7 Biggest Mistakes When Changing Your Eating Habits

Putting the effort in changing your eating habits can be challenging enough since it’s something new and different for your brain.

Your brain doesn’t really like new and different because it has no evidence of the new thing being safe. Whereas what you were already doing feels “safe,” so your brain is going to fight you on changing your eating habits, because that’s more comfortable.

There are several things you can do to make the whole process of changing your eating habits easier for your brain though, which includes minimizing certain “mistakes.”

So, I’m going to teach you 7 biggest mistakes when changing your eating habits that you’ll definitely want to avoid, so that the journey can go a little more smoothly. That way, your brain doesn’t try to protest more than it already might.

#1 – Changing Them Out of Hate or Dislike

Many women who set out to change their eating habits, do so because they don’t like their body and want to change it, or they don’t like themselves because of a particular eating habit or habits.

Wanting to change your eating habits out of hate or dislike is never going to be as effective as changing your eating habits out of love for yourself and your body.

Here’s why.

When you are in the habit of disliking yourself or body, there’s a whole lot of negative thinking going on over and over again, which is just going to continue throughout your whole eating habit journey and even afterwards when you have the results you want.

Or rather, IF you even get the results you want.

Negative feelings toward yourself and your body are not great fuel to boost motivation, or at least not nearly as good of fuel to boost motivation as love for your body and yourself is.

• RELATED: Feeling Better in Your Body (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: Why You Must Love Your Body First (Blog Post)
• RELATED: 10 Mindset Shifts for Weight Loss (Blog Post)

#2 – Not Knowing What Your Triggers Are

This is mostly important for trying to break a “bad” eating habit. If start trying to break the bad eating habit without knowing what your triggers are, meaning the underlying causes are, it’s going to be so much more difficult.

You might be spinning your wheels, which is just going to end in frustration and/or disappointment.

It would be like going to the doctor, telling him or her you have pain in your foot, and the doctor just prescribing a medication to take the pain away without examining it, maybe taking an x-ray, or maybe talking about some other treatment options that may be more effective.

So understanding the underlying cause or triggers, will much better enable you to know exactly how to break that particular eating habit, successfully and without wasting time and effort.

• RELATED: Sugar Cravings and Your Brain (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: Boredom Eating (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: Stress Eating (Podcast Episode)

#3 – Self-Critical Thoughts

This one has a similar result as the first one does, which is not providing good fuel to keep you moving forward in the direction of your goals.

Any time you have critical thoughts about yourself, your body, your eating habits, etc., you’re going to chipping away little by little at your confidence of being able to succeed with changing your eating habits.

It’s not just one of the biggest mistakes with changing your eating habits that I see, but I know other coaches see this mistake being made as well.

Self-critical thoughts can occur if you “mess up” or if you aren’t making as much progress as you had hoped. They can also occur before the eating habit journey even starts, with more subtle thoughts like, “I probably won’t be able to stop eating candy” to more severe like, “I eat like a pig, of course I messed this up.”

These self-critical thoughts, whether they’re subtle or whether they’re just plain mean, don’t serve any good purpose. None.

So, start working on some of those self-critical thoughts, so you can make room for self-compassion, a much more handy tool for success with changing your eating habits. (I have the perfect podcast episode for you to listen to, that will help you with that. See below.)

• RELATED: Self-Compassion and Your Eating Habits (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: You Are NOT Your Eating Habits (Podcast Episode)
• RELATED: 4 Thoughts That Are Sabotaging Your Weight Loss (Blog Post)

#4 – Making Too Big of a Change

Like I mentioned at the very beginning of this blog post, your brain likes to keep things relatively the same. That means making too big of a change is going to feel completely uncomfortable and your brain may do it the first few times, but it will take way too much willpower to continue.

You’ll then be more likely to quit before you’ve even gotten anywhere as far as making any sort of progress toward your goals.

Then, since you’ll have had a negative outcome, your brain will be much less likely to be willing to try changing your eating habits again in the future.

It’s going to look at this failed attempt as evidence that it shouldn’t even try again. It thinks it’s protecting you from failure again. It’s not though, because if you don’t try again after a “failure” then you’re of course, failing because you’re not going to try again, right?

All of that is why making too big of a change makes the cut for one of the 7 biggest mistakes when changing your eating habits, that you can make.

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

#5 – Doing it Too Infrequently

As you probably already know, in order for a behavior or action to become a habit, it must be repeated. ALOT.

So, making a change, whether it be to break a “bad” eating habit or form a new, healthier eating habit, needs to be done as frequently as possible. That said, you do still need to take into consideration that you need to not make too drastic of changes, so try to find a happy medium.

#6 – Not Celebrating

It’s so easy to criticize ourselves and be disappointed in our progress, but yet it’s so difficult to remember to celebrate the successes no matter how small. When you celebrate the successes or “wins,” this helps with motivation, more than you might realize.

See, your brain needs some positive reinforcement, kind of like a puppy after it goes to the bathroom outside instead of on your new couch, in order to keep doing the behavior you want it to do.

So celebrate the little wins, and REALLY celebrate the big wins. Always. Write yourself a reminder to do so too if you’d like.

#7 – Not Measuring Your Progress

How will you know if you’re moving closer to your goals? Whether it’s weight loss, weight gain, a certain measurement, or even just less sugar intake (just to name a few examples).

It’s important to see how far you’ve come and also important to make sure you haven’t plateaued. If you have, then you know you need to change something. If you’re not measuring, then it can be really difficult to see if you need to change something, right?

Meaning, if you weren’t really keeping track and measuring your progress, then you may be putting effort in that’s not really working. This just means you need to make an adjustment or try something new. Super helpful information.

• RELATED: The Best Way to Track Your Weight Loss (Blog Post)
• GET WEEKLY TIPS: Eating Habit and Weight Loss Tips

Final Notes

These 7 biggest mistakes when changing your eating habits are really key, and can help you break any bad eating habit or form any new, healthier eating habit you want.

They’re based on behavioral science and life coaching practices (so they really are legit) and to be honest, the combination typically isn’t taught by most. Usually, just a few of these are taught, which can lead to success, but the combination is much more likely to lead to success.