How to Give Up Fast Food for the New Year

The start of a new year is a great time to make a commitment to better health. If one of your New Year's Resolutions is to lose weight, along with getting more exercise, you will also need to make healthier eating choices. One of the best things you can do for your health, and your waistline, is to stop eating fast food.

We all know that after a long day at work, it is so easy to drive to a fast food drive-thru and order a quick meal for the entire family. But during this time we are probably just focused on the time we are saving, and not the calories we are consuming.

Eventually, continuing a fast food regimen can lead to you becoming overweight. Just by cutting out fast food from your diet, you can lose weight quickly. Setting this as one of your weight loss goals for the New Year can easily be accomplished once you have identified it as an area you want to change.

Make a Commitment

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The first step in reaching your New Year goal of giving up fast food is to make a commitment to do so. When you make a commitment to yourself, and accept that as something that you want to delete from your life to live healthier, you are also identifying a benefit.

Giving up something that you may love is not easy, but when you have it attached to a benefit, you will be more inclined to stick to your goal. If you don’t see a benefit, the opposite will happen, and you will revert back to your old habits. Once you stop eating fast food, however, and begin eating healthy, real, whole foods, you'll probably find you actually don't miss it as much as you think you will!

Cook Meals Ahead of Time

To avoid those days where you work late or the children have activities that get done late, cook extra meals on the weekend and freeze them in serving size containers. Just by taking the extra time on the weekend to cook a little more than you normally would, means you can have extra food readily available that just needs to be reheated.

When you know that you have something that you can simply place in the microwave for a few minutes to feed yourself and your hungry family in minimal time, spending money on fast food may not even cross your mind. After all, fast food is just about that – getting food quickly.

(Image courtesy of KEKO64 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

Keep Healthy Snacks Available

Keep healthy snack bars or dried fruit available in your bag or purse for those times that you or your children are so hungry after leaving work or an event. Choosing to eat a healthy snack will curb your appetite and make you less likely to pull up to a fast food restaurant for a quick snack.

By keeping non-perishable food available at all times, you will never be caught off-guard. You will give your hunger satisfaction for at least two hours, which is more than enough time to drive home and cook a healthy meal. It’s all about choices.

Choose Healthy Restaurants

If eating out or grabbing a quick meal is your only option, make wiser choices on where you eat. While you are not hungry, research and look for other places to eat that may be healthier for you and still provide a quick meal.

Many natural food stores now have food bars and freshly prepared healthy meals that can be warmed up in the store or eaten cold. These stores are giving you the option to make good choices and to stick to your health plan of not eating fast food that is full of fat and salt.

Staying away from fast food is not as hard as you may think. All it takes is some pre-planning and that deep desire to make a change for yourself to live a longer, healthier life.

For lots more tips on eating healthy, along with delicious, healthy, and fast recipes to prepare at home, be sure to check out our Cooking From Scratch blog. In fact, we're actually doing a series this month on eating to lose weight, so go check it out!