You know you need to eat better and exercise, but how do you make yourself keep doing it day after day? Maybe you do really well for a day or two but your motivation runs out. Use God’s guidance and power to accomplish your weight loss goals with this prayer for healthy diet choices.
How to Eat Healthy When You Don’t Feel Like It
Let’s face it. Cookies, chips, and candy taste amazing.
Kale and carrots? Not so much.
You know you need to eat healthy foods in order to feel better and lose weight, but it’s not easy in today’s modern world.
How can you learn to make healthy diet choices when the chips and cookies are calling your name?
The truth is that the food industry is in the business of making money, and food scientists have learned to make much of our first world diet highly palatable with the addition of colors, sugars, and fats.
But food scientists don’t have your health or weight loss interests in mind.
While it takes some time to adjust, do all you can to focus on eat real, whole foods rather than processed ones with lots of extra ingredients. Is it a food your great-grandmother would recognize as a food? An apple, yes. An apple flavored fruit roll up? Not so much.
You will discover that your tastes do change as you continue to make these foods a regular part of your diet.
Here are a few helpful strategies to develop when it comes to learning to like healthy food.
- Give healthy foods lots of tries. Research tell us that is takes 7+ times of trying a new food before we develop a taste for it. If there are healthy foods you don’t enjoy, that doesn’t mean you never will. Keep trying it and you might be surprised at how your tastes develop.
- Keep healthy food in plain sight. Keep a bowl of fruit on the counter instead of candy or cookies. Make sure when you open the fridge or pantry, the foods you see first are healthy ones.
- Pay attention to how you feel. Food has a tremendous impact on mood, energy levels, and vitality. Honestly, for years when I was 100 pounds heavier, I was so out-of-touch my body that I swore it didn’t affect me at all when I ate fast food and junk food regularly. But the more I cleaned up my diet and started paying attention to my body’s signals, I realized that as much as those foods taste good in the moment, after I eat them I am lethargic and listless, not strong and energetic.
Finally, pray! Ask God to help you change your taste buds so that you desire and crave eating healthy foods on a regular basis. This might seem like a silly thing to pray about, but it’s not. God cares about every aspect of your life, including the way you fuel your body. Use the prayer below to guide you.
Click here to read more about how to make healthy food choices even if you don’t feel like it.
What are Healthy Foods to Eat Every Day?
Are you overwhelmed with trying to decide how to create a healthy diet for yourself? Because there is so much conflicting diet advice out there these days, choosing healthy foods can be a bit challenging.
Remember that the only way to weight loss is to eat fewer calories than you burn, so keep that in mind as you make your choices. You can eat very healthy foods, but if you eat too much of them, you still won’t lose weight.
Here’s a good starting place for most people.
- Focus on protein first. The first building block of a healthy diet is protein. Eat protein at each meal (and ideally every snack, too), especially breakfast where you should aim for 20-30 grams of protein to help lessen hunger throughout the day.
- Include lots of produce. My business partner, Becky, and I are each maintaining a 100 pound weight loss and both of us eat loads of vegetables! At each meal, half our plate is usually veggies and we incorporate additional vegetables into almost every casserole, soup, and food we make. Vegetables are wonderfully filling, low in calories, and high on nutrition. You can’t go wrong with veggies. Although higher in calories, fruit is also a great option that doesn’t need to be avoided. Many people find that pairing fruit with some protein helps to moderate blood sugar.
- Choose healthy fats. Include healthy fat at each meal. This is where many dieters fail, but your body needs fat. Focus on plant sources like olive and avocado oil, avocados, and nuts. Animal fats are okay to include on a limited basis. I eat some type of animal fat almost every day. One lesson I learned from trying the Keto diet for weight loss is that fat is important for flavor and satiety.
- Add in treats in limited amounts. Just because you are trying to lose weight, don’t give up all junk food because you’ll end up binging on it later. Instead, pre-plan it and include it in healthy amounts. One serving of a junk food every few days (or even daily!), is totally do-able and I would say even necessary for long-term weight loss.
How to Exercise When You Don’t Feel Like It
People often write to me and tell me they can’t lose weight because they can’t exercise for various healthy or time reasons.
Yet they can still lose weight.
Weight loss is not about exercise, it’s about modified diet. Eat fewer calories than you burn, and you will lose weight.
At the finish line of a 250 mile distance bike event.
Yet don’t totally neglect exercise, either. God created your body and you are the steward of it. Are you treating your body as one of God’s good gifts? Exercise is an important part of that.
I went from total coach potato to triathlete. I learned to enjoy exercise and you can, too!
If you hate exercise (which is how I felt for many years), try some of these tips.
- Just do something. Walking is the perfect way for most people to get started, but it can even be vigorous house cleaning. Plan to do some type of daily movement. If physical restrictions limit you, do what you can. Can you do arm exercises? Check out our free faith + fitness challenge which is great for beginners and even has chair workouts included.
- Focus on building muscle. Especially when it comes to weight loss, after you have added basic daily movement, your next goal should be regular muscle-building activity, not cardio. Building muscle doesn’t burn as many calories during the actual activity, but it raises your metabolism. People often talk about weight creeping on with age. This is due to the natural lose of muscle over the decades. Build it back up and you will see your metabolism increase.
- Pair exercise with something else you want. If you have trouble getting moving for physical activity, pair the time with something you enjoy, like walking with your spouse or a friend, listening to favorite music or watching a TV show in front of the treadmill.
And yes, again pray and ask God for motivation and help. Nothing is too small to bring before the throne of God.
Click here to read more about how to exercise if you don’t feel like it.
Pray for Healthy Diet Choices
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
Lord God, so often I don’t want to do the things that would help me be healthy. I would rather eat chips than carrots. I choose cookies instead of fruit. I sit rather than move. I put off workouts until another day. I pray for Your strength to make better choices today. My desire is to lose weight and honor You by taking care of the body you’ve given me. Please help me, Lord. I know this is only possible by Your strength and power at work in me. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
7 Days of Weight Loss Prayers Challenge
Grow your faith this year as you lose weight.
Join the FREE 7 day Christian weight loss prayer challenge now. When you join, you’ll instantly receive this beautiful prayer journal, plus each day’s prayer comes right to your inbox.
With these strategies in place, you will find yourself making more healthy diet choices each day. Pray continually and be open to God molding you into a person who takes care of the body He has given you.
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Pin this Weight Loss Prayer for Later
I prayed this prayer. I need to pray it continually because it hits close to home where the exercise comes into play. I can do the healthy choices and track etc but find all kinds of excuses not to exercise … I can’t walk very far or stand very long, I can’t leave my husband unsupervised (because of his Alzheimer’s) to walk down to the gate and back. Etc, etc, etc. all true but I also know that where there is the will there is a way.
Check out Youtube! There are many sitting exercise routines as well as indoor ‘walking’ videos which help with exercise without ever leaving the house. The best part is they require no special equipment, just a foot or two of space and you are already home when you can go no further! They are what are helping me fit exercise into my routine!