A lot of Muslim women our age still live with their parents and eat their mum's dinners daily, eat out with their friends weekly and find that those are the main things stopping them from reaching their goals.

There are some strategies we can implement to work around situations like these.

The idea is to eat, build a lifestyle that you can maintain without feeling like you have to stress mentally when you’re meant to be having a good time.

1. Revisiting the hand plan

Using that as a guide to know how much protein, carbs, fats, veggies to serve yourself while enjoying the ethnic foods. The issue isn’t necessarily the food, it's the quantities.

2. Mindful Eating

Studies show that it takes about 20 minutes of eating to notice feeling full.

Be present when eating, savour every bite, eat slowly. This is especially important when eating low-nutritional value foods like some ethnic foods & fun foods.

Anytime you’re having mum’s dinner or eating out with friends, chuck that in your app and choose to consciously eat mindfully.

“But what about the inconsistencies?” 

Look, you’re not a bikini competitor, you don’t need to get ‘stage-lean’ so being super pedantic about the numbers will do more harm than good for someone looking to get a toned body.

4. Order your sauces & salad dressings on the side

 That way you can have control over how much sauce or dressing you want to put, you may not want to have so much sauce and may be able to save yourself some unnecessary low-nutritional value calories!