How to Spend Time With Friends and Still Eat Healthy

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Everyone loves to spend time with their friends and family. However, when you are trying to form new habits, such as eating healthier, this can become a little tricky around them. It could be harder for a variety of reasons, such as social anxiety and comfort eating, maybe you and your friend’s love language is food, or it might just be that you subconsciously change what you eat around them. Here are several ideas that you could try implementing into your life to help you stick to a healthier eating schedule.

Cook for your friends

Cooking for your friends more often could be an easy way of ensuring that you stay away from unhealthy processed foods, or takeaways. For example, you could invite your friends over and cook from scratch a healthy hearty meal that everyone can enjoy, like a quick and easy cowboy stew. It doesn’t need to be a solo mission either, you could involve everyone and make it a part of the evening. 

Set yourself clear goals

It is easy to slip into old habits when meeting up with friends, and it is an area where people will slip up if they don’t set themselves clear or achievable goals. If you set aside a little time to write out your goals, add some easily achievable milestones and review your progress regularly you will be able to track and see your progress. When you can visually see how well you are doing you will be much less likely to falter and give in to old habits when meeting up with friends.

Meal prep for work

Whether you are meeting a friend in town who works at a different place, or you take your lunch breaks with work friends, eating out every day can often be an unhealthy and expensive habit to have. Something you can do to combat this is meal prep and pack your own lunch to take with you. It will enable you to still meet up with friends on your break, while also being able to eat your healthier home-made food and probably even save you some money too.

Find a friend to eat healthy with you

Like with most things in life, if you have help and support when attempting to do something different you are far more likely to succeed. Changing your eating habits around your friends is no exception to this. Having a friend to eat more healthily with can benefit both of you as you can hold each other accountable, come up with new meal ideas and even share cooking duties.

So, whether you are working on personal health and fitness goals, looking to try new foods, wanting to increase your nutritional intake, or even just trying to save some money by eating healthier, hopefully, some of these ideas will help you stay on track when you meet up with your friends. Just remember that eating healthier doesn’t have to be hard, it is a new, fun, and exciting challenge.