Habits (Blog Post)
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• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

Bonus Tip – Shift Your Thought(s)

I can’t leave you without this bonus tip.

What’s typically the thought that runs through your head when you’re feeling too rushed or busy to make time for healthier eating habits?

Probably something like, “I don’t have the time” or “I’m too busy today.”

Of course that thought is going to want to creep into your brain when you’re feeling rushed, overwhelmed, or more busy than usual.

So instead of that thought sabotaging your efforts with healthier eating habits, you can shift your thought by adding “but I’m going to make the time anyway” to the end of the thought.

For example, if you have the thought, “I’m too busy to cook dinner tonight,” it’ll look like this instead, “I’m too busy to cook dinner tonight, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Your brain likes to feed you thoughts, but they aren’t necessarily true. You don’t ALWAYS have to believe your brain. Often, when we are feeling some sort of negative emotion, our brain wants to offer us excuses of why we can’t do something.

So, tell your brain that yeah, it might be thinking that thought, but you’re going to override it and make the time anyway. Chances are, you really did have the time and you’ll be happy you decided to make the time.

• RELATED: Willpower and Your Thoughts (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: 10 Mindset Shifts for Weight Loss (Blog Post)
• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

Final Notes

Making the time for healthier eating habits doesn’t have to come at a cost for you.

It can be something that you fit in easily and you do it enough that it eventually becomes your new routine, your new habit.

You can reap the rewards for making the commitment to yourself to have healthier eating habits, for many years to come.