Written by: Sydney Zakia Amari Busyra (10B)
For some people, getting a good healthy diet is a challenge. I couldn’t agree more because I share the thought. Yet, it’s a challenge that we can overcome as along as we have the commitment, planning, and support from our surroundings.
There are many common challenges that people face when trying to maintain a good healthy diet. Firstly, lack of commitment from ourselves and low motivation to keep our goal at achieving a good quality life. Secondly, bad influence from social media on the way of life involving eating habit. Third, having no support from your family in implementing a healthy environment. And lastly, constant distractions from our surroundings that affect our commitment to stay healthy.
Having a lack of commitment in trying to be a healthy can make you become an undisciplined person. When your commitment is weak, you tend to ignore and eventually go back to your old habits. This also applies on having little to no motivation when doing the program at trying to maintain a good healthy habit. Having lack of motivation can happen because sometimes we see people who has no problem with diet issues because they have good metabolism. And because of that, we try hard to discipline our diet and expect a quick result, hoping to be like them. Once the result is not up to our expectations some may be disappointed, and their motivation runs out.
In additions, maintaining a healthy diet is not an easy task as many people nowadays are exposed to social media. A lot of social media promote lots of unhealthy food with interesting ads. Many people see this as a way to help them manage their life. The ads convince them that food can be obtained easily just as long as you have the money. You tend to think that this is an efficient way as you have ‘busy life’ and don’t have to buy groceries and spend time cooking. But the foods that are prepared quickly most of them are processed foods or frozen foods. This is not healthy, yet it has become a daily thing.
Doing something challenging for yourself is not easy, especially when the environment around you does not support what you’re doing. And because of that, you don’t believe in yourself resulting in feeling like you aren’t able to achieve anything. This is a stressful and demotivating situation if it not well managed. It can also cause our self-esteem down.
If you were doing your diet, your family should know and support it by way of executing the same lifestyle. But this is a challenge when only one person in the family is experiencing diet issues. These environments that I’m talking about are actually very common, especially when it happens to the people closest to us. Why am I talking specifically about the closest people around us? Well because, if one of our family members knows about our diet issues, sometimes they tease us or make fun of it.
Distractions in managing a healthy diet can come in any shapes. It could be a visual distractions or non-visual distractions. The urge to eat particular food will be a challenge when you are exposed to somebody or a friend of yours consuming food that you’re avoiding for the sake of your diet. This is a temptation that sometimes a person cannot avoid. We need to stay focus from this unwanted distractions.
There are lots of more problems that we can talk about, but those four are the most common ones that we often experience. So, you’re probably wondering, how can we overcome these problems? Well, there are actually many ways that we can overcome those! When having lack of commitment, try to make a routine. By making a routine, we can go over the steps slowly and easily and from time to time we can be more disciplined. If social media is exposing many unhealthy foods in your feed, try limiting yourself from social media. Rather than using your free time to scroll on your phone, use that time to go outside, exercise, and take a walk. When encountering a distraction, no matter if it’s a visual or a non-visual, think about how we can limit or remove that distraction from us. By thinking about knowing how we can limit it, it puts us into a spot where we are able to focus more and be more productive.
It looks like we’ve already discussed about the problems and also the solutions to them. But what would happen if we ignored the problems? What would be the consequences? Well, surprisingly there are a lot of it. If we don’t manage to maintain our eating habits, our body will show bad signs. For example, if we eat too much, our body gains weight and we become obese. From being obese, our body will be an easy target for many diseases. This also applies to us being malnutritious, a condition where our body doesn’t receive the nutrients needed. These signs might not come quickly….but treat it like a long term investment for the healthy mind and soul for your body. Better to prevent than to cure it, right?
Maintaining a good healthy habit of eating isn’t easy, encountering many problems as we go on with our journey. But it doesn’t mean that there’s no solution to it. With the help of building our mindset and finding new ways to improve our habits, we are able to overcome those problems without calling it “impossible”. If these won’t, we can still seek advice from the expert or those who have been successful in managing a healthy diet.