Healthy at Home
How to Optimize Your Household for Weight Loss
How healthy is your home? When you walk into your kitchen to make a meal, do you find a serene place that promotes your well-being, or does temptation gnaw at you from every cabinet?
After bariatric surgery in Michigan, having a healthy home will be crucial to your success. Because we each spend so much time in our households, we need to make our homes places of positivity that help us achieve our weight loss goals. Though home may be a place of great temptations for you—like late night calorie cravings or excuses to stay in and skip a workout—a little work can turn it into one of your most effective weight loss tools.
Ready to turn your household into the perfect place for weight loss surgery success? Here are some pointers.
Get rid of the bad, make room for the good.
Unlike most animals on Earth, we humans are largely responsible for our own environments. While this doesn’t mean we have control over every temptation we encounter in Detroit or throughout Michigan, it is true of our homes. While you work towards losing weight, you need to become your home’s champion of health and nutrition. Do this by making healthy options readily accessible and ridding yourself of anything that tempts you to break your diet.
Go through your fridge, pantry and cabinets and get rid of any and all junk food. If the other members of your household object, ask them kindly to place those tempting treats out of your view, somewhere you’ll be unlikely to think about or access them. By conducting a careful dietary audit in this way, you can quickly make your kitchen a healthier place to prepare a meal.
Of course, the next step is to fill your home with the foods you should be eating, including all the nutritious and delicious foods that your bariatric surgeon has recommended for your diet. You can put these healthy items directly in your view as a reminder to always make the best choice. For example, try leaving a bowl full of fresh fruit out on the table at all times—this will make it easy to grab the healthiest snack when hunger rears its head.
Build bariatric barriers.
Once you’ve built a barrier against unhealthy foods around your home, you need to think about the other walls you’ll put up to defend against them in places like the grocery store. Many people focused on losing weight make an effort to avoid the inner aisles of the supermarket—this is where the majority of processed and unhealthy foods are kept. By maintaining this mental barrier as you shop, you can stick to the outskirts of the store and fill your cart with fresh fruits, veggies and lean protein, ensuring that only the most positive, weight-loss-surgeon-approved foods make it home with you.
Think of yourself as a nutritional gatekeeper, someone whose primary goal in the kitchen is to keep the bad foods out and the good ones in. This will be a positive habit for you after weight loss surgery, and it may also benefit the others who live in your household. By being a nutritional gatekeeper, you can take some of the stress out of eating right and experience the benefits of a home that welcomes weight loss.
How else can we make our homes healthy places to slim down after weight loss surgery? Share your tips, experiences and questions with us in the comments below!